Tarnished Treasures: A Discussion of Cultural Interactions
Amy C. Richards
21F830 Global Culture
Professor Martin Roberts
October 27, 1995


	In his book Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss discusses his view of journeys, exploration, modernization, and our perception of "primitive" peoples. I would like to discuss two ideas that Lévi-Strauss discusses about indigenous peoples and our contact with them. First, he mourns the loss of "pristine" human beings which have been corrupted through their contact with the Western world. He seems to be of the opinion that there are essentially no uncorrupted cultures left in the world. Second, he presents the idea that travel books (and presumably tourist-type activities) offer an illusion that there still exist "primitive" civilizations and untouched areas of the world. Lastly, I would like to conclude by commenting on his idea that we are no longer excited by exotic objects, clothing, foods, and so on, but instead find excitement from records of interactions between our Western cultures and other, "primitive" cultures, in the form of "photographs, books, and travellers' tales." [1]
	What do Trobrianders playing cricket, Kayapo natives using videocameras, and Cargo Culters in the South Pacific islands all have in common? They are examples of what Lévi-Strauss is referring to when he says:

	 "the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with 	dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only 	contaminated memories." [1]

Every one of the cultures mentioned above has had some sort of contact with the Western world, and that contact has produced a visible impact upon their own culture. For example, the colonization of New Guinea in the nineteenth century brought the game of cricket to the people of Trobriand. Over the next eighty years or so, the game underwent a process of continuous evolution, with the incorporation of significant aspects of Trobriand social behavior and ritual. The cricket game presented in the film Trobriand Cricket [2] distinctly shows that the Trobriand culture is an example of a culture which has had substantial contact with the Western world, and has merged aspects of both Western cultures and their own culture into a new cultural activity. In effect, their contact with the British has changed their own culture, and this is what Lévi-Strauss refers to when he talks about the corruption of "pristine ... human beings." [1]
	The Kayapo is another example of a "primitive" culture which has been corrupted through its contact with the Western world. A recent program by Vincent Carelli at the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista in Sáo Paolo focused on teaching indigenous peoples of Brazil how to use videocameras so that they could document themselves and their cultural practices. A film made by Carelli shows footage of Kayapo natives filming each other, integrated with footage filmed by the Kayapo natives themselves. The fact that these indigenous peoples are exposed to such high-tech wizardry has changed the way that they see their own world. Several shots in the documentary show the Kayapo villagers watching recordings of their own cultural activities or recordings of people in related tribes. The fact that the Kayapo are able to see themselves performing their cultural rituals and everyday activities necessarily lends a certain feeling of distance to their own lives. What may happen is that they record their cultural and everyday activities for posterity, and then simply let those practices fall into disuse as they continue to have contact with the "modern" world. The fact that they are able to see recordings of other related tribes also changes their view of the world. By seeing pictures of people that they may have only heard about before, they form a sense of identity with a larger community of people. In summary, teaching the Kayapo how to document their culture through the use of a videocamera has changed the very nature of their culture.
	The culture of the South Pacific islanders is another example of a culture which has been substantially altered through its contact with the Western world. Lévi-Strauss's assertion that  "Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers..." [1] seems to refer to many of the Pacific islands which were turned into armed forces bases during World War II. One manifestation of the integration of Western culture with the culture of the Pacific Islanders is Cargo Cult. After the colonization of the Pacific Islands by the British, a cultural/religious  movement known as Cargo Cult appeared. Missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial officials described religious ceremonies and the construction of runways which the natives built to await cargo deliveries. They believed that the supply planes which flew overhead were really sent by their ancestors and contained wonderful things like chocolate, motorcycles, and radios [3]. We see here an example of how the introduction of Western technology, coupled with traditional beliefs and cultural practices, produced a striking cultural phenomenon. More interesting, however, is the lasting effect which the Cargo Cult movement had on the Pacific Island society. Even today,
	
	"Melanesian political movements must take care to deny explicitly that they are any 	sort of cargo cult. For example, the organization in New Hanover that purportedly 	still awaits the coming of Lyndon B. Johnson with chocolate and motorcycles 	prudently designates itself today as the Tutukuval Isukal Association." [3]  

It is precisely this sort of phenomenon that highlights the impact on native cultures of contact with Western cultures. Cargo Cults may have initially been a response to the colonial presence, but they have become much more than that. Cargo Cults and Cargo culture have had a lasting effect upon the culture and society of the Pacific Islands. 
	In all the cases discussed so far, we have not simply discussed how contact with the Western world may have influenced the behavior or practices of a few people, but rather how that contact produced a significant shift in behavior or change in cultural practices within a native society. In effect, contact with the Western world has changed the very nature of these cultures, and we will never again be able to obtain a clear picture of what these cultures were like before they were exposed to Western culture.
	The second idea that Lévi-Strauss presents is that travel books (and ostensibly tourist trips, films, and tours) are illusory in that they tend to promulgate the idea that "primitive" civilizations and untouched areas of the world still exist. The films Cannibal Tours and Baraka are both specifically relevant to this idea.
	In Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke documents the travel of some rich Western tourists up the Sepik River as they visit several native Papua New Guinea villages. What is striking about the film is that it quite obviously shows the tourists' naïveté in that they are willing to believe that the villages and people they see are "primitive." This obsession with observing the primitive "other," in thinking that primitive cultures are somehow more real and closer to our true humanity than our own complex, modern culture, is a recurring aspect of tourist books, trips, tours, and films. O'Rourke does an excellent job of demonstrating that this idea is not true. One way that he makes this point is by repeatedly showing us that the Papua New Guinea natives have a real desire for European money (just as we desire money), to the point that they will sell their traditional shell currency in order to get European money. How can this desire for European money be anything but a reflection of how "ex-primitive" these people are? The New Guinea natives are so far along in the process of modernization that their traditional currency no longer has any value. Yet the tourists continue to gawk, buy "primitive" art, and pay the natives for the privilege of taking pictures of them and their holy buildings, because they refuse to, or cannot, see that there is no longer any substantive difference between "primitive" and "modern" cultures. The very presence of the tourists serves to push the Papua New Guinea peoples further along the path towards modernization, blending Western and primitive cultures until in the end no cultural distinctions can be made. As Lévi-Strauss poetically puts it:

	"travel books ... create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any  hope if avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. There is nothing to be done about it now; civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species which may have seemed menacing because of the vigor of their growth, but which nevertheless made it possible to vary and revitalize the cultivated stock. Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization..." [1]

	A somewhat different perspective can be discussed in relation to the film Baraka, which is a feature-length film by H. Ron Fricke which has no plot, no characters, and no words. It consists entirely of images and a soundtrack which has both celestial music, and traditional music of several native peoples. The film's movie poster and press release state that the goal of the film is to create "a world beyond words," that is "an explanation of the power of myth and of  'humanity's relationship to the eternal.' " [4] It appears that Fricke tries to accomplish this by presenting images of primitive peoples, natural scenes and landscapes, time-lapse photography of sunrises, sunsets, and eclipses, and scenes of Western life. Like any other film, Baraka is wide open to interpretation, and I believe that Fricke presents all of these images in an attempt to make us feel as though there is some universal, spiritual sense of humanity that transcends cultural and  geographical boundaries. However, the very way in which Fricke represents the foreign cultures in Baraka, and his goal to make us realize some sort of universal, spiritual humanity, are based on the assumption that we see ourselves as fundamentally different from these "other" or "primitive" cultures. In effect, if Fricke's goal is to present "a world without words",  and to make us aware of some universal, spiritual sense of humanity, he must take as a starting point the fact that we (the viewers) see the cultures represented in Baraka as primitive and different, and we must overcome that viewpoint in order to gain the deeper understanding that Fricke wants us to have. If we did not possess this view of primitive cultures being fundamentally different from our own culture, Fricke's goal of exploring "humanity's relationship to the eternal" would already be realized, and his film would contain no challenge or spiritual meaning. Although Baraka is not a tourist film per se, its spectacular imagery and depictions of "primitive" cultures seem to reinforce the "illusion of something which no longer exists but should still exist," [1] namely the extreme "other"- ness of anything which is not part of the Western world. In effect, by trying to overcome our ideas about different and primitive cultures, Fricke merely reinforces them. 
	  Lévi-Strauss mentions one final idea that I would like to discuss in summary of everything that has been discussed thus far. He states that:

	"In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth ... We might say, then, that, through a twofold reversal, from these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travellers' tales." [1]

 Lévi-Strauss's point is that we have corrupted these primitive cultures so much through our interaction with them, and become so jaded to the exotic nature of the cultural or religious objects, clothing, and food from these cultures, that the only thing which may cause a stir of excitement in ourselves would be the novelty of a record of an interaction between these primitive cultures and our own Western culture. All of the materials discussed thus far, indeed the very nature of this essay, are an outstanding illustration of this. Rather than discuss Melanesian food, or the exotic nature of Trobriand cricket bats,  or the clothing of the Kaiopo peoples, this discussion has focused on the interaction of "primitive" (or some would say ex-primitive) cultures with the Western world and records of those interactions. Lévi-Strauss was unerringly correct in his belief that our Western world has corrupted the remaining "primitive" cultures left on Earth, and that our records and interpretations of cultural interactions are all that we have left to sate our taste for the exotic. 

	"Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished." [1]References

1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques. trans. John and Doreen Weightman, New York: Penguin Books, 1992 [1955].

2. Leach, Jerry, and Kildea, Gary, Trobriand Cricket: an Ingenious Response to Colonialism. 1973. 

3. Lindstrom, Lamont, Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.

4. Staples, Ann J., "Mondo Meditations", American Anthropologist, (96) 1994.