Our Men about World: Strange Encounters and Differences in Madventures

The Finnish hosts of the television travel show, Madventures, explain in its introductory sequence that they are “on a global odyssey to learn about the most bizarre traditions on earth and to uncover the secrets this planet holds”. Filmed without a production team, Madventures employs a gonzo-journalistic method and aims at entertaining and educating audiences interested in low-budget travel to non-tourist destinations such as New Guinea, West Africa, and the Amazonas region. Shot in English for international audiences, the show was consequently shown in 2010 on the Travel Channel in the US and on Channel Five in the UK.

This article interrogates the show’s “strange encounters” (Ahmed 2000) by zooming in on three specific ways in which the show engages in the production of differences, be they cultural, gendered or in other ways power-marked. First, women appear only marginally on the show and thus serve to highlight the traveling white male body.  Second, carnal humour is born as particularly Riku’s body becomes a site of difference, humour and grotesque when exploring “the most bizarre traditions” of areas operating under the sign of the exotic in the Western imagination. Third, the show’s “Mad Cook” segment can be read as an example of “eating the other” made famous by bell hooks (1992), where the spectacle of meeting/eating exposes, ridicules and renegotiates power relations.

These three examples; women in the margins, carnal humour and competitive and comic ingestion of exotic foodstuffs, all serve to create the show’s adventurous atmosphere, which under critical scrutiny reveals how Finns in global popular culture engage in transnational negotiations of difference, identity and power.