I wonder if anyone has encountered and thought about the
implications of the kind of
cultural tourism I encountered yesterday.  A private company out of
Australia offered
faculty and the Studies Abroad Program at KU turn-key educational
packages through which
students and instructors have merely to pay and show up on time for the
flight.  As an
anthropologist who has designed and taught a field-based course in
another country, I
know what an enormous amount of work is involved, and the turn-key
nature of the
operation is very tempting as a result.  Yet I can't help think about
the consequences
of such a business for anthropology when the company, for a price,
agrees to deliver access to
aboriginal peoples with whom they contract and we, again, for a price,
agree to deliver
paying students into their hands.
    Our colonial anthropologist ancestors, we learn and teach,
appropriated
information and artifacts in shamelessly unequal power relationships
with indigenous
informants.  And Radcliffe-Brown, among others, was said to have
delivered African
peoples into the hands of British colonizers.  We, or I think many if
not most of us,
pride ourselves today on levelling that playing field and developing
more collaborative and participatory projects, and making considered
efforts at
building mutual trust and respect between us and our "teachers."
    The contractual nature of the relationship proposed by the company
is quite different.
The currencies of friendship, trust, information, and other modes of
reciprocal relationships
are supplanted by contract and replaced by money, a universal medium of
exchange,
and a necessary evil in short supply among the still casino-free
majority
of indigenous peoples.
    Might commodification of the relationship between
anthropologists-in-training and their instructors
work as a great equalizer?  Certainly the method insures that dollar
benefits will go to aboriginal teachers,
though its distribution and subsequent consequences are unpredictable.
We were told that incentives
for cultural preservation and pride are also among the benefits of
purchasing this product.
Elders train their own youth in various traditional practices, beliefs,
and so on, and the presence
of paying customers validates the value of those traditions asserted by
the elders.
Or does it change the value of these practices and teach that culture
has value if it can be sold,
but is otherwise just so much lint on a garment?  And what might such a
trend
mean for the quality of the learning experience, for the work of
anthropologists,
for the validity of commodified data?  I'm most anxious to hear from
others on this
vexing subject.
Thanks, Jane Gibson
University of Kansas



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