Representing Your Own Culture - Investigating authenticity in an indigenous museum

• Main Author: Zhang Östling, Xiaohui
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: Lunds universitet/Institutionen för tjänstevetenskap 2011
• Subjects: indigenous tourism; indigenous museum; self-identity; indigenous control; cultural representation; authenticity; Social Sciences; sami
• Online Access: http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/1978081

This project studies cultural representation in indigenous tourism. Indigenous theme and indigenous control are two important factors in indigenous tourism, and an indigenous museum controlled by indigenous people is a representative place for indigenous tourism. Therefore, this project focuses on a Swedish Sami museum. The aim of this project is to investigate different senses of authenticity in the cultural representation process in an indigenous museum. The two major research questions concerns how indigenous culture is represented in a museum, and in which sense cultural representation in an indigenous museum could be said to be authentic. After the study, it could be concluded that there are four main components in the cultural representation process, which reflects three senses of “authenticity”. Indigenous museum staff is the first component. Indigenous public, which is the second component as their main source of contemporary culture give feedback about researching and producing cultural representation to indigenous staff, so that indigenous self-identity, the third component, is reflected in different forms of cultural representation, which is the fourth component. Since non-indigenous public's feedback is seldom about cultural representation, it is not reflected in this process. Different forms of cultural representation reflects “object authenticity”, cultural expressions based on indigenous people's own feeling and identity reflects “existential authenticity”, while new indigenous behavior reflects “emergent authenticity”.