Adventure is currently enjoying enormous interest in public culture. The image of Tarzan provides a rewarding lens through which to explore this phenomenon. In their day, Edgar Rice Burrough's novels enjoyed great popularity because Tarzan represented the consummate colonial-era adventurer: a white man whose noble civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals. The contemporary Tarzan of movies and cartoons is in many ways just as popular, but carries different connotations. Tarzan is now the consummate -eco-tourist: - a cosmopolitan striving to live in harmony with nature, using appropriate technology, and helpful to the natives who cannot seem to solve their own problems. Tarzan is still an icon of adventure, because like all adventurers, his actions have universal qualities: doing something previously untried, revealing the previously undiscovered, and experiencing the unadulterated. Prominent anthropologists have come together in this volume to reflect on various aspects of this phenomenon and to discuss contemporary forms of adventure.
Author(s): Luis A. Vivanco; Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 340
City: New York
Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist… and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
PART I. The Adventurous Worlds of Simmel and Tarzan
Simmel and Frazer: The Adventure and The Adventurer
Adventure in the Zeitgeist, Adventures in Reality: Simmel, Tarzan, and Beyond
Tarzan and the Lost Races: Anthropology and Early Science Fiction
Avant-garde or Savant-garde: The Eco-Tourist as Tarzan
PART II. Exhibitionary Adventures
They Sold Adventure: Martin and Osa Johnson in the New Hebrides
Jacaré: Cold War Warrior from the Jungles of the Amazon
The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventures
PART III. High Adventures
Five Miles Out: Communion and Commodification among the Mountaineers
Crampons and Cook Pots: The Democratization and Feminizations of Adventure on Aconcagua
The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love: The Peace Corps as Adventure
Doing Africa: Travelers, Adventurers, and American Conquest of Africa
PART IV. Cross-Cultural Adventures
“Oh Shucks, Here Comes UNTAG!”: Peacekeeping as Adventure in Namibia
A Head for Adventure
PART V. Bringing Adventure Home
Riding Herd on the New World Order: Spectacular Adventuring and U.S. Imperialism
Adventure and Regulation in Contemporary Anthropological Fieldwork
Bibliography
Index
