Imagined Communities of "Cannibal Tours"

One of the things that struck me about the film “Cannibal Tours” was the “in between” nature of the village as described by one of the natives. As he said, the village he now lived in was not the village of his father, in the sense that it is no longer the isolated, untouched society that the people lived in. Now discovered by the “modern” civilizations and treated as a tourist attraction, however, the village is not yet “civilized” itself. It is in a limbo of development where the villagers are still living the lives they used to, but are now aware both of cultures and people different from their own as well as their status as a tourist entertainment for others. In a sense, this can be considered an “imaged community”. Their lives are forever altered by the presence of outsiders with cameras. They continue to live their former lives, but partially as display for the tourists, altering the finer points of their lifestyles. The tourists, as well, imagine what the native people live like but still are aware of how their presence has altered their way of life. For instance, their spirit house is actually in disrepair and missing practically all of its sacred relics, but it is imagined by the tourists that it is still a sacred space used by the natives for prayer important enough to pay to take pictures of it. The natives as well pretend that it is still sacred in order to get the tourists to pay for the pictures. Both sides are imaging and performing a community that no longer exists, a direct result of the very presence of the people who are doing the imagining and for whom the performance is happening.