Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how members of an African pastoral society physically and socially encompass Western tourists in their everyday life. Instead of the well-known commodification theory, the paper aims to offer a new conceptual frame for understanding tourism encounters in non-Western societies.

Paper long abstract:

Under this rather provocative title my presentation takes an old concept of anthropology and uses it to call attention for the deep ethnographic "thick description" of local understandings of tourists in contemporary, small scale African societies. The paper discusses some of my observations I have made during my fieldwork among the Mursi in the Lower Omo Valley in South-western Ethiopia, and develops an argument on different strategies that local people applied in order to encompass the cultural Other.

During my fieldwork I witnessed how the Mursi established model settlements, created "fake" hospitality spaces where they encountered their Western visitors. In these reproductions (mimics, staging) of 'real' Mursi sociality local people imitated daily routines (working activities, cooking) and dressed up as "wild savages" for the sake of their guests. The encounters were tense and uneasy and I documented not only evolving hospitality practices but also the tactics (mimicry of wildness, pretended hostility etc.) that local individuals used for reassuring their own personhood (everything which I am not) through the contact with the Other.

However, the way local people made sense of Western strangers was not always clear in the immediate moment of the encounter. The complete understanding of the local meaning of Western strangers required the conceptualization of how the Mursi assimilate the Other in their everyday life. In this paper I describe the tactics of physical and social incorporation the Mursi apply in order to achieve the neutralisation of (political, economic, cultural etc.) power of Western strangers.