Making the modern primitive : cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands / Michelle MacCarthy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue -- Ethnographic context: the place and the people -- Modernity and primitivity: definitions and discourses in imagining alterity -- Fixing the tourist gaze: essentializing the primitive and the creation of desire in textual and visual media -- Spectacular culture: performance and festivals -- Producing and consuming experience: commoditizing "real life" -- Producing and consuming things: material culture as meaningful object -- Tourist photography: prefiguring and postfiguring the touristic experience -- Cashing in on culture: the meaning of money in tourist-Trobriand transactions -- Epilogue.

"Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as culturally authentic. In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Based on long-term fieldwork, Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts derived from economic anthropology, she explores the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact “Trobriandness,” and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience." --Publisher's website.