Echoing images: The construction of savagery among Papua new Guinean villagers

Abstract

In 1987, a Swedish tourist visiting a remote Papua New Guinean village called Gapun made a video of the people who live there. Sensing that the tourist wanted them to be “primitive”, a number of villagers accommodated him by dressing up and acting as “savages”. This paper explores the villagers' representations of savagery by contex‐tualizing it in contemporary village discourses about the past and the modern world. The analysis raises the question of how Western images and representations of the Other come to engage the Other in a dialogue which, because of the socio‐economic realties of colonialism, through time becomes increasingly monologic. It describes how, in Gapun, the villagers' representations of themselves and their past have in an important sense become displaced by their understanding of Western images of them.