Ethnographic Heterotopias. Some observations on the Spatial Aspects of the 19th-century Ethnographic Spectacles.
Abstract
Similarly as in other urban centers of the late-19th-century Europe, commercial spectacles of Non-European people, known as the "ethnographic exhibitions", formed a part of the entertainment industry in Bohemia and its capital Prague, already from the beginning of the 19th century. Most of the scholars, who worked on the "human zoo" in the last fifteen years, identified the role of these spectacles in the production of cultural and racial difference.
The representations of "the Other" as uncivilized, animal-like savage, were described as constitutive for the self-definition of the white European subject and for the legitimization of the colonial hierarchies. In my presentation, I will try to theorize the spatial aspects of these exhibitions.
Reaching back to my previous research about the freak show culture in Prague, I will discuss two cases of "exotic" exhibitions in Prague: firstly a group of the so-called "Samoyed" people from eastern Siberia, which performed in Prague in 1882, and secondly a much bigger group of the so called "Amazons from Dahomey" from western Africa, which appeared in Prague ten years later, in 1892.