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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Spectacle Of The Odd: Constructing Otherness In The Odditoriums Of Ripley’S Believe It Or Not!, Sarah Haughenbury
A Spectacle Of The Odd: Constructing Otherness In The Odditoriums Of Ripley’S Believe It Or Not!, Sarah Haughenbury
Theses and Dissertations
Since Robert Ripley’s inception of the concept behind Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in 1918, Ripley Entertainment Inc. has continued to capture the attention of the public with their display of purportedly strange and unbelievable people, animals, and artifacts from across the globe. Using theories of categorization, Othering, materiality, the grotesque, the carnivalesque, and the gaze, this ethnographic study examines how persons and things in the company’s odditoriums are constructed as odd through the arrangement and decoration of exhibits and odditorium space and through the language used in advertisements and information panels.
I argue that Ripley’s uses similar techniques as …