Summary: What are the chief pleasures and tensions embedded in the circulation of indigenous performances as global commodities made available for 'reading across cultures?' To probe this question, my paper focuses on the Olympic Games as a potent, if highly controversial, stimulus for the expression — and consumption — of indigenity in the neo-liberal marketplace. While the signal events for my analysis are the Sydney, Salt Lake City and Vancouver Olympics, all in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a longer historical view will help to weigh the exoticising effects of spectacle against the argued benefits of national and global visibility. Specific pageants and protests are discussed as constituent parts of performance clusters intricately connected to each other by the spatial, economic and conceptual structures of individual host cities. Conceptually, the argument draws from recent work in cultural geography and urban studies as well as in performance theory. The overall aim is to begin a comparative materialist analysis of pro- and anti-Games performances of indigeneity while offering some grounded theoretical insights into the ways in which such 'inhabitations' map into local and translocal commodity cultures.
