Maasai Speak Back

The growing body of anthropological research on the economic and social realities of Western tourism in Maasai communities focuses largely on cultural heritage tourism, in which visitors are taken to Maasai bomas where they can interact with local people, observe cultural performances, take photographs, and purchase crafts. The advertisements created by tour companies often feature quite dramatic images of Maasai men and women in full traditional dress, and promise tourists adventure, hospitality, and most importantly an authentic inter-cultural experience. The existing research tells us much about the real-world and theoretical issues of the anthropology of tourism in East Africa, but what it does not (and perhaps cannot) provide is a measure of how the cultural assumptions, expectations and misinterpretations of both tourists and Maasai hosts determine the nature of the cross-cultural moment as they attempt to reach across the interpersonal divide. Researchers are not mind-readers and therefore the inner dialog of the cross-cultural exchange is largely unobservable and unknown, as is the ongoing subjective resonance of the experience and how it continues to influence each group’s perception of the other. The anthropologist and filmmaker Vanessa Wijngaarden’s remarkable new film, Maasai Speak Back, mines the emotional landscape of the cross-cultural moment between Western tourists and Maasai hosts, and brings the previously unobservable or unknowable to the surface. During her fieldwork in Tanzanian Maasai communities, Wijngaarden filmed the interaction of several groups of Dutch tourists with local Maasai. These visitors were brought to established bomas where Maasai work and live, not to specially designed “cultural” bomas, places where they were invited to observe people at their work, interact, take photos and buy hand-made crafts. It is here that the misunderstandings unfold, as visitors and hosts negotiate the buying and selling process. The Maasai women, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy below the tour companies, the local guides and interpreters, hope for a fair price and a small profit. The visitors, trapped in the orbit of the tourist bubble, are concerned with bargaining a “good price.” This exchange is tense and uncomfortable, the Westerners feeling that they are being taken advantage of, the Maasai that their work is being devalued.