Department seminars: Associate Professor Rupert Stasch

For thirty years, Korowai people of West Papua have been an iconic focus of primitivist tourism, broadly of the kind seen in Cannibal Tours. Korowai and tourists have almost no direct and accurate knowledge of each other, and they interact through a haze of exoticizing stereotypes. Yet they often get along smoothly and happily. Taking as read the fundamental structural presence of stereotypy and misunderstanding on all levels of these tourism meetings, this presentation foregrounds some small areas of partial commonality and mutual alignment in those meetings’ practical unfolding. I look at examples from the logistics by which tour groups are moved across the landscape; from performance and spectacle; and from payment. What insights about exoticizing stereotypes, ignorance, and social articulations across radical difference might emerge from this focus? 

Rupert Stasch is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology and Director of Postgraduate Education at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies, Sidney Sussex College. He is the author of Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place (2009) and numerous articles based on fieldwork with Korowai of Indonesian-controlled Papua since 1995. He has a background in linguistic, semiotic, and symbolic anthropology. In addition to researching primitivist tourism, he has been publishing on state formation and social change at the far rural periphery, and doing archival work on a fascist-led overland trek in Dutch New Guinea in the 1930s