Tomaselli, Garland, Loizos

Tomaselli, Garland and Gordon and Loizos all address how being under scrutiny affects the actions of the scrutinized. Loizos writes about various ethnographic films and whether or not each film falls into the category of purely documentation, entertainment or a mixture of the both. In the case of a film being a partly fictionalized documentary, the film loses value as being an anthropological work. The problem of analyzing these types of films is that is impossible to determine what is the factual and what is contrived for the purpose of entertainment.

Loizos's chapters, while solely addressing documenting realism, relates to the content of Tomaselli's and Garland and Gordon's articles as well. Rather than focusing on various filmmakers and their works, these articles take a different look at derived culture, seen in the tourism industry. Both articles focus on the group of people in Namibia known as the bushmen. Here the tourism industry markets a 'rich cultural heritage' by promoting an inside look at the authentic, primitive culture of the bushmen. Same as with ethnographic films, what the people see is not always what is the truth. The bushmen are well aware of their marketability as a commodity and cater to what tourists wish to see. They understand that cultural tourism will yield profits for them, if they play up that they are a 'dying culture,' or a simple, nature loving, live on the land type of people, all the while knowing that they are in fact very modernized. This type of tourism attracts those looking for an adventure, or who wish to get closer to the land, or discover themselves through the simplicity of another society. In Tomaselli's article, it is noted, "Cultural or eco-tourism is basically the commodification by capital of the romance of anthropology” (Tomaselli 189). The bushmen are profiting from the Western desire to seek the untouched, the so-called 'primitive.' My thought is to wonder if they are somehow morally wrong to do this. Does this have a negative impact on the actual record of the bushmen's place in history? With something like this happening, I'm sure Namibia is not the sole example, how can authenticity be proven? As Garland and Gordon pointed out, “authenticity is not the same thing as primitivity, ethnic originality, or historical stasis” (Garland & Gordon, 280).