JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 169
Human ignorance in observing differences among different societies and races has always been a burgeoning, expanding, sub-intelligent subset of other human stupidities, frailties and incapacities. Sometimes these are exhibited liberally and freely, and stupidly; other times it is difficult to see, vile, menially, sub-rosa, and thoughtfully thoughtless.
These prejudices been spectacularly exhibited in many ways over the centuries—forced immigration, complete removals, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, slavery, expulsion, legal intolerance, and so on; an entire library can be filled with this stuff. Sometimes people were gathered together and moved far away; other
times they were gathered together and removed into compounds right in the middle of cities in which they lived (as in ghettos, antiquarian “hospitals” and the creation of the more modern asylum, and so on). Genres not-too often discussed is the human zoo, and this image from the Illustriete Zeitung in 1877 depicts one of them
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This woodcut depicts the “Patagonian” Indians displayed in the Dresden Zoological Gardens. They lived in a fenced exhibit (and allowed to wear clothing), and were shown is all aspects of their daily lives. The curious would come and hang around at the perimeter fences (visible in the lower left of the hunting scene), and gawk, or study, or perhaps help themselves feel better or more superior by watching people in cages live their lives. I don’t know what they were really thinking or feeling.
People weren't thinking when they were looking, paying to look, at captive humans on display for many years. The questionable P.T. Barnum made his "contribution" to 19th century disgraces in 1835 with his exposition of a black slave (Joice Heth) who was supposed to be the world's oldest living human (I can't get into the slavery issue in the course of this post, although I probably should), bringing this sort of behavior to early and high entrepreneurial exposure. Soon after there would fellow his imitators, establishing human occupants in zoos in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, and Warsaw, and other places, all by the 1870's. There would be spectacles of human "exotics" in the semi-rarefied atmosphere of world fairs and expositions in Paris (1878,1889, 1931), Marseilles (Colonial Expo in 1906), Barcelona, Stuttgart (1928), among others. I should point out that there was a display of an entire Congolese Village as late as the 1958 Fair in Belgium (the Belgians evidently trying some bloody retrothink, 45 years after their long series of atrocities committed against those peoples). Humans do have an expansive capacity for this sort of behavior.
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