Analysis Of Cannibal Tours

Film Review 1
Cannibal Tours

The main thesis of cannibal tours seems to be getting both the natives point of view about the tourists, and the tourist’s point of view about the natives. The natives had a lot to say about how much money the tourists had and how they did not want to pay full price for anything. The tourists had a very ethnocentric perspective about the natives. The tourists thought the natives way of life seemed nonproductive. The tourists believed the natives needed to progress slowly into the modern world as they know it.
The natives in this film lived in small villages along the Sepic River in New Guinea. They had a history of cannibalism but gave that custom up sometime close to when some European explorers came along and
From reading this lesson I gathered that Cannibal tours is an Ethnography that showed contextualization of both emic “the native perspective”, and etic “the tourists perspective”. I learned that the tourists were very ethnocentric in that they seemed to believe the natives should strive to be more like them.
The natives in this film were far closer to the folk end of the folk/urban continuum. Their village seemed to be small, isolated, non-literate, and homogenous. The only touch of individuation seemed to be in some of their clothing. I noticed some of them wearing t-shirts and pants; one boy was even wearing a Pepsi-Cola t-shirt. I would put the natives in this film somewhere between a tribal and peasant based society.
I did not care for Cannibal tours very much. I was hoping to learn more about the dynamics within the village, such as the role men and women play, do they marry from within the tribe, and how big of a family sleeps in one hut. I did not expect to see such amateur filmmaking for instance every time a lady was in a bathing suit the cameraman used up 30 seconds to a minute filming her. I also believe the title was a little misleading. Out of 68 minutes of film they only talked about cannibalism for about 3