På ville veger? Levende utstillinger av samer i Europa og Amerika

Authors

  • Cathrine Baglo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5617/nm.3107

Keywords:

living exhibitions, Sámi, cultural reconstruction, physical anthropology, imperialism, contact zones, the history of affect, authenticity, ANT

Abstract

Getting off track? Living exhibitions of Sámi in Europe and America. Abstract: During the nineteenth century, new practices for the representation of otherness were established. One significant manifestation was the living exhibitions of Sámi and other native peoples in zoological gardens, amusement parks, world fairs and other urban stages in Europe and America. These exhibitions have usually been perceived as the Western world’s staging of primitivity and race within hegemonic discourses based on exploitation and repression. The exhibitions in zoological gardens, in particular, have been considered instrumental in this respect. Although this dominant interpretation has provided important insight into how stereotypical features of cultural difference were normalized and naturalized, it has also seriously obscured the exhibitions’ own historicity and, in particular, the agency of the exhibited people themselves. In this dissertation, this a priori victimizing approach to the living exhibitions is challenged. A far more nuanced picture of motivations, experiences and power relations emerges through a detailed study of the Sámi participants and their exhibitors, also providing a richer account of the exhibitions’ own ethnography. 

Issue

Section

Projects