Last One Standing: Cultural Reality TV?

Guest Columnist

Last One Standing: Cultural Reality TV?

by Thanu Yakupitiyage

A couple of weeks ago I walked past a bus stop in mid-town Manhattan and halted dead in my tracks at the sight of a large poster of a white man wrestling down what appeared to be an indigenous tribesman. It was an advertisement for the new co-produced BBC and Discovery Channel Reality Television Show, Last One Standing, with the slogan, “Welcome to Full Contact Culture.” The show follows six Western athletes from the U.S and U.K as they travel to different parts of the world to learn the ‘warrior’ traditions of indigenous tribesmen, from wrestling in the Amazon, stick fighting in South Africa, to tribal cricket in the South Pacific islands. Discovery Channel is picking up their pace, and instead of just showing indigenous people in their ‘natural habitat’, they are joining the reality TV show race to show what will happen when Western men engage with these unknown cultures!

Paulo Fridman/Discovery Channel

I’m not sure if I am more offended by the supposed thrill of seeing five white guys (the sixth is the token black of course) “getting down” like tribesmen do in a chest-thumping, testosterone driven “I’m a man- hear me roar” kind of way; or the bit about reducing indigenous cultures to a mere eco-tourism sport for the traveling Westerner that gets me the most riled up. Either way, Last One Standing, continues the trend of reality shows that package ‘culture’ for the sake of entertainment.

Posted at 10:52 AM, Nov 19, 2007 in Pop Culture | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

Reading your blog, I get excited and angry. On one hand, I love sport and wrestling, even better, scantily-clad men buffing it out along natural landscapes. Not to mention, I'm curious how native communities will act as a foil revealing not only the physical un-exceptionalism of Westerners but also their cultural and spiritual inadequacies. On the other hand, I fear winning and losing will too easily become issues of nationality and ethnicity rather than athletic acuity, which rings of a modern re-organizing of cultures and races along a male-dominated hierarchy. We just can't afford to address global issues of race in a medium of farce and chauvinism.