Human Zoos - Racist theme parks for Europe's colonists ?

sept 9th, 2007

i propose that india create a theme park where various communists can be put on display in their natural habitats.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sushama

Rajeev,

 

I just came across an utterly Abhorrent side of Western Colonialism in my research online. Truly tragic, disgusting and shocking. And to think that the Western intellectuals and Christian missionaries have the audacity and temerity to lecture Hindus about atrocities in the name of the caste system. That is really rich!

 

Here are some article links and excerpts for your reading pleasure:

 

1. The parade of the vanquished

 

I know their game, explained the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II shortly before he was defeated by a British invasion and committed suicide. First traders and missionaries, then ambassadors, then the cannon. It's better to get straight to the cannon.

Exhibits of non-western peoples were first organized by zoos, apparently on the grounds that with exotic animals went matching people, and probably making use of the same trade connections. In Germany such exhibits were organized by the Hamburg animal trader and zoo director Carl Hagenbeck. In his memoirs he refers to them as "anthropological-zoological exhibits". Groups of Laps, Nubians, Eskimos, Kalmuks, BellaCoola Indians, Sinhalese, Ethiopians, Somalis and so on followed one another in a motley parade from the 1870s onward. LaGrange in Paris followed suit in 1881 and staged ethnographic shows in the Jardin d'Acclimatation of the Bois the Boulogne. Godefroy brought an ethnographic collection from Angola to the Netherlands in 1888 with a group of 23 slaves, selected in such a way that they would be "wild customers".

Thus during the heydays of imperialism many exhibits of peoples were organized: against payment the public were shown negroes, Indians, Asians, situated in their own dwellings. In colonial ethnography the colonized were turned into objects of knowledge, in the colonial exhibit they were turned into spectacles. The peoples on display were the trophies of victory.

 

African intellectuals who criticized the European clichés in the twenties and thirties made several arguments. (1) European conquest itself was barbaric . There was wide agreement about the barbarism of the "civilizing hordes", from the West African essayist Tovalou Houénou to Rabindranath Tagore….

 

http://www.africansocieties.org/n4/eng/pieterse.htm

 

 

On A Neglected Aspect Of Western Racism – By  Kurt Jonassohn

 

For more than half a century - from the beginning of the 1870s to the end of the 1930s - the exposition of so-called exotic peoples in zoological gardens** and international expositions attracted a huge public eager to be fascinated by the unfamiliar and the unknown. Throughout Western Europe travelling exhibits of non-European natives were recurring features of zoological gardens where they eclipsed the drawing power of the more usual animal exhibits. Both exhibits were isolated by fences that variously protected sometimes the animals and more often the public; but in the cases of the human exhibits the main purpose of the fences seems to have been to stress the distinction between them and us.

 

http://migs.concordia.ca/occpapers/zoo.htm

 

Human Zoo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo

 

Sushama

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