ABSTRACT
Thirty years after its release, Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1988) arguably remains the most critically insightful portrayal of cultural tourism to Melanesia yet produced. This ethnographic film follows a chatty band of wealthy, loud, opinionated and overtly cosmopolitan European and American tourists as they travel up the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in search of ‘tribal art’ and authentic Melanesian cultural experiences. Turning the camera to observe the observers, the film produces a profound and unsettling insight into the ways in which stereotypes, tropes and narratives of native otherness are replicated in touristic encounters. In these narratives, indigenous Melanesian villagers are essentialised into a distant ‘stone age’ past of savagery, cannibalism and oneness with nature. As Banivanua Mar (2016: 327) notes, in the final analysis, what is documented is less a journey of discovery than a rehearsed script that has been written, rewritten, rehearsed and acted out countless times, and so the tourists ‘see what they came to see whether or not Papuans play their part, and Papuans act out their roles knowingly and begrudgingly’.
