How an Egalitarian Polity Structures Tourism and Restructures Itself Around It

ABSTRACT

Korowai of Papua, Indonesia, are famous in tourism and mass media circles for their ‘tree houses’, and for other ways they match globally circulating stereotypes of primitive humanity. This article examines how tourism intersects with Korowai egalitarian politics. Korowai spatial dispersion and concern with equality mean that tourists' visits to the land of certain people and not others is politically sensitive. I describe new forms of differentiation arising around tourism, such as emergence of clans specializing in hosting tour groups, and of individual Korowai specializing as tourism mediators. Across these and other areas, what is most striking is how Korowai people's egalitarian political sensibilities have fostered complex forms of interlocal cooperation around tourist visits, innovated and agreed upon in a decentralized manner. This case illustrates a broader pattern that intersocietal articulations are often mediated by the social organization of difference and heterogeneity in people's home locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• egalitarianism
• social heterogeneity
• landownership
• intersocietal articulations

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mark Graham, the Ethnos reviewers, and the other contributors to this issue for their help with this article. I am very humbled by the generosity of the many persons in the Korowai area and elsewhere who have talked with me about their experiences of the encounters discussed here.

Notes

1. From 1990 until at least about 2005, international tourists were by far the most prominent category of non-local strangers within most Korowai people's social horizons. But for parallels and differences in Korowai experience of other categories of outsiders, see Stasch (2001, 2007, n.d.-a).

2. Patterns of dividing out tourism payments among those who have directly participated in hosting a group also reflect egalitarian sensitivities. Aunale distributed the main payment from the Japanese group to about 30 different people, with even his very close kin receiving their separate portions. For example, his wife received a major sum of her own. Even very small children receive separate portions from their parents. It is common also to give money to relatives who are on the scene of a distribution but who did not participate at all in the labour, to prevent ill feeling.

3. Once when Yakop joked about wanting to travel to the city of Jayapura, I suggested he would go hungry due to lack of gardens and kin. He countered that he would don traditional dress and the city people would photograph him and give him money.

4. One symptom of this vacuum of mechanisms for eliciting tourism transactions is that it is common for a local kin network to start spontaneously preparing to host a tour group (by constructing tourist housing and the like), even though no guide or other intermediary has conveyed any promise of a group coming. They hope that just the hard work of producing the right transactional objects on the hosts' side might somehow be enough to bring about the desired visit.

5. There was an independent reason Aunale would have declined to host the Danish group had Buom taken them to him. The tour guide handling the Danes' logistics had not had any means to communicate with Aunale in advance, and just knew of him as a good host. But the Danes travelled to the Korowai area at a time when Aunale was awaiting the arrival of the Japanese film crew whose leader had already visited alone some months earlier and set up a specific schedule for the full team's visit.

6. The Korowai word for ‘head’ was not formerly used to name social roles, but is newly used in this way under the influence of the Indonesian word kepala ‘head.’ Many Korowai assume it is tour guides who instruct tourists to come to the Korowai place and who order them around once there, which is part of the force of referring to the guides as ‘heads’: others do what they say. But typical of egalitarian tendencies even in ideas about new authority relations, Korowai say an exogenous tour guide and a Korowai partner are each the ‘head’ of the other: each does what the other says. A fuller description of the roles of both types of ‘heads’ (the professional guides from elsewhere, and the Korowai tourism specialists who partner with them) would be a crucial part of any overall account of relations between Korowai and tourists, and would further underline that this relation cannot be accurately summed up as a dichotomy (something I am seeking to establish in this article in another way, by looking at differentiation within the Korowai side of the paired terms). For an ethnographic study of guide roles in Java and Tanzania, see Salazar (2010); for more on Korowai ‘heads’, see Stasch (n.d.-b).

7. Some of the complexities of feasting as a reflexive dramatization of the social geography of otherness among Korowai themselves are discussed in Stasch (2003). For one comment on elective affinities between feasting and tourism, see Schwimmer (1979: 231–233).

8. Even at close distances, questions of inclusion are also sensitive and emergent. After the Japanese crew left, Aunale gave the equivalent of a hundred dollars to his only brother, who protested that he had not done any tree house work or other labour. Aunale argued that the brother had at a crucial time stayed in a riverside village attending to Aunale's interests around a government housing project, freeing Aunale to prepare for the film crew.