Du corps humain comme marchandise

Abstract

Starting from the publication, before Christmas 2006, of arrogantly advertised picture books dedicated to the painted bodies of Surma men, women and children, the author discloses, from the recent scientific history in the Lower Omo Valley, Sout-West Ethiopia, the reasons behind the commercial success of such catalogues. The discovery of prehistoric human fossils and the study of little known contemporary « tribes » led explorers, photographers and tourism managers to create an attractive mythology : being one of the « craddles of mankind » that remote part of Ethiopia has supposedly preserved to this day its human populations in a condition of primeval innocence, the « state of nature ». The Horn of Africa by C. Beckwith and A. Fischer, published both in English and in French in 1990, was a important landmark in the fabrication of that mythology. In France, Alain Cheneviere pioneered the myth since the mid eighties and developed it in general public magazines. The Omo populations are the descendants of Lucy – the famous pre-human fossil which was discovered not in the Lower Omo but in the opposite corner of Ethiopia, the Afar country. Kara men are the giants alluded to in the Bible, and Hamar women, as their beauty demonstrates, are the daughters of the Queen of Sheba. Thus it is not surprising that the area is attracting crowds of visitors, among whom celebrated photographers, in search « of the origins of mankind ». Concerning the picture books, the author demonstrates that the innocent spontaneity of the Surma painting their bodies is a strategy for eating the bread of affliction, nothing to compare with the profits of the photographers and their publishers. Thus an alleged artistic activity is analysed as an lawless merchandising of the body images of people not prepared to take any advantage from the intrusion of such predatory vanguards of a globalizing world.