Pygmic Tours

Abstract

Among Africa's eastern Pygmies, the history of tourism is longer than that of anthropology, a fact most anthropologists to the Ituri have chosen to ignore. Instead, an ethnography has grown that focuses primarily on the Pygmies relationship with the ecosystem in which they live. The world beyond the rainforest has been excluded from our understanding of their lives. By detailing the extent of Pygmic tourism in four different locations in and around the Ituri, the aim of this paper is to show how this exclusionary practice has led to only a partial understanding of Africa's Pygmies. We are left with a myth of the "forest people, " and no adequate way to explain those Pygmies that do not correspond to the myth. They are abandoned in a condition of vagabondage, of passive acceptance of their ultimate fate: extinction by the contamination of the external world. Using the Sua of Uganda as an example of this presumed situation, I describe how, rather than slide into extinction, they actively deal with a world of multiple levels through the navigational skill of reflective ethnicity. They choose to expand their socio-political horizons, rather than shrink into the depths of the forest.