Fantasy and Interaction in Encounters between Primitivist Tourists and Korowai of West Papua, Indonesia
Friday, January 27th, 2012
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, January 27, 2012 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | External Event, PLEASE NOTE THE LOCATION: Anthropology Department, University of Toronto, Room AP246, 19 Russell Street, Toronto, M5S 2S2 |
Series
Southeast Asia Seminar Series
Description
For two decades, Korowai of West Papua have been famous in the primitivist mass media and primitivist tourism industries, where they are known for their “treehouse” architecture and for living in a valued, nearly “Stone Age” condition of human archaicness. This presentation considers some striking convergences and contrasts between the bodies of fantasized stereotypy that Tourists and Korowai respectively project onto each other. The presentation also explores some aspects of actual interactions between Korowai and Tourists that would not be adequately accounted for by consideration of stereotypy alone, nor adequately accounted for by taking Korowai and Tourists as entirely two separate and unitary groups.
Rupert Stasch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSD, and previously taught for ten years at Reed College. He is the author of Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (U. California Press, 2009), and a number of journal articles also based on fieldwork 1995 – 2011 with Korowai of West Papua, Indonesia.
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