500 Words Anthropology essay

Guide to Prepare You for Writing on Cannibal Tours Cannibal Tours was released in 1988. The setting is the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (during glacial maxima, New Guinea unites with Australia to form a single land mass). The producer, Dennis O’Rourke, evidently secured the permission of one or more tour operators to have a film crew tag along with groups of European and American tourists on package tour outings up the Sepik River (I don’t know, but suspect that one of these package tours might have been marketed as “Cannibal Tours”, hence O’Rourke’s film title). In most cases, tourists would board a boat with sleeping compartments and a galley, which would take them to the mouth of the Sepik on the northern coast, where it would anchor. Then there would be small motorboats that would take the tourists up the river to some traditional native villages.

 (Some  “MACRO”  [structural]  factors  that  shape  the  relations  you  observe  on  the   “MICRO”  [interpersonal]  level):  It  appears  to  me  (Powell)  that  the  tour  operators,  I   assume  with  the  ‘assistance’  of  Federal  and/or  Provincial  governments,  had  made   agreements  with  the  headmen  of  these  villages  that  they  (the  tour  operators)  would   bring  the  tourists,  while   they  (the  villagers)  would  perform  traditional  dances   in   traditional   ‘costumes’,   sell   traditional   crafts   (carved   figures   and   ritual   masks   of   ancestors  and  spirits,  shell  necklaces,  etc.),  and  allow  them  (the  tourists)  to  go  in  the   village  Spirit  House.  —The  ‘selling  point’  to  the  villagers  was  that,  in  this  way,  they   could  become  active  in  the  now-­‐ubiquitous  cash  economy  that  they  (the  villagers)   had  been  placed  into  by  the  Federal  government. (The  traditional  villagers,  of  course,  weren’t   given  a  vote  on  the  market  economy,  nor  on  being  made  official  “citizens”  of  the  nation-­‐state  of  Papua  New   Guinea,  nor  even  whether  or  not  there  should  be  a  nation-­‐state  of  Papua  New  Guinea.)  

In preparation for writing your Essay, you’ll want to view the video through your newly acquired Anthropological lenses (maybe make some notes as you view), and you’ll want to be paying attention to the uneven relations that are evident in the interactions between the locals and the tourists. In a sense, the unevenness you see here on the ‘micro’ level reflects the unevenness we find on the ‘macro’ level in the Modern World System. The aspects given in the rubric on the following page will constitute the operative criteria by which your essay will be evaluated.

Minimum length: 500 words.

The purpose of this Essay is to give you the opportunity to demonstrate to me how well you’ve begun to grasp how an anthropologist might go about viewing the world.

So before you begin to write, you might re-consult Durrenberger and Erem readings, Power Points, and videos to refresh yourself on anthropological vocabulary, and on the several aspects given in the rubric below.

Structure your paper after the prescribed topics given on the following page. As with the Research Assignment, a rubric based on these topics has been installed into the Turn It In. Following the prescribed topics will greatly facilitate the evaluation of your submission, and by extension, make it easier for me to see what a good job you’ve done in your anthropological analysis of the video.

[THE LIST of issues for discussion in your paper/the rubric by which your submission will be graded:]

1. ATTITUDES. What do the different groups (locals, tourists) think and feel? What are the applicable structural factors* that shape the way the locals and the tourists interact and create the drama you see unfolding? (*large forces such as the global economy, social organization, political organization, even mass media, etc—these shape what people do and think)

2. You’ll observe that the tourists are able to come to someone else’s place and feel that they are in control. How does an anthropologist explain this?

3. Describe and explain some behaviors you see exhibited during the interactions between tourists and locals that that illustrate this that you can use in your explanation.

4. ECONOMIC FACTORS. What are some economic factors (within a capitalist-market economy) that make the locals, on balance, ‘losers’ in this relationship?

5. Uneven economic relations: Why can tourists expect to pay “2nd price” or even “3rd price” for their souvenirs, when the locals can’t do that when they buy a tee shirt and jeans at the store in the nearest town?

6. What would you guess is the financial nature of the arrangement between the tour operators and the locals? In other words, what’s the “cut of the action” that the operators hand over to the locals? And why do you think that?

7. IDEOLOGICAL FACTORS (based on the set of assumptions about the way the world works that justify the status quo): What are the people in the film thinking?!? And why are they thinking that? • The tourists—how does their referencing of the assumptions that are fed by

the ideology attached to a capitalistic-Market economy make it possible for them to act as they do? Cite examples from the film.

• The locals—some who still reference the assumptions fed by the ideology attached to a traditional Reciprocal-redistributive economy (cite at least one example). But also notice that there are other locals who have at least to some extent started figuring out the [imposed] Market economy (cite at least one example).

8. THE IRONY. Finally: I think that I detect an ironic meaning that O’Rourke might have intended when he gave this film the title Cannibal Tours. State what that might be….