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Description
You've SPENT 10,000 YEARS getting there. It's not pretty but it's yours--the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you fell back on a godforsaken place full of reptiles, insects and malarial encephalitis. West Papua's rainforests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.
Then Zuruck in die Steinzeit comes along--a party of Germans looking for tourism's outer edge. They have their cameras ready and this is what they've come for (Zuruck in die Steinzeit means "Back to the Stone Age")--stark naked little guys with bows and arrows and weird penis sheaths and living in trees. They're up there on a kind of platform gesticulating: even at $8000 a seat this show is worth a ticket.
IT SEEMS THAT EVERYWHERE today people spend lots of time staring at other people. In some Third World villages they do it because time hangs heavy on their hands. In First World cities they do it because time hangs heavier--the rich, who read less and play more and suffer a surfeit of channels as well as food, are often bored out of their minds. So the bolder of them go on tour to the ends of the earth where "extreme ethno-tourism" can be enjoyed by venturing into the last strongholds of tribal man.
In his book about the tourists now exploring such domains, Lawrence Osborne describes them as "a sophisticated variant of the ecotourist". He concedes in The Naked Tourist that "they are not anthropologists by any means", but goes on to claim that "they share the anthropologist's ethos: subtle, invisible contact with fragile and remote peoples, extreme sensitivity, a light touch".
Now one doesn't want to be picky. Mr Osborne writes well, is funny, and is highly informative. For all of this we... |
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