“Show Meets Science:” How Hagenbeck’s “Human Zoos” Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation

This chapter attempts to explain the role of “human zoos” in the emergence of scientific ethnography and its display in museums by examining the case of the private portfolio of the first director of the Natural History Museum Vienna, Ferdinand von Hochstetter. This vast portfolio includes photographs of the first Völkerschauen (“peoples’ exhibitions”) by Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913). Some of the pictures of the Greenland Inuit appear to have been the templates for at least two sculptures of “native types” that the Austrian sculptor Viktor Tilgner used for his Inuit caryatids in the exhibition hall. This discovery sheds new light on the complex relation between “human zoos” and early ethnographic science. Keywords: Human Zoos, Hagenbeck, Inuit, NHM Vienna, Tilgner Introduction: Science in public, “human zoos” and in scientific Museums In the late-nineteenth-century Europe, the popularity of a specific kind of ephemeral exhibition, the so-called “human zoos” reached its zenith. In these shows, indigenous people were displayed in their costumes, re-enacting their customs alongside animals from their home countries. Like museums, they presented “foreign” artifacts and “cultural aliens,” albeit in a live theatrical context. As such, these shows filled a gap that museums were unable to: they presented the “other” in the flesh. The phenomenon of “human zoos” was extremely successful and spread rapidly across Europe, especially after Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) developed it into a thriving business model in his Thierpark (“zoo”), which opened in 1866. Ethnographic shows, Hagenbeck called them Völkerschauen (“peoples’ exhibitions”), like these became an integral part of world fairs, colonial exhibitions, and other ephemeral exhibitions. Over time, the character of these shows negatively transformed: they changed from presentations with a serious claim of authenticity, to attention-seeking circus spectacles. By demonstrating a seemingly natural polarity between European civilizations, with technological advancement and modernity on the one hand and primitivism on the other, they reinforced a sentiment of European superiority. Simultaneously, a wave of romanticization set in, in which indigenous people were perceived as being “purer” and uncorrupted by civilization and industrial culture. In his book, Carl Hagenbeck emphasized the innocence and authenticity of the people he hired and called them “natural men.”

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