Dehumanizing the Exotic in Living Human Exhibitions

During nearly a century, between the 1851 London Great Exhibition and (at least) the eve of WWII a very ancient practice of putting on display human beings of exotic origins established itself in Europe and, in general, in the Western world, modifying their previous significance and scope and assuming the aspect of a highly organized commercial activity and a regular spectacular happening within the great expositions of different size and extent – national, international, colonial, imperial, universal – which became a frequently recurring international rendezvous. On such occasions, groups of human beings were systematically brought from every part of the non-European world toward the Western capitals and other cities seats of the expositions to be variously put on display as actors of what has also been termed ‘human zoo’, but we can better call an ‘exhibitionary complex’, whose script in fact was the result of different and often competing agencies engaged in defining how those ethnic types were placed in the great map of mankind, civilization and societies. What was at stake in a more or less explicit way was their possessing all the requisites of a fully developed human nature and their rightful or conditional or limited belonging to a proper human condition. The interplay between the several actors involved in the living ethno-exhibitions determined the degree of de-humanization or animalization or commodification, or else of positive appreciation, to which those peoples were exposed. This paper intends – by reference to a series of historical examples and by discussing the ‘human zoos’ paradigm – to offer a summary interpretation of a phenomenon through which the nature of the displayed individuals as human beings and as members of cultural groups was questioned and interpreted according to the different paradigms concurring to define roles and meanings of the participants to the exhibitionary devices.