Primitivist tourism and romantic individualism: On the values in exotic stereotypy about cultural others

Abstract

This article examines a series of interconnected features of the idea of the primitive other that informs international tourists’ travel to visit Korowai people of West Papua, Indonesia. These include: how tourism is constituted as a reflexive inquiry into globalization itself; the cosmological idea of a Manichaean duality of the civilized and the primitive; the status of the primitive as ‘pure’; the idea of primitive closeness with nature; and the primitive’s functional role in a contemporary analog of the Romantic self-forming project of Bildung, which Dumont analyzed as a modified individualism and which I suggest is the driving foundation of the overall complex of stereotypy. My discussion emphasizes the importance of carrying out a cultural analysis of the primitivist stereotypy as a structured ideological system in its own right, by underlining the repetitions and interdependencies between the different facets of the overall ideological formation.