Cannibal Tours

Watching Cannibal Tours created a sense of discomfort in me that I definitely did not expect to feel when I watched the film. The tourists seemed typical and ignorant of the tribal culture in Papua New Guinea. What struck me the most was the part with the native man saying he wants the tourists to stop asking him for a second price because he can’t do that when he goes to a market in town, or a mall. He is absolutely right!.

The black and white photography that pops up periodically throughout the film shows the natives (back then) looking extremely miserable as if they were specimens, next to the caucasian explorers. The documentary photography in the film is similar to the photography in the National Geographic, because it is exhibiting an exotic culture. The readings from the book Reading National Geographic, by Catherine Lutz and Jane L. Collins paint a different picture of the National Geographic than what is traditionally thought. The natives are a an exotic “other” and according to Lutz and Collins the magazine “is continually drawn to people in brightly colored, ‘different’ dress, engaged in initially strange-seeming rituals or inexplicable behavior” (89). The magazine definitely focusses on exotic aspects like what the natives wear partly perhaps because “exotic dress can stand for a pre-modern attitude, Western dress for a forward-looking Western orientation” which is essentially what is conveyed in many of these images.


The scenes in the film, with the tourists going around with their cameras photographic everything, asking the natives to “smile” for them and pose, made them (the tourists) appear almost cannibalistic. It’s the tourists who are insatiable, completely consuming any exoticness that they perceive. But I think that what made the scenes even more disturbing for me was that I remember my mom doing the same thing when I went to Panama last summer - asking a tribe of native girls to smile while I went and posed with them. I just felt really guilty after watching those scenes. But I think that the absolutely most vile aspect of the film was that it seemed the natives were selling their culture, or at least the Western world’s consumerism was essentially consuming their culture. The act of paying for a photograph of their most sacred building, and then paying them to pose was uncomfortable watch.