“When We Are Laughing Like This Now, We Are Also Being Recorded by Them”: Eliamani's Homestead and the Complicity of Ethnographic Film

Eliamani's Homestead is an unfiltered presentation of unequal power relations, othering, suspicions, misunderstandings, and the untranslated in an exchange between Indigenous hosts and their guests in a cultural tourism setting. A family of Dutch tourists visits a Maasai homestead in Tanzania, where Eliamani and her child have no food. The tourists take copious pictures of the women and children and haggle over the price of a bracelet—a common scene in cultural tourism encounters the world over. The discomforting exchange is all the more palpable when Eliamani breaks the fourth wall and reminds the filmmaker and viewer of their complicity. This film dialogue is part review, part conversation with the filmmaker who describes the process of making, editing, and screening the film, including audience and participants’ reactions. It situates Eliamani's Homestead within the ambit of ethnographic film, both illustrating visual ethnography's complicity in cultural tourism and revealing its potential to offer its own critique when it maintains a multivocal approach that strives for dialogue with “the other” on both sides of the camera.