“Queensland Cannibals” Encountered in Finland (1886): Locally Rooted Visions of Exhibitions of Colonized People

Abstract

The chapter examines the visit of a live ethnographic exhibition group of Australian Aboriginals, led by the impresario Robert A. Cunningham, in Helsinki and Vyborg in 1886. This exhibition, together with others of the same genre that followed a few years later, became an influential new means for Finns to encounter ideologies, imageries, and individuals closely associated with colonialism. The chapter demonstrates that the highly standardized exhibition concept did not ensure uniformity of either performance or reception. The Finnish example illustrates how the meaning of an exhibition was always locally embedded and thus subject to new interpretations. Since previous knowledge of Australia and its indigenous populations was sparse and fragmentary, Finnish journalists found the promotional material provided helpful and made use of it in a more or less straightforward and uncritical manner, thus reproducing racist and stereotyped imageries. Yet, they also applied their interpretive and descriptive skills in making an unprecedented exhibition concept intelligible to the local audience. The visit by the Aboriginals became a means to express membership in a western, allegedly superior civilization, with its rationality, its practices of overcoming and mastering other human populations, and its privilege of being entertained by those very populations.