Ethno-tourism

Voyeurismo by Roger Sandall. A long and highly readable essay that discusses Ethno-tourism and gives a close inspection of The Naked Tourist (a book, fortunately). [via Arts & Letters Daily]

You've spent 10,000 years getting there. It's not pretty but it's yours--the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you retreated to a godforsaken place thick with reptiles, insects, and malarial encephalitis. Southern Papua's rain forests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.

Then Zurück in die Steinzeit comes along--a party of Germans looking for tourism's outer edge, an unknown and uncontacted tribe, a forest fastness to outfast any other. They have their cameras ready and this is what they've come for (Zurück in die Steinzeit means Back to the Stone Age)--stark naked little guys with bows and arrows and funny-looking penis sheaths and living in trees. They're up there on a kind of platform gesticulating: even at $8000 a seat this show is worth the price.