Paper short abstract:

This paper examines confrontational negotiations over payments that sometimes arise in foreigners’ visits to a primitivist tourism destination in West Papua. My focus is on the contrasting ethical models of appropriate social comportment that circulate among the different participants.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, several thousand international tourists and about fifty film crews have visited Korowai of Indonesian Papua, motivated by primitivist ideas that Korowai live outside global market structures. Tourists and Korowai interact remarkably smoothly, considering their profound mutual misunderstandings. Much of this smoothness is owed to the work of professional guides and Korowai tourism specialists. This paper looks at confrontational negotiations over the size of tour groups' payments to hosts that sometimes arise toward the end of tourism encounters. My focus is on the contrasting ethical models of appropriate social comportment that circulate among the different participants, and the larger ideas informing these models. One area of ethnography I deal with is Korowai norms of egalitarian politics, wherein confrontational brinkmanship is a regular mode of solving problems, and expectations about reciprocity are routinely redefined according to the temporal flow of egalitarian labor participation. I also look at tour guides' Indonesian-language critical approval of Korowai who "understand" or critical disparagement of those who are "ruined," in reference to the importance of adhering to promises and reasonable levels of material expectation. Tourists' ideas of who Korowai should be are reflected in discourses of pollution that similarly focus on Korowai material demands and the instrumentalization of social relations to money. On the other side, I look also at Korowai critical evaluation of different guides and tour groups, and controversies among Korowai which revolve around different hosts' approaches to tourism transactions.