Watch: Framing the Other, 2011
Read: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2009/jul/25/tribal-adventure-ethical-tourism-jarawa (refers to other isolated tribal groups that have been negatively impacted by tourism)
Extract from the article relating to the Mursi in Ethiopia:
“Tourism can be a useful source of income, but most people would say it’s pretty bad news for the local people,” says anthropologist David Turton.
Turton has spent 40 years among the semi-nomadic Mursi in the Omo valley in southern Ethiopia, where some women have had their lower lip pierced and stretched so that a clay plate can be inserted. With the prospect of a giant dam flooding much of their lands, the tribe has enough problems, but it has been exploited by tourism now for 20 years. Tour companies have presented the Mursi as the most primitive and wild people and the Mursi are fully aware they are being singled out as savages. The tourists arrive in four-wheel drive vehicles and the Mursi gather around them, asking for money in return for being photographed.
Turton has asked the Mursi what they think of these people, who only seem to want their photographs. He recorded this conversation in 1991:
Bio-iton-giga: “Why do they do it? Do they want us to become their children, or what? What do they want the photographs for?”
Turton: “They come because they see you as different and strange people. They go back home and tell their friends that they’ve been on a long trip, to Mursiland. They say, ‘Look, here are the people we saw.’ They do it for entertainment.
"Komor-a-kora: "We said to each other, ‘Are we here just for their amusement?’”
"They conclude that white people are thieves. The relationship is similar to prostitution,” says Turton. “The Mursi know they are looked down on. But to them the encounter is a commercial transaction. They are short of everything and cash is important.”
Through the interaction with tourists the Mursi have also invented new, more outlandish decorations for their lip plates, earrings, heads and bodies. These new artefacts bear no cultural meaning and have been created purely to satisfy the tourists’ desire of the other. In the film Framing the Other they even have a song they call the ‘Tourist Song’ to sing as the tourists arrive. They also perform chores that they rarely do in their day to day lives such as stone-grinding meal so that tourists will take photos of their ‘primitive’ activities.
Neither side gains any understanding of the other. The tourists come, take photos, argue over the price of the photos and then leave. They do not talk or interact or take the time to learn from the Mursi, leaving the Mursi feeling dehumanised.
Above: A decorated lip plate – in the documentary one of the women says that usually they use plain or engraved lip plates, but paint them for the tourists
Below: A pair of cow horns balanced on the head – something the woman said was created specifically for the tourists and had no cultural meaning
At what point does their culture become a costume for the consumption of the west? Although they restrict the tourists’ access to their lives – they have a specially built village some of the population occupy during the day before going to their actual homes after the tourists leave – still, the mutation and commercialisation of their culture leaves its own scars. As does the constant flood of people coming to take their photographs, capturing what they think is an authentic image of a centuries old culture that they are unknowingly degrading. After all this time we are still haunted by the notion of the noble savage.
–> what does commercialisation do to spirituality? In fifty or a hundred years time will the costumes like the cow horns have been incorporated into the Mursi’s traditions as the distance of time erodes the knowledge of their origins? Has the West’s obsession with the other only furthered that otherness?
LFlynn Research Blog 