Wa Grotesque: Headhunting Theme Parks and the Chinese Nostalgia for Primitive Contemporaries

Introduction: Double Signs and Intrasocietal Heterogeneity in Primitivist Tourism Encounters

“…80:4, 2015 (pp. 433 -447) technologies of steam travel (Fusco et al 1993;Bennett 1988;Balme 1998;Stanley 1998;Parezo & Fowler 2007;Blanchard, et al 2008;Allegaert & Sliggers 2009;Qureshi 2011, Fiskesjö 2014. The current moment is characterized by even more intensified global economic and communicative interlinkage, and it is unsurprising that recent decades have witnessed a steep acceleration in tourists' desire and ability to visit human communities figured as different or separate, relative to global modernity.…”

“…For example, in reference to a socialist-era parade ground in a regional administrative centre that has been remade into a cultural performance space through ornamentation with emblems of Wa headhunting, Fiskesjö states: this would-be theme park, however detached from the ordinary people of this peasant periphery, has taken on a strange mixed significance as festival ground offering space for the tourist consumption of Wa exotics, which is also a celebration of the Wa as a vigorous people-albeit all within precise limits of political and economic control. (Fiskesjö 2014) My own article examines how the political culture of Korowai people of Indonesian Papua structures the practical organization of international tourists' visits to the area. Although my contribution deals only peripherally with tourists' own perspectives, these tourists visit Korowai in the first place because of their primitivist ideas of an archaic 'Stone Age' condition of human life in harmony with nature, out of contact with the global market economy.…”

Ethnic tourism in mainland Southeast Asia: the state of the art

“…Some studies take a more critical view of Chinese ethnic tourism development, decrying it as a force of radical transformation, in which local customs are commoditised (Su & Teo, 2008), commercialised, spectacularised (Li, 2012) or exoticised (Fiskesjö, 2015) for the entertainment of a new domestic tourist public, whereby they implicitly lose their 'authenticity'. However, as Zhu's study of a Naxi marriage ceremony for tourists in Lijiang demonstrates authenticity in performances for tourists is an intricate issue: for the Naxi dongba (ritual practitioner) the ritual may still preserve a 'performative experience of authenticity', even if performed 'just for fun' for a tourist audience (Zhu, 2012(Zhu, , p. 1495.…”

Window of the World: Sino–African Encounters through Copies and Simulations

“…The host not only worked at the Africa pavilion, but also hosted shows in the Maori dwellings. ‘[O]ur host is part of the Wa ethnic group in China’, Thato explained, ‘which is maybe why he has a dark complexion, but sometimes he wears makeup to appear darker in the shows.’ The Wa people in China and Myanmar have long been utilized to serve up the cultural spectacle of minority nationalities ( Fiskesjö, 2015 ). In fact, prior to the importation of African performers, dark-skinned ethnic minority Chinese people were recruited to Window of the World to perform as ‘Africans’, as well as Maoris and American Indians.…”