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Tourism
Mursi line up to be photographed by a tourist in the Mago Valley. (Ben Dome, 2004)
Foreign tourists are attracted to the Lower Omo by the image presented to them in travel agents’ brochures and newspaper articles of one of the last ‘wildernesses’ in the world, inhabited by wild animals, naked warriors and – in the case of the Mursi – by women wearing large pottery discs, or plates, in their lower lips. Here is an example of this literature, from an article by Amanda Jones that appeared in the Sunday Times Travel Section, 21 November 1999, under the heading ‘Tribes and tribulations’.
The final leg of our journey was to the Mursi people. In southern Ethiopia, this is the tribe who strike fear into the hearts of northern Ethiopians and tourists alike. We’d heard so many lamentable tales about their behaviour, that we didn’t really know what to expect. The problem is that you can’t possibly come all this way and miss the Mursi, famous for the lip plates the women wear in their lower lips.
Because of their reputation, most visitors make a six-hour round trip drive from Mago National Park to see them. They come tearing down the road, jump out of their cars with cameras blazing and Birr aflying, create a riot, get scared, jump back into the car, lock the doors and take off again after 15 minutes. The Mursi have this down to a fine art. They encircle the ferengie, manhandle them a little, exact inflated sums for photos, force them to buy chipped lip plates and then whip up such a racket that the tourists retreat with only a few terrible snap shots of lip plates looming inches from their lens to show for their expensive foray into Mursi land.’
In this tourist literature, the lip-plate symbolizes the ‘tribal’ and ‘untouched’ world of the Mursi, which should not be missed by anyone venturing into the Omo Valley. But it is their growing integration into the economic life of the highlands, and their growing dependence on market exchange, which drives Mursi of both sexes to play the demeaning part of archetypal primitives, as they line up to be photographed by passing tourists in exchange for one or two Birr per photograph (at today's rate of exchange (14 July 2009), 1 USD = 11.29 Birr and 1 GBP = 18.30 Birr).
More information
David Turton, ‘Lip-plates and “the people who take photographs”: uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia’, Anthropology Today. 20 (3), 2004, pp. 3-8.
Jon Abbink, ‘Tourism and its discontents: Suri-tourist encounters in southern Ethiopia’, Social Anthropology 8 (1) 2000, 1-17.