Cultural showcase or cultural zoo?

At the Hornbill Festival, I took this photo of some performers waiting to enter the stage area. Aware that their butts were hanging out of their costumes, I was a little hesitant to take the photo without asking their permission, perhaps being a little too culturally sensitive.

But as at the Ahuna festival, it was a local friend who suggested I take the shot, and I reasoned that this was a performance, these people were in costume and there were going to be cameras all over them in a second anyway.



A few minutes later, while the same performers were getting ready to go onstage, this is what I saw. I think the guy on the left was American, and I heard the guy on the right speaking in French.



Now surely there's a limit to what you can and cannot do with your camera in such situations. I still don't know what to think of these guys. They probably wanted a better angle of the performers for their photo collections, but come on, these are still people here! I suppose it would have been a completely different thing if the performers were actually posing for the photos as well.

Anyway, on the final day of the festival, I saw a tall blond woman walking around the stage perimeter shoving her camera lens in front of people in the audience (while performances were going on). She wasn't alone, there was an Indian guy doing the same thing. It was with a little satisfaction that, as she was photographing the Dimasa performers, one guy asked her stood up and asked for a photo with him using his phone camera. He then dressed her in one of the scarves that the women were wearing, which he took back after the photo had been taken.

I suppose as an obvious foreigner here, she must get quite a lot of stares (I'm sure my friend Lauren can empathise when she's in Nepal), no matter how she's dressed. The man who took a photo of her will probably be showing it off to all his friends for some time to come, the way she'll be showing off her pictures of 'ethnic people' to her friends.

Maybe such events are just meant to be a bit of a zoo for everyone.