For those of you who are eager for a ‘first contact’ fix (or a ‘criticize essentialized representations of first contact’ fix) but are burned out on the Korowai, may I suggest the Smithsonian’s excellent website on Matthew Stirling’s 1926 film “By Airplane To Pygmyland”:http://www.sil.si.edu/expeditions/1926/. Done in collaboration with SIL (who I think have the footage that forms the core of this ‘digital curation’), the website has both the original footage of the expedition as well as photos and interpretive essays. The site is too big and I am — alas — too busy to give it a thorough going-over. One thing that I love about the title is that the ‘aeroplane’ part probably sounded as sexy and mysterious to its 1926 audience as the ‘pygmyland’ bit. Serious though — this is a great and deep on-line resource for teaching culture contact and the representation of the colonized.
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A minor point of clarification. The SIL referred to in this project is, I think, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, rather than, as many readers may suppose from this post (and the general context of the time and topic) SIL (ie. the Summer Institute of Linguistics). I could be wrong about this, but studying the credits etc. for the site led me to this interpretation. When I saw news of the project in the current issue of Inside Smithsonian Research, I placed it in a pile of news items to post on the Museum Anthropology blog, which I have just done.