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• Wednesday, November 19, 2008 08:48 AM

  cecilbeanie, freak shows were not simply racist as John Merrick "the elephantman" was white...

  Roslyn Poignant's Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle is essentially a book about the exhibition of aboriginal Australians in Europe and America, but it spreads its ambit much wider to put them in the context of other exotic ethnographic exhibits. Two chapters cover displays of living humans in the sideshows of zoological gardens and circuses; another three chapters cover displays of the dead in museums and scientific institutions--leading into discussion of the repatriation of human remains from imperial metropoles to the descendants of aboriginal peoples for burial, etc.

  Systematic zoological exhibition of groups of "savages" or aboriginal people, rather than just individuals, began in the 1850s with the anatomist Robert Knox in London, and took off in the 1870s with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire at the Jardin Zoologique d'Acclimatation in Paris and the wild animal importer and trainer Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg--who imported whole villages of Scandinavian Laplanders (Sami) in 1874, and of Nubians from the Sudan in 1876. In North America, Phineas Barnum is credited with the first comprehensive display of living humans with his 1883 "Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes."

  The showmen and the scientists (and the colonialists) in the new imperial age between them propagated crude racist ideas that penetrated mass consciousness through popular entertainment. But Roslyn Poignant emphasizes that, after settling down in their new role as human exhibits (with a significant initial death rate), such "savages," to be successful, had to become active entertainers participating in the hokum of show business; in a word, professionals.

  Professional Savages concentrates on the careers of aboriginal Australians overseas, culminating in the repatriation of the remains of one "Tambo" from Ohio to the Torres Straits in 1994, but also contains much fascinating non-Australian material. Thus in 1886 a family of !Ko people from the Kalahari, imported by the Canadian showman G. A. Farini, was paraded on stage at the Folies Bergres and was "examined" by the anthropologist Paul Topinard. The body of one who died was presented to the Societe d'Anthroplogie for dissection. In 1888-89, forty-five year old Esther the Hottentot received particular attention among the thirteen Khoekhoe exhibited at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Out of the seeds sown by Hagenbeck and Saint-Hillaire, came the colonial villages characteristic of International or Universal Fairs and Expositions--from Paris in 1889 and Chicago in 1893 through to Brussels in 1958.

  Books like this tread a knife edge between satisfying general readers seeking interesting narrative and scholarly readers seeking deeper discussion of issues. The imprint of Yale University Press tells us to expect the latter. Some readers may miss more discussion of the history of the presentation of human bodies and more discussion of the ethics of "repatriation" of human body parts, but Roslyn Poignant has successfully trod the knife edge in covering so many countries and diverse areas of scholarship

  —maureenodonnell Read maureenodonnell's other letters
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