Watching Survivor with my friend Andra is one of my guilty pleasures. I just finished watching series 16 – Micronesia and at the end I had my usual reminder of just why this particular pleasure makes me feel guilty. At the end of each series season they show a little taster of the next one. Check out the preview for Survivor: Gabon
Survivor always has a bit of the cultural colonialism about it – Americans going to beautiful untouched wildernesses abroad and living as “tribes”. There’s always at least one reward where they go to some kind of supposedly traditional feast and meet the natives wearing their traditional garb. In fact, in a particularly unpleasant gesture during the most recent season they actually blobbed out the bare breasts of women. So they get the tribespeople to put on this ghastly show so the “audience back home” can get see a bit of foreign culture kitsch and then deem their traditional costume too obscene to be actually shown.
But this trailer is really quite explicit: America is safe and homely. Africa is dangerous. But Africa’s nature and people offer a way back to prelapsarian innocence. Here are some direct quotes:
“one of Earth’s last sanctuaries for pure, untouched wilderness”
“rituals and dances as pure today as they were generations ago”
The tagline is “Earth’s last Eden”!
Extraordinary.
I’d love to see an urban Survivor. Or possibly better – a surburban one. Survivor Swords – see the tribes compete in the shadow of Dublin’s only international airport on the flat terrain of “Co.” Fingal.
