Dramas of Otherness: “First Contact” Tourism in New Guinea
The Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series
University of Rochester, 2016
Rupert Stasch
Anthropologist Rupert Stasch’s research focuses on the treehouse-dwelling Korowai people living on the island of New Guinea in Indonesian Papua. Since 1990, they have been visited by fifty film crews and thousands of tourists, who are motivated by the idea that Korowai are a “Stone Age society” living outside of global markets and history. Drawing on ethnographic research with tourists, guides, reality television crews, and Korowai themselves, Stasch describes the vivid fascination that tourists and Korowai people have with each other’s strange characteristics and analyzes the stereotypes that visitors and Korowai project onto each other. Stasch suggests that some participants in the encounter become more aware of the naturalized assumptions of their own thought, while others assert the unquestionable naturalness of their assumptions even more strongly than before.
For the fourth installment of the multimedia feature of the HAU-Morgan
Lectures Initiative brings you Professor Stasch’s 2016 Morgan Lectures in video
format. See links below the video for the transcript of the lectures
READ AND DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT OF THE LECTURE HERE
LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. STASCH ON NPR (ROCHESTER, NY) HERE
Rupert Stasch is Lecturer in the Division of Social
Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies,
Sidney Sussex College. He has long-term fieldwork experience with Korowai
people in West Papua, Indonesia, who during the years he has been involved with
them have become internationally famous in the mass media and in the tourism
industry. His book, Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West
Papuan Place (California, 2009), is an ethnography of relations among
Korowai themselves, centered on how they make forms of otherness the central
focus of social bonds. Dr. Stasch is the author of numerous articles in
prestigious journals such as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist,
Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute. He is a broadly-trained sociocultural and
linguistic anthropologist whose interests include: kinship and marriage;
photography and visual culture; semiotics; ritual; space and time; tourism;
state formation at the state periphery; Indonesia, Melanesia, and the
Pacific.
THE HAU-MORGAN LECTURES INITIATIVE
A HAU AND UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
COLLABORATION
