Search

I cosiddetti “zoo umani” rappresentarono un fenomeno di vastissima diffusione e popolarità nell’Europa delle grandi esposizioni nazionali, internazionali e universali a partire dalla metà dell’800. Forme spesso brutali di pubblica esibizione di esemplari di umanità selvaggia, gli “zoo umani”, completi di “villaggi” ricostruiti nel dettaglio e popolati di “indigeni” importati come animali da esposizione, costituirono un ingrediente importante – per quanto raccapricciante – della mentalità e dell’auto-rappresentazione dell’Occidente “progredito”, imperialista e colonizzatore. Grazie a questo libro, dopo che numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno in larga parte del mondo occidentale (Germania, Francia, Inghilterra, Stati Uniti, Spagna, Svizzera, Russia, Danimarca) disponiamo ora della prima ricerca sistematica sulle “esposizioni umane” nell’Italia liberale e fascista, viste non solo nella loro funzione politico-ideologica, ma anche in rapporto ai loro antecedenti storici più antichi e nella varietà di declinazioni che, ben oltre la nozione restrittiva di “zoo umani”, esse assunsero nel mondo dello spettacolo, in quello delle attività missionarie oltremare e negli ambienti della ricerca medica e antropologica. L’interesse suscitato dal libro ne ha reso necessaria una seconda edizione riveduta e accresciuta e con una Prefazione di Sandra Puccini. ll volume è attualmente in corso di traduzione presso la prestigiosa casa editrice inglese Routledge.

This article is part of a themed issue of "Ricerche storiche" with the title "Esposizioni Universali in Europa. Attori, pubblici, memorie tra metropoli e colonie, 1851-1939 (a cura di Giovanni Luigi Fontana -Anna Pellegrino)". It aims at discussing some current historiographical paradigm concerning living ethno-exhibitions, by showing how deeper and more ancient motivations were at their basis. In particular, the article criticizes the notion of "human zoos" as suggesting an interpretation which risks missing some fundamental aspects of the ethno-exhibitions. Such aspects - variety, multiple meanings, agency and negotiation - are introduced and explained. In particular, this essay dwells on the concepts of ‘human zoos’ and ‘living human exhibitions’, in order to show that the first was a particular case of a larger family of cultural practices in early modern and modern Europe, where the appropriation of human ‘others’ was inspired by the will to exercise the ‘power of the gaze’. Human aliens were repeatedly and often voluntary victims of abduction from their countries of origin and public exhibition in several different venues in European cities according to widely diffused practices of ‘public othering of the human body’, which was made available to the observation of the Western gaze. The great nineteenth-twentieth century world expositions offered one of the most influential contexts for such ethno-shows, innovating the pre-existing performances in several ways, in particular by taking over the ‘human zoos’ format. It would be partial however to interpret the latter only in terms of the obvious aspects of ‘animalisation’ of human ‘others’ and racism. Public exhibitions of living humans ‘other’ were in fact complex performances involving ideas of civilizing and Christianizing tasks and occasioned unexpected reactions on both sides of the exhibitions, so that to reduce the latter to a mere expression of power and racist domination means to miss important aspects of the complex relationship between exposer and exposed.

The present contribution concerns the European representation of the colonized world within universal exhibitions, with particular reference to the exposition of living exotic and savage humans coming mainly form Africa. Such performances were contrived for offering the public a vivid image of the contrast between civilization and savagery. Although well rooted in a very old European tradition of freak spectacularization, capture, imports and expositions of human beings came to assume a commercial entrepreneurial form during the 19th and early 20th century. Recent historical and anthropological studies have called these exhibits “human zoos”. However, this notion seems too limited for essentially two reasons: it applies only to a particular late 19th-early 20th century variety of living human exhibitions, which in fact comprehend a larger assortment of shows and displays of human beings; and it insists excessively on the monodimensional and unidirectional relationship between the displayer and the displayed, whereas human exhibitions were more complex “cultural artefacts” whose actors included visitors and spectators and whose unstable meaning was the result of the interplay between different agencies, being thus much the result of representations and interpretations on the making. Four main points are then to be stressed: 1st) the exposed subjects’ agency, which can be analyzed by studying the details of the European tours and the complex reaction patterns that can be ascertained during the exhibitions, 2nd ) the connection between living ethno-exhibitions and national colonial policies; 3rd) the transformation of the 19th century form of human exhibition into more articulated, less exotic, ideologically more complex representation of human diversities within an imperial discourse during the first half of the 20th century; 4th) the continuity in contemporary world of living human exhibitions begs the problem of the building of individual and collective personalities and their meanings through exposition and self-exposition, “watching” and “being watched” and the search for the conditions and boundaries of visibility as a drive for the definition of cultural identities.

Over the past twenty years international and universal world expositions have been extensively researched as subjects of a thriving historiography with a distinctly comparative outlook. Numerous academic disciplines – particularly under the impetus of transnational, global and post-colonial approaches – have contributed to our understanding of them as major events tightly linked to fundamental historical phenomena such as nationalism, globalization, imperialism, consumerism, mass society and culture, scientific and technological progress, modernization and modernity itself. The essays collected in this volume explore different aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century world expositions from the perspective of social and political history, the history of literature and of the performing arts, the history of ethno-anthropology and cultural history in general. They exemplify the different ways world expositions have affected popular imagination, literary creativity, forms of public entertainment, and social and political agency. These original contributions add significantly to what is now recognized as an established and dynamic field of research.

The study of living ethnic expositions in Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth century allows some additional considerations on two main questions: the contributions of such cultural phenomena to the creation of a colonial culture in Italy; and their continuity in modified and adapted forms whereas current interpretations acknowledge their lesser recurrence and relevance in periods of time marked by globalization and dramatic media revolutions. The first point is analyzed with reference to the most recent historiography. With regard to this the A. criticizes G. M. Finaldi’s 2009 thesis on the pervasiveness of a mass colonial sensitivity in late nineteenth-century Italy on the basis of his comparative studies on Italian and European living ethnic expositions and spectacles. These cultural phenomena in the last decades of nineteenth-century Italy reveal weakness, superficiality, improvisation and amateurish character especially if compared to analogous events in France and Germany, with respect to which the Italian cases do not show comparable racist features. Only on the eve of the Italian-Turkish War of 1911-1912 Italian colonialism and its social-cultural expressions assumed very aggressive nationalistic, expansionist and increasingly racist tones. This was the consequence, since the beginning of the twentieth century and the resumption of Italian colonial programs in Africa after the Adowa disaster in 1896, of the growth of a properly speaking colonial culture, with the birth of colonial societies and institutes, the development of colonial socioeconomic, geographical, statistical disciplines and of a scientific anthropological interest in the study of submitted African peoples. These developments had consequences also on the particular way the living exhibition of human colonial diversity continued to occur, making those practices an occasion for publicising not an image of radical and irreducible otherness, but rather a civilizing, assimilationist discourse. The second part of this contribution tackles the question whether the living human exhibitions disappeared in contemporary collective socio-cultural practices. It recalls several, recurring examples after WWII of what could be termed the visual perception of anthropological difference in support of discourses radically different from the typical ones of the age of colonialism and imperialism. The essay shows that the settings partly remained the same as previously, as in the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition, and partly changed radically both in their physical locations and in their intended meanings. Several examples of different nature – from commercial publicity to ethno-ecological advocacy, from mass tourism to experimental performing arts – converge in giving support to the idea that all historical ages create and rest on, or remember and reproduce plural visual, or ‘optic’ regimes of representation of human (and cultural) differences, thus suggesting how the construction of (especially public) visual perceptions and representations directly derives from or just implies the exercise of physical submission and acts as a device for reducing to order and control the disturbing human diversities.

This contribution aims at exploring the phenomenon of the ethnic villages in several international exhibitions in different European countries between the end of the 19th and the fist two decades of the 20th century

Recent studies on human live ethno-exhibitions have concentrated on their nineteenth-twentieth centuries forms, considering them as a typical expression of Western capitalist, imperialist and racialist culture and using for them the definition of ‘human zoos’. This essay aims to put in a longer historical perspective the phenomena of live human ethno-exhibitions, suggesting, first, to connect them to the practice of abducting exotic humans at the epoch of the discovery of the New World, and, second, to underline their relationship with the ancient “Roman triumphal culture” and its public exhibition of stranger, exotic captives as preys and trophies on the same plane as booty of other kinds. At the same time, a continuity can be envisaged between early modern practices of ethno-exhibitions of exotic living humans and present-day episodes registered by news reporting which testify how the use of reifying human beings and making of them ‘trophies’ of ideological discourses of different sort – humanitarian, conservationist, ecological – has survived in many unexpected contexts even in the twenty first century and not only in the Western World.

This essays explores for the first time the phenomenon of ethno-exhibitions in 19th century Italy. It focuses on the 1884 Turin General Exhibitions and analyzes how the first Italian ethjno-exibition of living African human beings was staged. It does that on the basis of entirely unpublished archival sources, by a great variety of sources, including the iconographic ones and by a comparative perspective, which provides an interpretation of this Italian experience with the wider European practices.

The so-called "human zoos" represented an incredibly widespread and extremely popular phenomenon in 19th-early 20th century Europe, at the age of the great national, international and universal exhibitions, of which they were a recurrent and a nearly constant element. The "human zoos" were brutish forms of public exhibitions of specimens of "savage" (mostly African) humans purposely imported as exotic animals from overseas by specialised merchants and entrepreneurs and hosted in "indigenous villages" very carefully and minutely reproduced within the exhibition areas. Such public displays - true ethno-anthropological shows in which the exotic actors were supposed to "play" their native daily habits, craftsmanship, arts, dances, songs and religious rites - contributed in an important albeit appalling way to Western Europe self-perception as an advanced, modern and "civilsed" society and culture, to be efficaciously contrasted with primitive or just diverse forms of human ways of living. The expanding, aggressively militarist, imperialist and colonising West could proudly look at itself in the mirror offered by the spectacle of a human alterity exhibited in its most demaning forms; and in that contrast it could find a clear confirmation of the importance of its civilising mission in the world. Several recent books have explored this phenomenon in the social and cultural history of many West-European and American countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, the United States. This book for the first time investigates the great variety of living human public exhibitions in 19th-20th century Italy, between the liberal era and Fascism. It connects these examples of public exhibitions to an ancient tradition of triumphs and freak shows and underlines the close relationships with colonial politics and ideology, with the development of anthropology and the medical sciences as academic disciplines in Italy and with catholic missionary activities in Africa, the Near East and South America. In so doing this book suggests the need to enlarge the very notion of "human zoos", which aptly defines a particularly brutal, even if very common form of living human exhibition, but which cannot be applied to other, themselves very widespread aspects of human shows, such as ethnic theatre, missionary exhibitions and colonial-imperial exhibitions based not so much on the public show of a degraded savagery, but on the apology of the civilising capacity of colonial and imperial institutions. In so doing, this book offers an original insight into Italian public opinion and sensibilities in matters of human varieties, race, civilization, globalization, modernity and the non-European world; and it tries to assess, in comparison with other European cases, the specifities of Italian attitudes toward human ethnic diversities and colonialism. The book is enriched by a very large section of "Illustrations" reproducing original and often previously unpublished images and archive documents; and it is closed by a wide, 50 pages bibliography. I cosiddetti “zoo umani” rappresentarono un fenomeno di vastissima diffusione e popolarità nell’Europa delle grandi esposizioni nazionali, internazionali e universali a partire dalla metà dell’800. Forme spesso brutali di pubblica esibizione di esemplari di umanità selvaggia, gli “zoo umani”, completi di “villaggi” ricostruiti nel dettaglio e popolati di “indigeni” importati come animali da esposizione, costituirono un ingrediente importante – per quanto raccapricciante – della mentalità e dell’auto-rappresentazione dell’Occidente “progredito”, imperialista e colonizzatore. Grazie a questo libro, dopo che numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno in larga parte del mondo occidentale (Germania, Francia, Inghilterra, Stati Uniti, Spagna, Svizzera, Russia, Danimarca) disponiamo ora della prima ricerca sistematica sulle “esposizioni umane” nell’Italia liberale e fascista, viste non solo nella loro funzione politico-ideologica, ma anche in rapporto ai loro antecedenti storici più antichi e nella varietà di declinazioni che, ben oltre la nozione restrittiva di “zoo umani”, esse assunsero nel mondo dello spettacolo, in quello delle attività missionarie oltremare e negli ambienti della ricerca medica e antropologica.

Il saggio contiene una analisi originale su fonti primarie a stampa e manoscritte relativa alla figura e al contributo di A-H. Anquetil-Duperron, autore dell'opera manoscritta inedita di cui il volume presenta la prima edizione critica a stampa, con commenti e aparati critici

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.