Introduction: Double Signs and Intrasocietal Heterogeneity in Primitivist Tourism Encounters

ABSTRACT

A growing body of ethnographic work examines tourism in which visited people are figured as embodying an archaic human condition outside modernity. I suggest that this work's core subject is the structure of articulations between people who understand their close involvement very differently. I then highlight two more specific themes that cut across this issue's case studies from Kenya, Indonesia, China, and Papua New Guinea. One is that ethnographers trace participants' disparate understandings of specific interactional media, since these contact points and their plural make-up are the actual substance of articulation between different sides to the encounters. The other theme I highlight is that heterogeneity within tourists' and visited people's home ideological formations is critical to their tourism involvement, such that endosocial and exosocial processes are mutually constitutive. I lastly outline how the category ‘primitivism’ is a useful resource for situating this tourism in wider and deeper historical contexts.