Content area
Full Text
MAKING THE MODERN PRIMITIVE: Cultural Tourism in the Trobriand Islands. By Michelle MacCarthy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. x, 270 pp. (Illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-82485560-4.
As its title flags, this volume is a study of cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands based on fieldwork in 2009-2010. The research is focused on four groups: tourists, Trobriand Islanders, government officers involved in tourism, as well as tour operators and hotel owners. MacCarthy investigates how these groups interact in four contexts: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Her work is based on lightly structured interviews as well as that old standby, participant observation, and she lived with a local family. The book is quite reliant on anecdotal material and her interviews are generated from only 186 tourists (for a minimum 3-night stay) who visited the islands during the author's time there. The strength of this volume is in its detail about tourism in this particular place and time. The author writes fluently and exhibits a warm rapport with the many people she interviewed.
Although this study is of cultural tourism, MacCarthy sets herself a larger task: "I merely use tourism as a means and the Trobriands as a place, through which I can access questions fundamental to anthropological theory" (5). Within this larger framework she is interested in the way in which anthropological concepts, culture, tradition, custom, authenticity, and primitivity are appropriated and manipulated by producers and consumers in this local-global interaction. At...