This image from my trekking journey in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands figured into the recent Deviate episode wherein Ari Shaffir and I discussed the idiosyncrasies of travel onstage at KGB Bar in NYC.
Specifically, we talked about the tourist desire to see a “pure” vision of distant cultures, and how years of working with travelers in the Mentawais had conditioned Agus, my trekking guide in this remote archipelago off the coast of Sumatra, to remove anything that didn’t look traditionally Mentawai — himself included — from the sight-lines of his clients’ cameras.
Granted, Agus was as ethnically Mentawai as anyone there (and even the more traditional islanders used things like processed sugar and wristwatches), but with his fluent English and penchant for T-shirts, he’d learned he had too much in common with his clients to be the kind of Mentawai they were looking for.
Hence, while Agus was one of the best trekking guides I’ve had anywhere in the world, he appears in almost none of the hundreds of photos I took in the Mentawai jungle — one exception being this video screen-cap of his hand darting into the shot to remove a plastic water bottle as Amantiru, his intricately tattooed, loincloth-wearing cousin, used a traditional pulp-press to process sago in the jungle.
Agus’s vocational diligence in removing modern-looking items from traditional-looking settings when his clients were around catered to what anthropologists call the “tourist imaginary”: the desire for us as travelers to record and certify not what we actually see in distant lands — but our own fanciful reveries of what we’d hoped we might find there.
For more thoughts on the “tourist imaginary,” dig into my book The Vagabond’s Way, or check out episode 206 of Deviate with Rolf Potts.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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