Duet for Cannibals: Forms of Cultural Appropriation is a publication based on a screening and discussion program bringing together a selection of works by contemporary artists and filmmakers as well as footage from the archive of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

The title Duet for Cannibals is borrowed from a 1969 film directed by American author and critic Susan Sontag.

Anthropologic and ethnographic institutions in European colonial power centres, like the former Colonial Institute of Amsterdam (nowadays the Royal Tropical Institute), were founded to study and exhibit the cultures of 'overseas people'. Their role was to appropriate, classify, and display cultural artifacts and sometimes even human beings. Though they claimed to reveal the pre-supposed cultural essence of the non-European other, such displays further entrenched the stereotypes of a eurocentric scientific and cultural status quo. In other words, it was by means of the inclusion of other cultures rather than their exclusion, that the colonial power constructed and affirmed itself within the enlightened modern institution, enhancing a privileged position from where it could unilaterally represent the rest of the world.

(Quelle: jap sam books)