predatory voyeurs: tourists and “tribal violence” in remote Indonesia JANET HOSKINS University of Southern California Tourism has been theorized in a new ethnography of modernity, stressing the museumization of the premodern and its production as spectacle. In this arti- cle, I explore the voice and perspective of the “tribal culture” recently ex- posed to a new type of gaze. Tourists are perceived as predatory voyeurs on Sumba, a once remote area now receiving increasing numbers of foreign visi- tors. An idiom of visual consumption encodes a critical awareness of global inequities in access to and use of technology, and a history of changing self- perceptions. The cameras that every tourist brings to capture images of head- hunters and primitive violence become the very emblems of the exotic vio- lence that they are designed to capture. [tourism, photography, cultural identity, Eastern Indonesia, violence, headhunting.] Fantastic stories about foreigners have been common in Indonesia’s eastern is- lands for some time. For years, the most common fear was of white headhunters, who would come in the dry season and raid villages to steal children. The children could be sold as slaves or beheaded and used to fortify the foundations of large construction projects (dams, hospitals, cathedrals, or government offices). Ethnographic reports of these fears include Haddon’s account of white headhunters in Sarawak in 1894 (Had- don 1901:173–175); Tsing’s (1993, 1996) and Drake’s (1989) reports of government headhunters in Borneo in the 1980s; Barnes’s (1993), Erb’s (1991), and Forth’s (1991) accounts from Flores; and Needham’s story of a “penyamun scare” in Kodi, Sumba in the 1950s (Needham 1983). In summer 2000, when I returned to visit Sumba after twelve years away, I en- countered a new image of horror and a new way of imagining foreign predation. As I accompanied a couple of young friends to an ancestral village that I had not visited before, I heard the woman of the house call out, “She isn’t one of those foreigners with metal boxes (dawa mbella) is she? She isn’t one of those foreigners we are afraid of (dawa pa kambohi), one of those tourists?” “No, of course not,” my companion answered, “this is Tari Buku, who lived here 20 years ago and took a Kodi name. She speaks our language. She is not a tourist.” 1 * Intrigued by her comment, I sat down on the veranda of her house and offered her betel nut from my betel bag. After a few moments of polite conversation, I asked her to tell me more about the Sumbanese image of tourists as “foreigners with metal boxes.” “We don’t really know much about them, but they are supposed to travel around, often at night, carrying metal boxes. They have long hair and disheveled clothing, and they smoke cigarettes dipped in potions that can make you sleepy. They are said to blow the smoke into children’s faces so that they lose consciousness. Then they take American Ethnologist 29(4):797–828. Copyright © 2002, American Anthropological Association.