ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses why the Sami resonated with the British public, and how the Sami were imagined and commoditized in that period, through a discussion of the staging and media reception of this Sami exhibition. It examines the interplay between a well-established primitivist and transnational stereotype of the Sami as simple children of nature, or 'noble savages'. The chapter provides a short overview of premodern images of the Sami in the British Isles before addressing the dominant stereotypes of the Sami that Bullock drew on in his staging of the exhibition. An image developed to a large degree by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and projected by the exhibition manager William Bullock. As opposed to contemporary narratives on race and civilization, in which the Sami were often depicted to be savages, rather than noble savages, whose low racial status set them apart as inferior to the rest of Nordic countries peoples.
