Rethinking Sami Agency during Living Exhibitions: From the Age of Empire to the Postwar World

Abstract

In the fall of 2008, the state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK), a noncommercial and highly-regarded channel, presented its new Saturday night show: „The Great Travel‟. The plot was simple. Three Norwegian families were sent into the „bush‟ to live for three weeks with three different indigenous groups around the World. One of the groups, the Waorani in the Ecuadorian Amazon, appeared more or less naked on the screen. The show was an immediate success. Almost a fourth of the country's inhabitants, including myself, followed the first episodes. But it also immediately caused an uproar, especially among anthropologists. Many alleged that NRK had paid the Waorani, who normally wear western clothes, to appear naked. These critics asserted that the Waorani‟s authenticity had been „staged‟. Even the former president of the Sami parliament, Ole Henrik Magga, made a public statement claiming that the show degraded and toyed with indigenous peoples. Others explicitly called the show racist, and claimed that it represented an attitude towards native peoples that belonged to colonial times (Nordlys 2008).