Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
2. RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION:
ETHNIC STEREOTYPES AND COLONIZED PEOPLES
AT WORLD'S FAIRS
Burton Benedict
1 For an analysis of world's fairs as rituals see Burton Benedict et aI., The Anthropology
of World's Fairs.: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition 1915 (Berkeley:
Lowie Museum of Anthropology and Scolar Press, 1983), 6-12. Accounts of the power
relationships manifested in world's fairs can be found in Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair:
Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984); A.E.S. Coombes, "For God and for England: Contributions to an Image
of Africa in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century," Art History 8 (1985); John M.
Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); and Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas:
The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1988).
2 See introductory essay in Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, eds., The Invention
of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
29
fairs, ethnic stereotypes became both less rigid and less simple. They were
elaborated and modified and acquired quite new meanings. They moved
from the display of a few ethnic types as oddities to the portrayal of many
different cultural traditions. These traditions were not always old; they were
sometimes invented; and they acquired new referents on the world's fair
stage, but their very proliferation militated against the simplifying nature
of stereotyping.
Displaying People and Their Artifacts
Few pastimes are more amusing than looking at other people. A study of
visitor behavior in public parks shows that people spend more time looking
at each other than at the beauties of nature. If the people observed differ
in some striking fashion from the observer, interest is further stimulated.
For centuries, entrepreneurs and showmen have been charging admission
to see human oddities.
Three ways of displaying people and their artifacts are central for the
analysis of colonial exhibits at world's fairs: the display of people and their
artifacts as curiosities, as artisans with their products, and as trophies or
booty.3
The display of people and/or their artifacts as curiosities has a long
history deriving from fairs, carnivals and side shows. Objects are shown
that are unfamiliar to the audience and preferably concern the shedding
of blood. For people on show, ph ysiological characteristics are em phasized
-enormous girth, armlessness, dwarfishness, hairiness. Often, however,
the physiological characteristic is a difference in ethnicity-the wild man
from Borneo, the hairy Ainu, the pygmy, the cannibal from Dahomey. Note
that in the last case the criterion is behavioral. It is not just his pigmentation; it is what he eats. Behavioral "freaks" can be created from one's
own culture, especially if eating is involved---sword swallowers, fire eaters,
people who chew glass. The main aim of the exhibition of curiosities is
commercial. People have to pay to see them.
The display of people as artisans emphasizes the continuity of ethnic
3 The ethologist, Desmond Morris, has examined the human propensity for looking at other
humans. See especially his Manwatching (New York: Ahrams, 1977). For an examination of
behavior in parks and other public places see N.H. Cheek and W.R. Burch, Jr., The Social
Organization of Leisure in Human Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and Erving
Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963). Accounts of the
exhibition of exotic humans in London from 1600 to 1862 can be found in Richard D. A1tick,
The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). An account of
American displays of human oddities can be found in Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting
Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). On
types ot:.human displays at world's fairs, see Benedict, Anthropology, 43-45.
30
BURTON BENEDICT
or cultural differences even where the artisan comes from the same broad
culture as most visitors, e.g., for Westerners-Irish lace-makers, Italian
glassblowers, Shaker furniture makers. Artisans are often dressed in traditional costumes. The principal aim here is also commercial. Although the
emphasis is on the products, showing people helps sell them. The people
on show and their products form a unit.
In the displays of people and/ or their artifacts as trophies or booty won
by conquest, the power relationship is naked. The conqueror displays the
conquered and/or his arms. Greeks and Romans displayed their captives;
so did Saddam Hussein when he showed British captives on television on
August 23, 1990, at the time of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. An ethnic
element is often involved because those conquered usually come from a different society. Geronimo was shown at three American fairs. The main aim
here is political, whether what is shown is in a trophy cabinet, a museum,
a zoo, a prison, a world's fair or on television.
These three types of display are amalgamated and ritualized in world's
fairs. A more recent fourth way is the display of people and/or their artifacts as scientific specimens. This often masks their display as curiosities
or trophies. At both the Chicago fair of 1893 and the St. Louis fair of 1904
"villages" ofliving peoples were placed in the fairgrounds in what were supposed to be evolutionary sequences from the most 'primitive," usually shown
as pygmies or Philippine Igorots, to the more "advanced," who approximated
Euro-American physical type and culture.
Power relations are often combined with and sometimes disguised by
amusements or displays of crafts. In some displays this is deliberate, but
we must beware of thinking that every exhibit is the result of a conspiracy,
that every time we put some object on show in a museum or some person
on show on a stage, or making a pot, power relations are being manifested.
There are many reasons for people and things being on show, and not all
have to do with power.
The display of people is essentially theatrical and can be analyzed in
theatrical terms. There is the setting which can be the fabricated village,
the craftsman's workshop, the showman's stage. There are the props which
include modes of dress, makeup, furniture, weapons, tools, etc. There is
the performance itself-dancing, singing, drama, sporting contests,
hunting, eating, religious ceremonies, the fashioning of objects, etc. Finally
there is the interpretation furnished by labels, brochures, catalogues,
programs and/or a narrator. The performances became rituals, stylized
verbal and motor behavior that is habitual or customary in a particular social
environment. Such rituals created or perpetuated ethnic stereotypes. Some
were linked to existing stereotypes of ethnic minorities in the the countries
giving the fairs. In the United States, for example, the stereotypes of Africans from Africa fed into or sometimes took their reference from
stereotypes of African - Americans. Examples can be seen in caricatures that
appeared in the press at the time of the fairs. Such stereotypes served to
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
31
simplify and distance the peoples on display from their audiences and by
extension from the societies from which the performers came. This was
particularly the case in British and American fairs where visitors observed
people on display from behind barriers. It was less true in France where
visitors could mingle with the people on show.4
Colonial Pavilions
Nearly all the sponsoring nations of world's fairs were colonial powers:
Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and the United States, the latter showing
its overseas possessions acquired after the Spanish-American War as well
as the internally colonized Native Americans. Even countries that were
themselves colonies, such as Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, IndoChina and South Africa, exhibited their dependencies. Though all colonial
powers stressed the economic ad vantages to be gained from their colonies
by showing the raw materials and crafts they produced, along with what
the metropolitan powers concei ved to be their enlightened policies toward
their colonial dependents, there were significant national differences in the
ways imperial powers displayed their colonies.
The first world's fair in the Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and succeeding early world's fairs were housed in a single large building in which
there were sections for each colony. They were usually decorated in indigenous styles to attract attention and often displayed stuffed animals arid
models or miniature dioramas of native life. By the time of the Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, fairs could no longer be contained in
a single structure. There were buildings for each class of manufacture such
as machinery, food and agriculture, liberal arts, etc. These too often had
colonial sections displaying appropriate products. The multiplication of
buildings led to the growth of national and state pavilions, and by the Paris
fair of 1889 to separate colonial pavilions. Like the colonial displays in
earlier fairs, they were designed and managed by Westerners. Colonial
pavilions soon took on vernacular architectural styles-an Indian palace
in the Mughal style or a West African mud fort. A single architectural
4 Pride of place for the theatrical metaphor belongs to Shakespeare's As You Like It ("All
the world's a stage .... "), but the metaphor has become well established as role theory in
anthropology and sociology notably by the writings of Erving Goffman, The Presentation of
Selfin Everyday Life (New York; Doubleday, 1959); Encounters (Indianapolis; Bobbs Merrill,
1961); Interaction Ritual (New York: Doubleday, 1967); Stategic Interaction (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). There is an extensive anthropologicialliterature on
ritual; see Edmund R. Leach, "Ritual," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New
York: Macmillan, 1968). The definition used here derives from Meyer Fortes, "Religious Premises
and Logical Technique in Divinatory Ritual," Philosophical Transactionsof the Royal Society
of London Series B, no. 772, vol. 251 (1966): 409.
32
33
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
representation stood for all the cultures that might be found within a single
colony. It symbolized the colony as a whole and can be seen as a symbolic
precursor to the growth of nationalism within colonies, although this was
clearly not the intention of the colonizers. Such buildings became ritualized
settings, invented traditions, which continued to represent these countries
in post-independence world's fairs. 5
PHOTO 2.1
The idols at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Christian images are absent. (From
L'Exposition Universelle de 1867111ustree, ed. F. Ducuing. Paris, 1867)
Displays of Objects
5 On differences in display in Britain, France and the United States see Greenhalgh,
Ephemeral Vistas, 82-142, and Burton Benedict, "International Exhibitions and National
Identity," Anthropology Today 7 (1991): 5-9.
6 BarbaraM. Benedict, "The 'Curious Attitude' in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Observing
and Owning," Eighteenth Century, 14 (1990): 75. On the use of Objects to assert colonial power
with special reference to Fiji, see Nicholas Thomas, "Material Culture and Colonial Power:
Ethnological Collecting and the Establishment of Colonial Rule in Fiji," Man 24 (1989). James
Clifford has written on the notions of coUecting cultures as appropriation in his 'Objects and
Selves---;An Afterword,' in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture,
ed. George Stocking, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 236-46, later expanded
in his Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography. Literature. and Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21S-Sl. AdrienneL. Kaeppler points to
the use of displayed objects to create timeless cultural others in her "Museums of the World:
Stages for the Study of Ethnohistory" in Museum Studies in Material Culture, ed. Susan M.
Pearce, (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), 83-96. Sally Price in Primitive Art in
Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) examines the consequences of
the transfer of cultural objects from their indigenous surroundings into museums. Many of the
essays in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Ivan Karp and
Steven D. Lavine, cds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) critically
examine the politics of museum display.
\"
34
35
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
Amusement Zones
PHOTO 2.2
Chang, the Chinese Giant, with his wife and a Chinese dwarf at the 1867
Paris Exposition. Chang was later exhibited in the U.S. by P.T. Barnum.
(From L'Exposition Universelle de 1867 Illustree ed. F. Ducuing. Paris,
1867)
People on Show
An imperfect survey of fifty-seven international and colonial exhibitions
reveals that living peoples from sixty-seven colonies or parts of colonies
were exhibited between 1867 and 1986. During this same period living
people from sixteen independent nations or parts of nations were also shown
(see Appendix).
7 For Chang, see Fr. Ducuing, ed., L'Exposition Universellede 186711Iustree, vol. 1 (Paris,
1867): 350-52; Bogdan, Freak Show, 99; and Robert L. Ripley, Ripley's Believe It or Not (New
York: Garden City, 1934), 199.
36
37
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
exhibited ethnic group. From the time of the "Hottentot Venus," first exhibited in London in 1810 to the dozens of displays of African Pygmies
throughout the nineteenth century, Africans were portrayed as sub-human
freaks, missing links between man and animal and the epitome of primitiveness. Both genetic physiological differences, such as the small stature
of pygmies and Bushmen, and induced physiological features, such as the
lip plates worn by so called Ubangi women, were exploited on the amusement zone. A sideshow at the New York world's fair in 1939 advertised:
... pygmies from Batwa, Central Africa (the smallest human beings known);
genuine Duckbill Ubangis from Shari country, French Equatorial Africa,
headhunters from Congo and Masambo .... "9 As more Africans were shown
in colonial exhibits at world's fairs, and as colonial powers distinguished
peoples from their various colonies from each other and from the
inhabitants of colonies of other powers, the undifferentiated, freakish
stereotype Was modified.
When colonial boundaries were drawn in Africa, they often ran through
traditional cultural areas, so that a particular tribe might be partitioned
among various colonial masters. Since the British, French, Belgian, Spanish
and Portuguese had different colonial practices, distinctions based on the
colonizing power rather than on indigenous differences in custom grew up,
including colonial mandates that determined which European language
Africans had to learn. When independence came, the boundaries of new
nations were not based on traditional tribal or cultural areas but on colonial
boundaries. Continuing wars and skirmishes show just how fragile is this
arrangement. World's fair exhibits sometimes reflected traditional cultural
differences among the peoples shown, and sometimes differences based on
the culture of the occupying power.
Dabomeans
The Dahomeans of French West Africa were one of the most popular
exhibits at world's fairs. [SEE PHOTO 2.3] Horror stories about the
savagery of the Kingdom of Dahomey had circulated in Europe in the nineteenth century. Two thousand virgins were reputedly sacrificed on the death
of a king and there was a lake of blood big enough in which to paddle a
canoe. Dahomean women were described as Amazon warriors. Sir Richard
Burton visited the kingdom in 1863 and saw 2,500 female soldiers who were
Africans
Africans were subject to the most prevalent negative stereotyping of any
9 On the Hottentot Venus, see B. Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus; Africa: Revista
trimestrale di studi e documentiazionne deU'Isttituto Italo-Africano Anno XL, 1985. On African
Bushman and Pygmies see Bogdan, Freak Show, 187ff. For displays of Africans in the amusement zone in New York 1939 and Chicago 1933 see the Official Guide Book of the New York
World's Fair (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939), 65, and Bogdan, Freak Show, 195-97.
38
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
BURTON BENEDICT
PHOTO 2.3
Dahomeans at the 1894 Midwinter Fair in San Francisco linking the
stereotypes of dark pigmentation, nakedness and savagery. (From Sunset
City, n.d.)
39
10 See Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1967), 211ff.
11 Chiarivari. l'Exposition Comigue. 7 Juin, 1900: 4-5.
12 Puck 1893, No.6: 72; "Quondam", The Adventures or Uncle Jeremiah and Family at
the Great Fair (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1893),209; Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book or the Fair
(Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), ii, 878.
40
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
PHOTO 2.4
Cartoon of a Dahomean at the 1900 Paris Exposition. "How much for the
purse?" the Frenchwoman asks. "Two louis, but consider that it was made
from my sister's skin!" (From L'Exposition Comique, 13 Sept. 1900)
'>':"\11
41
The Senegalese
In contrast to the Dahomeans the Senegalese were not presented as bloodthirsty savages, but as people whose domestic manners, arts and crafts were
worthy of interest. Senegal had been under French influence since the
seventeenth century, and was shown in virtually every French fair and, as
a concession, in fairs in the United States, England, Scotland and Belgium.
The Senegalese village at the Paris fair of 1889 was surrounded by a fortified wall and contained a mosque, a market, a chief's house and a market
garden. The inhabitants included a weaver, a maker of silver filigree, and
men and women carrying out ordinary domestic tasks. At the 1908 Scottish
National Exhibition in Edinburgh, postcards of the exhibit showed warriors,
a blacksmith, a carpenter and his family, a chief, dancers, jewelers, musicians, a tailor with a sewing machine, a weaver at her loom and wrestlers.
There were also comic postcards showing a kilted Scotsman doing the highland fling with a Senegalese "medicine man" and an old maid being pursued
by an African carrying an ethnographically incongruous Zulu shield.
In some fairs Africans were lumped together in a single exhibit even
though they were often distinguished by tribal name. The 1911 Scottish
International Exhibition in Glasgow had a concession called "West African
Colonies" with 100 Africans from Dahomey, the French Congo, French
Equatorial Africa and the Sudan. There was a similar exhibit at Buffalo in
1901. At other fairs separate exhibits distinguished one African people from
another. At the Paris fairs of 1889 and 1900, for example, there were
separate exhibits of Senegalese and Dahomeans. Visitors could observe the
differences.
Bantus
Xosas and Zulus were exhibited in shows in London at the time of the Great
Exhibition of 1851 where they were described as "Kaffirs", a name deriving
from the Arabic word for infidel and applied to South African Bantus of
several tribes. Zulus in particular gained western attention as fierce African
warriors as a result of the Zulu-British and Anglo-Boer wars of the 1870s
and 1880s. In carnival and circus jargon in the United States the word
"Zulu" became synonymous with African.
A spectacle on the Boer war and "Savage South Africa," presented at
the Greater Britain Exhibition in London in 1899, was brought to the St.
Louis world's fair in 1904 where it met with considerable success. In
addition to simulated battles between Britons and Boers there were sixty
Africans from various Bantu tribes "exhibited here in Kraal and native
huts .... All natives will appear in their native costumes, exactly as worn by
them in Darkest Africa" (Anglo-Boer War Official Program). A different
image of Bantus was shown in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London
42
BURTON BENEDICT
in 1886 and in later exhibitions, where they were shown as useful workers
washing diamonds in the South African mines. 13
13 Frank E. Gillis, The South African Boer War Exhibition: The Greatest and Most
Realistic Military Spectacle known in the History of the World (St. Louis, 1904), 17. On
diamond washing see Frank Cundall, ed., Reminiscenses of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition
(London: William Clowes & Sons, 1886), 86-89.
14 Fergus Clunie, Fijian Weapons and Warfare (Suva: Fiji Museum, 1977); Bogdan, Freak
Show, 181ff.
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
43
darker nor different in tone as one of our maidens might get from a summer's yachting
trip along our coast. 1S
Thus not even her pigmentation is held against her. The South Sea Islands
Village shown at this fair consisted of four Samoan houses contai.ning people
from Samoa, Fiji, Rotuma, and Wallis Islands. In post-independence fairs
the culture of each new Pacific nation was distinguished. Polynesian lures
were held out to tourists, particularly in the United States where elaborate
Hawaiian concessions formed part of nearly every fair. The French did the
same with Tahiti, though less extensively.
Arctic Peoples
IS Julian Hawthorne, Humors of the Fair (Chicago: E.A. Weeks, 1893), 168-69.
45
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
PHOTO 2.5
Pueblo Indian dwelling at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. Note the inappropriate feather bonnet, not worn by these tribes, but a stereotype of the
Indian. (From D.R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 St. Louis.
St. Louis, 1913)
44
~.
Native Americans
I:
From the European discovery of the new world, American Indians exercised
a fascination on Europeans and successively elicited antagonism, paternalism
and guilt in Euro-Americans. These attitudes were manifested in the displays of Native Americans at world's fairs. Indians have a long history of
exhibition in Britain where, as J.C.H. King has pointed out, two North
American Indian stereotypes succeeded each other. The first was the
Woodland Indian of Eastern America with a roach headdress, shaven head
and painted body; the second was the feather- bonneted Indian of the Plains.
Impetus was given to this latter stereotype by the wild west show. Buffalo
Bill and his troop took London by storm at the American Exhibition of
1887, and he repeated his triumphs on the Continent. Although wild west
shows were featured at virtually every American world's fair from 1892
onwards, there were other exhibits that differentiated Native Americans
by tribe by showing them in different settings such as wigwams (Chicago
1892) and reconstructions of terraced pue blo villages (San Francisco 1915),
as well as in distinctive performances. Fourteen different tribes were
distinguished at the St Louis fair of 1904. [SEE PHOTO 2.5] Despite the
distinctions made among Indian tribes, Native Americans were presented
as uniformly primitive whose best hope lay in American government efforts _
to "ci vilize" them and assimilate to the dominant Euro-American culture. 17
...
;f.
ill
16 Altick, Shows, 45; Boswell's Life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1953),
537; J .S.Ingram, The Centennial Exposition Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia: Hubbard
Brothers, 1876), 151; Official Catalogue and Guide Book to the Pan-American Exposition
(Buffalo: CharlesAhrhart, 1901),42. For a discussionoftheEskimostereotypeseeJ.C.H. King,
Living Artic: Report and Catalogue (London: British Museum, 1989), 21.
-~
.........- - '
~.'.~'.:
,"
' .l
.,-
I II,.
..
'~
~tl.-3
,,.........--'
Frontier 1820-1920, cd. William H. Truettner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991). For Buffalo Bill and the American Exhibition, see Burton Benedict, "The American
Exhibition of 1887: How Buffalo Bitt Captured London," World's Fair 5, no.2 (1985) and Charle&
Lowe, Four National Exhibitions in London and their Organizer (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1892). Discussions of the displays of Native Americans at world's fairs emphasizing their
explOitative and derogatory aspects can be found in Robert Rydell, "The Culture of Imperial
Abundance: World's Fairs in the Making of American Culture" in Consuming Visions:
Accumulation and the Display of Goods in America 1880-1920, ed. S.J. Bronner (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1985) and Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 82-112.
17 For Indian stereotypes in Britain, see J.C.H. King, "A Century of Indian Shows:
Canadian and United States Exhibitions in London 1825-1925," Native American Studies 5
(1991): 35-42. For the role art played in creating Indian stereotypes in America see Julie
Schimmel, "Inventing 'the Indian'" in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the
I
I
46
47
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
PHOTO 2.6
Igorots eating dog under the eyes of visitors at the 1904 St. Louis
Exposition. (From J.W. Hanson, The Official History of the Fair: St. Louis
1904. Chicago, 1904)
Southeast Asians
Four groups of Southeast Asians were exhibited at world's fairs by the
nations which had conquered and colonized them: the inhabitants of the
Philippine islands were shown principally at American fairs; Javanese and
Balinese were featured in exhibits from the Netherlands; the people of the
various states of Indo- China were to be found chiefly in French fairs; and
the inhabitants of Burma and what is now Malaysia appeared at British fairs.
At post-independence fairs the successor states of these colonies have been
trying to present images of national unity of their various peoples rather
than to differentiate them.
The American conquest of the Philippines in 1898 was soon reflected
in world's fair exhibits. Filipinos appeared at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha late in 1898 and in Buffalo in 1901. But it was in the st.
Louis fair of 1904 that the more enduring Philippine stereotypes were
created. The Philippine exhibit, which extended over forty-seven acres,
was advertised as including 1,200 people from forty tribes, six villages,
70,000 exhibits, 130 buildings and 725 native soldiers. The people on show
were presented in a social Darwinian context with "the least civilized in the
Negritos and Igorots, the semi-civilized in the Bogobos and Moros and the
civilized and cultured in the Vasayans as well as in the constabulary and
scout organizations." It was the scantily clad, dog-eating Igorots who
attracted the most attention. [SEE PHOTO 2.6] They soon became a sideshow appearing on the midway in Portland in 1905, in Seattle in 1909, in'
New York in 1939, again in Seattle in 1962, and once more in New York
in 1964. The Igorots have all but disappeared from post-independence
exhibits from the Philippines where the emphasis has been on a unified
national and modernizing culture.
In contrast to the rather savage image of the Igorots, the Javanese were
seen as small, primitive and somewhat incomprehensible innocents. The
Javanese village at the 1893 Chicago exposition consisted of some forty-six
buildings made mostly of bamboo and surrounded by a bamboo fence. This
led one observer to see the Javanese as living in baskets. The dancers
reminded him of "a new and beautiful insect in human form." Javanese
~~"'Iii~I~;l':"'_
j,"
"",""
48
49
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
dance and drama became an exposition ritual which represented independent Indonesia in post-World War II fairs. With their many cultural
groups the Indonesians have placed even greater emphasis on a national
culture than the Fili pinos. 18
French Indo-China comprised the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and
Cambodia, the colony of Cochin China and part of Laos. In French fairs,
although there were pavilions showing the products of Indo-China as a
whole each protectorate or colony was also represented in a separate exhibit
in indigenous style, ranging from a Cochin - China theater to Annamese and
Tonkinese villages to the reproduction of the Cambodian temple of Ankor
Wat. Dancing and drama were prominent features in the presentation of
Cam bodians and other inhabitants ofIndo-China. These same sorts of performances became national representations of independent Cambodia, Laos
and Vietnam (made up of Cochin-China, Annam and Tonkin).
A Burmese temple was constructed by native craftsmen forthe British
Empire Exhibition of 1924. This setting and the dances which went with
it represented independent Burma in Osaka in 1970. Malays were presented
as craftsmen rather than artists. The independent nation of Malaysia absorbed the colonies of Sarawak and Sabbah on the island of Borneo, but was
separated from Singapore with its largely Chinese population. Each of these
two nations now stresses its own national culture.
South Asians
India featured in every British exhibition and in British exhibitions abroad.
Several images were projected. The first was the opulence of India, the
jewelled scimitars, the ivory throne, the'tissues woven with gold thread.
The second was the exotic religions, the pantheon of Hindu gods, the
image-encrusted temples, the Taj Mahal. The third was the backward state
of the masses and the strides they were making under British rule. Huge
collections of Indian artifacts were amassed in London for the exhibitions
of 1851 and 1862 and were transported to Paris for the exposition of 1878.
The collection of these objects in themselves demonstrated British dominance over India, as Breckenridge has noted. Lest there should be any doubt
about whose art was superior, the author of the Handbook to the British
Indian Section of the 1878 Paris exposition states: "... it is impossible to rank
the decorative art of India, which is a crystallized tradition, although perfect
in form, with the ever-living progressive arts of Europe, wherein the inventive and creative genius of the true poet, acting on his own spontaneous
inspirations, asserts itself and which constitute the Fine Arts .... " Indi-
18 David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase
Exposition Company, 1913),565; Hawthorne, Humors of the Fair, 178.
51
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPREsENTATION
In the popular culture of the west, the "mysterious orient" image clung to
both Far Eastern nations and was exploited by both western and oriental
entrepreneurs in the amusement zone with Chinese and Japanese villages,
souvenir stands, restaurants and tea gardens. These features have persisted
in post-World War II fairs, though both nations now stress their technological achievements as well as their ancient cultures.
Japan presented its own colonies, Formosa, Korea and the internally
colonized Ainu, in the st. Louis fair of 1904 and the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 in London. The Ainu display followed the established world's
fair tradition with a village of people in native costume, a blacksmith, and
such ,entertainments as fencing, stilt-walking and a performance of the
"Feast of the Bear," a traditional Ainu ceremony that involved the ritual
killing of a bear.
PHOTO 2.7
National stereotypes of fair visitors at the 1900 Paris Exposition. (From
L'Exposition Comique, 3 May 1900)
50
'
Punch's Almanack for 1851 (London: Punch, 1851); Punch, June 25, 1924 (London,
1924): 701.
5~
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
minorities, especially Jews, Blacks and the Irish.21 Blacks are seen as
stupid. A two-page color cartoon shows "Darkies' Day at the Fair," a
lampoon on "Jubilee" or "Colored Peoples" day that was celebrated at the
fair. The cartoon depicts a long procession of blacks, both African and
American, thus amalgamating the two stereotypes. An accompanying set
of v.erses relates how they have been diverted from the the grand parade
by a discontented African-American who distracts them with watermelons
which they gobble up without paying him. (SEE PHOTO 2.81 Blacks were
not just ridiculed in cartoons. Antipathy toward them could take a more
literal form. They featured as targets in sideshows called "Soakum" at the
1915 San Francisco fair and "Ie negre a reau" at the 1925 Paris fair. For
a fee customers could throw balls at atarget. If they hit it, a black man was
dumped into the water. An article on the amusements at the 1925 fair commented "there is a society for the protection of animals, but there still isn't
one for ... blacks.,,22
PHOTO 2.8
Conflating Africans and African-Americans at the 1893 Chicago Exposition
Both are readily distracted from the fair by a wily African-Americat
offering watermelons. (From World's Fair Puck. Chicago, 1893)
52
~~
~~lt~:!~'
54
55
BURTON BENEDICT.
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
villages from both French and British colonies were side-show attractions.
The Singalese concession had jugglers, dancers, musicians and "beautiful
nautch-girls." The Indian arena had acrobats, tightrope walkers, wrestlers,
snake charmers and elephants that slid down a forty- foot incline into a lake.
The French Senegalese village featured over 100 natives in a stockade
engaged in "weird chants and rhythmic dancing." The whole was put on by
Imre Kiralfy, a Hungarian entrepreneur who mounted a series of similar
shows in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Ethnic shows were
often to be found in London in the exhibition halls at Earls Court and at
the nearby Olympia. It was not until the British Empire Exhibition of 192425 that colonial people were again integrated into the main fair. 23
In the United States the amalgamation began with the Chicago fair of
1893. Here, despite the efforts of anthropologists who were supposed to be
in charge of the ethnographic exhibits, most ethnic "villages" ended up on
the midway, where they remained in subsequent fairs until after World War
II.
25 John B. Judis, "Seville Postcard: Show and Tell," The New Republic 20 Jan. 1992, 15.
23 Franco-British Exhibition,London 1908: Official Guide (London, 1908),48,57.
24 Le Livre des Expositions Universelles 1851-1989 (Paris: Editions des Arts Decoratifs,
1983),137-38.
26 For the early history of the Imperial Institute, see William Golant, Image of Empire:
The Early History of the Imperial Institute 1887-1925 (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1984).
For its role in the propaganda of empire, see Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire,.121-46.
57
BURTON BENEDICT
RITUALS OF REPRESENTATION
French colonial empire, than because they are fine examples of the art deco
style of the 1930s.
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago was originally incorporated as the Columbian Museum of Chicago. A large endowment from
Marshall Field brought about a change in the museum's name to the Field
Columbian Museum. It also reflectedthe way in which American expositions and museums are financed, largely by private eJ;lterprise rather than
by government grants. The original museum housed historical relics,
memorial statuary, industrial arts 'and much material on the railways in
addition to departments on zoology, botany, ornithology, geology and
anthropology, all containing exhibits that had come mostly from the World's
Columbian Exposition. The building deteriorated to such an extent that it
was decided to construct an entirely new museum. Opened in 1921 as the
Field Museum of Natural History, its name preserved that of its family of
benefactors, but lost its connection with the World's Columbian Exposition.
Today it is a natural history museum with a large professional staff and an
extensive research program. 27 It contains some 14 million specimens. Like
many American museums it places Native American and other non-Western
cultures in the same building with geology, botany and zoology, not in a
building devoted to history or even ethnography. This reflects a nineteenthcentury evolutionary view which progresses from rocks to plants to animals
toearly hominids to non-western humans.
56
Conclusion
The displays of colonized peoples at world's fairs became rituals within a
ritual in which the settings, props, and acts performed became stereotyped
both on the midway and in government exhibits. But the meanings of these
rituals have undergone changes from the time they were introduced until
the present. War dances, marriage ceremonies, etc., were life cycle rituals
in their cultures of origin, but at world's fairs they were presented theatrically. For those performing them they lost their original meanings and
became make believe. For those observing them, they did not symbolize
war or marriage, so much as they symbolized a particular ethnicity, such
as Native American or Dahomeans. In this way new traditions were invented, drawing on elements in native cultures and adapting them to the
,27 The Field Museum was constructed in a new location in Grant Park near the University
of Chicago. The original building in Jackson Park, site of the World's Columbian Exposition
of 1893, was reconstructed in more permanent materials and is today the Museum of Science
and Industry, perhaps a more fitting memorial to an American world's fair than a natural
history museum. See Field Museum of Natural History, The 1979-80 Bienniel Report (Chicago,
1980). For an account of another museum which derived from the 1893 Chicago fair, the
Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, see Rydell, 'Culture of Imperilll Abundance,' 210ff.
58
BURTON BENEDICT
midway and the colonial exhibit. The same sorts of exhibits were repeated
in fair after fair so that the public came to associate certain rituals with
certain ethnic grouP!!. These meanings of cultural identity became so well
established that they carried over into post-independence world's fairs,
changing their meanings once again to become symbols of a new nationalism.
APPENDIX
FREQUENCY OF DISPLAYS OF COLONIZED PEOPLES
AT WORLD'S FAIRS
Number of Displays
Colonized People
Colonial Power
Native Americans
Indians from India
Algerians
Arctic Peoples
Senegalese
Tunesians
Congolese
Dahomeans
Javanese and Balinese
Africans (unspecified)
Annamites
(Vietnamese)
Filipinos
West African
(unspecified)
Hawaiians
Laotians
Malagasies
Sudanese
Burmese
Ceylonese (Sri Lankans)
Guadaloupe &
Martinique
Indian colonies
Igorots (philippines)
Kaffirs (Bantu)
Moroccans
Samoans
Somalis
Tahitians
Maoris (New Zealand)
Kanakas (New
Caledonia)
Ainu
British Guianians
(Guyana)
Cambodians
Cameroonians
13
U.S.
British or French
6
6
U.S.
French
French
French
British
British
French
5
5
5
5
French
U.S.
British
French
U.S.
French
French
British
French
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
3
3
Japan
British
2
2
French
French
2
2
13
9
9
9
8
7
7
7
6
6
4
4
4