Reflections of Benjamin and Adorno in Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours

In his review of Cannibal Tours, Edward M. Bruner speculates that it is the “vicarious brush with danger” derived from visiting a land where cannibalism was once practiced that draws tourists to Papua New Guinea. These people’s desire for the “unpolluted, the pure, and the original” drives them to make the long trip to explore what they view as “the forest primeval”. As Brunner points out, the irony in this is that, had the native’s original culture not been “intentionally altered or destroyed” by colonialism, then the tourists would not have been able to have their faked experience of the indigenous people’s civilization. Interestingly, this process wherein the colonists’ “’yearn[ing] for ‘traditional’ culture” causes them to destroy that which they crave, closely mirrors aspects of the development of modern media. Specifically, Brunner’s reading of Cannibal Tours parallels the obliteration of and subsequent quest to reconstruct the aura of the original work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction a la Walter Benjamin’s famous essay. Photography and to an even greater extent film are both the outcome of art’s longing to create the most perfect illusion of reality possible. However, with the advent of such ideal mediums wherein this conclusion is so closely achieved, the original becomes cheapened to the point where, in the case of film, it no longer exists in any sort of conceivable form. As with the colonist’s longing for authenticity of culture, the connoisseur’s yearning for the same quality causes art to cannibalize itself.