ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the nature of the reports produced by viewers in the United States immediately after watching the 60 Minutes episode of “Tango Finlandia.” This discourse, as a whole, is composed of several parts. In particular, these cultural reports focus upon the topics of Finland and Finns; expressed astonishment at Finns and Finland; rendered Finns as inexpressive, sad, and shy; diagnosed this portrayal as a problem; and offered some remedies for this problem. Hidden in this discourse is the way making sense of a cultural other actually reflects more about one’s own cultural frame of reference, one’s own coding, one’s own “majority culture” as Professor Thorburn of MIT has put it, rather than it reveals something about the cultural other. Let’s listen to what was said by these viewers in some more detail.1
