Predatory Voyeurs: Tourists and "Tribal Violence" in Remote Indonesia

Tourism has been theorized in a new ethnography of modernity, stressing the museumization of the premodern and its production as spectacle. In this article, I explore the voice and perspective of the "tribal culture" recently exposed to a new type of gaze. Tourists are perceived as predatory voyeurs on Sumba, a once remote area now receiving increasing numbers of foreign visitors. An idiom of visual consumption encodes a critical awareness of global inequities in access to and use of technology, and a history of changing selfperceptions. The cameras that every tourist brings to capture images of headhunters and primitive violence become the very emblems of the exotic violence that they are designed to capture. [tourism, photography, cultural identity, Eastern Indonesia, violence, headhunting.]