“Show Meets Science:” How Hagenbeck’s “Human Zoos” Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".