Contribution short abstract:

This illustrated presentation examines some of the ways in which the celebrated ethnographic film Cannibal Tours misrepresents the impact of modernisation on village people in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea.

Contribution long abstract:

When it was released in 1988, the film Cannibal Tours, by the activist Australian film maker Dennis O’Rourke, quickly became a classic in the field of visual anthropology and a key work in the growing sub-discipline of the ethnography of tourism. The film documents interaction between a group of tourists, travelling on a luxury river boat, and village people on the Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea. The film implies that tourists are the end-product of a period of colonial interference in the lives of the local people which has destroyed their vibrant indigenous cultures and reduced them to selling debased artworks and trinkets to uncomprehending outsiders. The film is beautifully photographed but it radically misrepresents the lives of the village people and their relationship to tourists. This paper will explore both its strengths and major weaknesses ethnographically.