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Human Zoo (Völkerschau) in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1928

A Human zoo (also called "ethnological expositions" or "Negro Villages") was a 19th and 20th century public exhibit of human beings usually in their natural or "primitive" state. These displays usually emphasized the cultural differences between indigenous and traditional peoples and Western publics. Ethnographic zoos were often predicated on unilinealism, scientific racism, and a version of Social Darwinism. A number of them placed indigenous people (particularly Africans) in a continuum somewhere between the great apes and human beings of European descent. For this reason, ethnographic zoos have since been criticized as highly degrading and racist.

A caricature of Saartjie Baartman, called the Hottentot Venus. Born to a Khoisan family, she was displayed in London in the early 19th century.

One of the first modern public human exhibitions was P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth on February 25, 1835^[1] and, subsequently, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. However, the notion of the human curiosity has a history at least as long as colonialism. For instance, Columbus brought indigenous Americans from his voyages in the New World to the Spanish court in 1493.^[2] Another famous example was that of Saartjie Baartman of the Namaqua, often referred to as the Hottentot Venus, who was displayed in London until her death in 1815. During the 1850s, Maximo and Bartola, two microcephalic children from Central America, were exhibited in the US and Europe under the names "Aztec Children" and "Aztec Lilliputians" (See Aguirre, Informal Empire, ch. 4). However, human zoos would become common only in the 1870s in the midst of the New Imperialism period.

Exhibitions of exotic populations became popular in various countries in the 1870s. Human zoos could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, and Warsaw with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition. In Germany, Carl Hagenbeck, a merchant in wild animals and future entrepreneur of many European zoos, decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoan and Sami people (Laplanders) as "purely natural" populations. In 1876, he sent a collaborator to the Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. The Nubian exhibit was very successful in Europe and toured Paris, London, and Berlin. He also dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of "Esquimaux" (Inuit) from the settlement of Hopedale; these Inuit were exhibited in his Hamburg Tierpark.

Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin d'acclimatation, decided in 1877 to organize two ethnological spectacles that presented Nubians and Inuit. That year, the audience of the Jardin d'acclimatation doubled to one million. Between 1877 and 1912, approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation.

Both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World's Fair presented a Negro Village (village nègre). Visited by 28 million people, the 1889 World's Fair displayed 400 indigenous people as the major attraction. The 1900 World's Fair presented the famous diorama living in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) also displayed human beings in cages, often nude or semi-nude.^[3] The 1931 exhibition in Paris was so successful that 34 million people attended it in six months, while a smaller counter-exhibition entitled The Truth on the Colonies, organized by the Communist Party, attracted very few visitors—in the first room, it recalled Albert Londres and André Gide's critics of forced labour in the colonies. Nomadic Senegalese Villages were also presented.

Native people of Suriname were displayed in the International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam held behind the Rijksmuseum in 1883.

In 1906, socialite and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, had Congolese pygmy Ota Benga put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other animals. At the behest of Grant, a prominent eugenicist, the zoo director placed Ota Benga in a cage with a chimpanzee and labeled him The Missing Link, illustrating that in evolutionary terms Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.

Although such views had passed far from the mainstream of anthropological thought by the mid-20th century, a Congolese Village was displayed at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.^[4]

The concept of the human zoo has not completely disappeared. A Congolese Village was displayed at the Brussels 1958 World's Fair.^[5] An African Village was opened in Augsburg's zoo in Germany in July 2005.^[6] According to a June 1994 article by Le Monde diplomatique, a human zoo was present in the village of Huang-Haen in Burma, visited by most tourist agencies.^[7] In August 2005, London Zoo also displayed human beings wearing fig leaves (though in this case, the participants volunteered).^[8] In 2007, Adelaide Zoo ran a Human Zoo exhibit which consisted of a group of people who, as part of a study exercise, had applied to be housed in the former ape enclosure by day, but then returned home by night. The inhabitants took part in several exercises, much to the amusement of onlookers, who were asked for donations towards a new ape enclosure.

• Anthropology
• Colonialism
• Freak show
• Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer
• Joseph Beuys' performances
• New Imperialism
• Racism
• Scientific racism
• Scramble for Africa
• Zoo
• Abraham Ulrikab

• Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

• Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, edition La Découverte (2002) 480 pages (French) - French presentation of the book here ISBN 2-7071-4401-0
• The Couple in the Cage. 1997. Dir. Coco Fusco and Paula Eredia. 30 min.
• Régis Warnier, the film Man to Man

"From Bella Coola to Berlin". 2006. Dir. Barbara Hager. 48 minutes. Broadcaster -- Bravo! Canada (2007) "Indianer in Berlin: Hagenbeck's Volkerschau". 2006. Dir. Barbara Hager. Broadcaster -- Discovery Germany Geschichte Channel (2007).

• "Human zoos - Racist theme parks for Europe's colonialists", Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2000.  (English); "Ces zoos humains de la République coloniale", Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2000.  (French) (available to everyone)
• "On A Neglected Aspect Of Western Racism", by Kurt Jonassohn, December 2000 (Jonassohn is known for his book with Frank Chalk, The history and sociology of genocide : analyses and case studies, 1990, Yale University Press; New Haven) (English)
• On the construction of the African "savage" stereotype necessary to colonialism, on Africansocieties.org (English)
• "First thoughts on the site of the Groote Schuur Zoo by Nick Shepherd & David Van Reybrouck (English)
• The Colonial Exposition of May 1931 by Michael Vann (English)
• May 2003 Symposium "Human Zoos or the exhibition of the creature" (French)
• Imperial Culture in countries without colonies : Africa and Switzerland; The Human Zoo in Switzerland: object of popular curiosity or tool of colonial propaganda? by Patrick Minder, University of Neuchâtel (French)
• Guido Abbattista, Africains en exposition (Italie XIXe siècle) entre racialisme, spectacularité et humanitarisme (French)
• "Official site of the Adelaide Human Zoo" (English)