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Accepted Paper:

The 'white man' in the Mursi narratives  
Tamas Regi (Keimyung University)

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to show how the South-Ethiopian Mursi think about their visitors, about their guests especially about tourists who visit them. Through anthropological approach I try to demonstrate how the Mursi use their 'authentic' hospitality practices with tourists and other outsiders.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to show how the South-Ethiopian Mursi people think about their visitors, about their guests especially about tourists. Through a complex anthropological approach I try to demonstrate how the Mursi use their 'authentic' hospitality practices with the tourist and other outsiders.

The support to study this system is narratives embodied in texts, oral history, material culture, and local economy. The particular frame for the background study is constituted by the recent emergence of Western tourism in South-Ethiopia and its reformulation of the 'local' through various projections anchored in the tourist imaginary. The paper will investigate the different manifestations of these new contact types, but mainly concentrate on material culture and its related practices.

The fieldwork which gives data for this study employed ethnographic methods (e.g. participating observation, open interviews and visual anthropology) as well as investigative methods to approach the wider political, demographic and economic context. The historical data was collected through the Mursi's oral history, the ethnographic data through fieldwork in South-Ethiopia.

Panel P44
Postgraduate forum
  Session 1