Ethnographic Salvage and Cosmopolitan Exoticism

Abstract

This chapter focuses on one of the most enduring tropes of exoticism, ethnographic salvage. It explores how the project of ethnographic salvage, once the prerogative of Western ethnographers, has been taken up by Indigenous filmmakers who aim to recuperate and preserve their own cultural memory. The chapter examines four Indigenous films, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Ten Canoes, Embrace of the Serpent and Tanna. By exploring the conceptual convergences between exoticism, local authenticity and cosmopolitanism, this chapter aims to rehabilitate what Berghahn theorises as ’cosmopolitan exoticism’, through demonstrating how contemporary Indigenous cinema appropriates familiar exotic tropes (e.g. the Noble Savage, the ‘primitive’, the South Sea paradise) only to put them at the service of new cosmopolitan agendas. These include empowering marginalised Indigenous communities, demanding the atonement of colonial guilt and calling ‘the white man’ to responsibility for the looming environmental catastrophe he has caused. These Indigenous films demonstrate that certain contemporary forms of exoticism contribute to the important project of decolonising the lens.