Primitivist Tourism and Anthropological Research: awkward relations [Audio]

Latest 100 | LSE Public lectures and events | Audio

• Episode: Primitivist Tourism and Anthropological Research: awkward relations [Audio]
• Website: Latest 100 | LSE Public lectures and events | Audio
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• Duration: 01:00:23
• Published: 2017-05-25 20:00

Speaker(s): Dr Rupert Stasch | Editor's note: The first few minutes of the chairperson's introduction is missing from the recording. This lecture draws on Rupert Stasch's fieldwork studying Cannibal Tours-type encounters between international visitors and Korowai people of Indonesian Papua. Korowai, tourists, and guides regularly assimilated Rupert to tourism-relevant roles, and he regularly noticed similarities between tourism participants' ideas or practices and his own. In the lecture, he will explore the ethnography of the anthropology-tourism relation in this research, following a wider well-established genre of productive reflection on anthropology's alignments and disalignments with other social complexes it both studies and is historically co-implicated with. He emphasises that the diversity of alignments drawn or enacted by different participants does not fit one predictable construal of the anthropology-tourism relation. Concerning the side of tourists, he attaches special significance to a minor but theoretically challenging pattern of tourists being “anthropological” not just in a sense of enacting primitivist ideology with historical connections to our discipline, but also being “anthropological” in a sense of taking tourism’s primitivist ideology itself as an object of inquiry, or otherwise developing ideas about tour interactions parallel to his own. This is the Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2017. Rupert Stasch is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Katy Gardner trained at Cambridge and the LSE. After spending much of her career at the University of Sussex she has returned to the LSE. Her work focuses on the issues of globalisation, migration and economic change in Bangladesh and its transnational communities in the U.K. LSE's Anthropology Department, (@LSEAnthropology) with a long and distinguished history, remains a leading centre for innovative research and teaching. We are committed to both maintaining and renewing the core of the discipline, and our undergraduate teaching and training of PhD students is recognised as outstanding.