ectoplasmosis:Surma kid - Omo valley Ethiopia by Eric Lafforgue on Flickr.The photographer says:Body

ectoplasmosis:Surma kid - Omo valley Ethiopia by Eric Lafforgue on Flickr.The photographer says:Body paintings unfortunately also show the increasing impact of foreign turists. Suri people have developed and created new body paintings as well as new dress codes in order to attract tourists. They have understood that tourists would be more eager to take pictures from them with such decoratives paintings and ornaments, and to pay for it. A few years ago, Suri boys started to disguise by wearing flower headdresses. These dress codes, invented for some of them, have lost their social and cultural meaning.Noticing these strategies were successful neighboring tribes and villages started to imitate the Surma. These « ethno » tourists influence the material culture of the Omo Valley people and its expression, and by doing so, cause changes, they paradoxally don’t want to see happening.The photographer deigns to decide what is and is not “authentic” to the Surma folk and their neighbors, deciding that body modification and decoration practices determined within the tribes prior to contact with white tourists are “real”, and that the “new”, “changed” dress codes are “unreal”, and that they “no longer have meaning”, a determination that he somehow makes as a foreign observer and “ethno tourist”, himself.  It also casually states the premise that all sartorial choices made by the oppressed group are being made to please the white man, a similar assumption to the one that states all women get out of bed in the morning and assemble outfits designed specifically to entertain heterosexual white men.The concept that western tourists get to decide what is or is not “authentic” cultural expression by a colonized indigenous group, while masquerading as “concerned ethnographers” interested in the “preservation of culture”, is one more example of ethnocentrism coming up with stupid answers to the wrong questions asked from the position of false assumptions about the subject.  It’s turds all the way down. -- source link

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