You're right. But still, whether forced or bribed, these people
taking part in the Polynesian Cultural Center are not promoting their
various cultures, but instead they are presenting them as oddities.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
I've seen other such villages in other places throughout the world. However,
there is a difference between that kind of thing and the human zoos
described in the article. The people who acted out the parts of villagers in
that Hawaiian tourist attraction, were doing so because they chose to do so.
They were in their own country, and they were paid a salary. Now we can
certainly talk about the place of native Hawaiians in Hawaii, about US
colonialism, and about the whole social and economic structure of the
islands, but that is entirely different from being kidnapped and then
exhibited in a museum in a foreign country.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 10:50 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
In 1986 we decided it was time to have a honeymoon. Cathy and I had been
together 5 years, married for 4. We took two weeks and along with Cathy's
brother an wife, we headed for our first Hawaiian tour.
High on our lists of "things to do" was a visit to the Polynesian Cultural
Center. If this was not an expanded Zoo, then I am in need of having Zoo
defined for me. The tour took us through small replicas of the lives of the
various Natives around the Pacific Islands. We watched people going through
their daily routines, or demonstrating strange customs. This Center claims
to be the most popular attraction in Hawaii. Funded by the Mormon Church,
it is an interesting collection of cultures that the Mormon Missionaries
were busy extinguishing. By "Civilizing" these "primitive people, the
Church was profiting even as they were destroying. And we all looked on and
never lifted a hand. But then, we never saw ourselves as members of a
Conquering Horde. But that is exactly who we are.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
Associated Press
When Donald Trump recently accused "illegal immigrants" of wanting to
"pour into and infest our country," there was an immediate outcry.
After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of
dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that
needed to be eradicated.
Nobody, however, should have been surprised. The president has a long
history of excoriating people of color as animal-like. In 1989, for
instance, reacting to the rape of a white woman in New York's Central
Park, he took out full-page ads in four of the city's major papers (total
cost:
$85,000) calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and
decrying "roving bands of wild criminals roaming our streets." He was,
of course, referring to the five black and Latino youngsters accused
of that crime for which they were convicted - and, 10 years late,
exonerated when a serial rapist and murderer finally confessed.
Trump never apologized for his rush to judgment or his hate-filled
opinions, which eventually became the template for his attacks on
immigrants during the 2016 election campaign and for his presidency.
He has declared many times that some people aren't actually human
beings at all but animals, pointing, in particular, to MS-13 gang
members. At a rally in Tennessee at the end of May, he doubled down on
this sort of invective, goading a frenzied crowd to enthusiastically
shout that word - "Animals!" - back. In that way, he made those
present accomplices to his bigotry. Nor are his insults and racial
tirades mere rhetorical flourishes. They've had quite real
consequences. It's enough to look at the cages where undocumented
children separated from their families at or near the U.S.-Mexico
border have been held as if they were indeed animals - reporters and
others regularly described one of those detention areas as being like
a "zoo" or a "kennel" - not to mention their parents who are also
trapped behind wire barriers, even if arousing far less attention and
protest.
A History of Caged Humans
All the president's furious contemporary rants and rallies, along with
those cages and detainee centers, have certainly brought Nazism to
mind for some, but it might be more illuminating to think of them as
echoing an earlier moment in history when comparing dark-skinned
humans to animals would hardly have caused a stir. It would have been
considered part of normal discourse, in both Europe and the United
States.
Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions
of Europeans and Americans considered it perfectly natural to treat
certain members of our species quite literally as if they were beasts.
They were unfazed, so the historical record suggests, by the idea of
seeing such "animals," such oddities, displayed in literal zoo cages
at boisterous public events. It may now be hard to believe, but our
forebears once flocked in staggering numbers to "human zoos," where
thousands of natives kidnapped from Asia, Africa, and Latin America
were exposed to scrutiny, curiosity, and derision, as well as,
sometimes, undergoing scientific experimentation.
Today, such mindboggling violations of human rights have almost
entirely vanished from public memory. I had only vaguely heard of
human zoos myself, before I became obsessed with them when research
for my latest novel, Darwin's Ghosts, led me into the world of human
menageries. I discovered that the phenomenon had been launched in the most
modest of ways.
One hundred and seventy years ago - 1848, a year of revolutions across
the globe - a Hamburg fishmonger, Claus Hagenbeck, decided to charge
customers to take a peek at some Arctic seals swimming in a large tub
in the backyard of his house. Soon enough, that first timid
entrepreneurial step developed into a highly lucrative family business
exhibiting wild animals, while feeding growing demands for wondrous
beasts to populate circuses and fill the private collections of monarchs
and other wealthy individuals.
In the end, animals were not enough. By the early 1870s, in
conjunction with the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris and American
impresarios like P.T.
Barnum, the Hagenbeck family started dabbling in displaying "savages"
from the farthest corners of the planet. The first victims of this
desire to bring exemplars from the rest of humanity to viewers in the
West were Laplanders, displayed in a setting meant to look like one of
their villages.
(A similar urge gave birth to the dioramas that soon began to flourish
at museums of natural history.)
That first exhibition in Hamburg of "the little men and women" of
Lapland proved so sensational - tours were organized to Berlin,
Leipzig, and other German cities - that the desire to see more
"primitive" humans soon became insatiable. Scavengers who had
previously specialized in locating and bringing African and Asian
wildlife to Europe and the United States were now instructed to be on
the lookout for similarly exotic human wildlife. They should not be,
it was quickly stipulated, so monstrous as to disgust audiences, but
neither should they be so beautiful as to cease to be bizarre.
The Laplanders were followed by a multitude of indigenous inhabitants
of the planet forcibly removed from their habitats: Eskimos,
Cingalese, Kalmuks, Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Nubians from the
Upper Nile, aboriginal Australians, Zulu warriors, Mapuche Indians,
Andaman Islanders from the South Pacific, head-hunters from Borneo.
The list went on and on, as those human zoos spread from Germany to
France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the United States, all of
which - what a coincidence! - just happened to be the globe's imperial
powers of that era.
Representatives of ethnic groups from all over the planet soon became
an expectable feature of then-popular World's Fair pavilions. Besides
providing entertainment for the whole family - they might be thought
of as that moment's equivalents of reality TV shows - those
exhibitions were proclaimed "educational" experiences by the
enterprises cashing in on them. Such tableaus of "prehistoric" people
offered a way for affluent visitors to gawk at and be amazed by the
bizarre habits of the bizarre inhabitants of the faraway lands that
their countries were incorporating with great violence into
"civilization" via colonial dominion. In fact, that violence was such
that some of the native populations on display, like diverse groups of
Patagons from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Latin America,
were already then on the verge of becoming extinct. One of the draws
of seeing living specimens of those strange men, women, and children
was to do so before their last remnants, along with their languages
and their cultures, disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Even if you were among the millions of Americans and Europeans who
couldn't personally visit such folk displays, ethnic villages, and
human zoos, you could still inexpensively and vicariously experience those
exotic others.
The images of the captives - who, of course, had been photographed
without their consent - were commercialized on an industrial scale.
The postcards upon which their faces and bodies were flaunted soon
became an everyday feature of domestic life, one more way that the
human zoo was normalized, whitewashed, and sent into the home with
barely a thought about the horrors, the suffering being visited on
those captives or how their children, husbands, wives, mothers,
fathers, relatives, and friends, left behind, were dealing with the
trauma of having their loved ones torn from their midst.
Nor were such acts repudiated by the most illustrious members of those
"advanced" societies. Quite the opposite, many of the abductions had
been financed by scientific institutions eager to discover how such
specimens might fit into Darwin's theory of evolution. Their research,
in turn, was backed by government officials more than ready to show
their respect and support for scholars looking into the origins of
humanity. Were those Africans and South Americans entirely human or
did they constitute missing links in the great chain of beings that
became our species? Eminent naturalists and doctors debated just such
matters, gave lectures on them, wrote treatises about them, and (in
what then passed for scientific
experimentation) poked at or into the bodies of those who had made the
mistake of being born far from the so-called civilized world.
The Ota Bengas of Today
Today, of course, human zoos and the medical experiments on live human
beings that went with them are inconceivable. The consciousness of
humanity, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
adopted by the U.N.
70 years ago, has made such practices disgraceful and intolerable. Who
today could stomach the fate of Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo who
was housed with the primates at New York's Bronx Zoo in 1906 and
committed suicide a decade later when he realized that he would never
be able to return to his native land? Who among us would bring their
children to gape at "missing links" like Thai dwarfs, Amazonian
Indians, or Sudanese villagers as if they were freaks of nature, not
human beings?
Unfortunately, congratulations are not (yet) in order, given how often
the same racist impulses resurface today, and not only in the
president's intemperate diatribes equating humans and animals (none of
which have so far provoked indignation in most of his followers). A
similar dehumanization of strangers with darker faces and skins
appears to animate current anti-immigrant sentiments in many lands, a
desire to escape "infestation"
from abroad and maintain mythical versions of racial purity and
national identity. Are we really that removed from the spectators who
watched their fellow humans abused in zoo-like conditions a century or
so ago without blinking or being disturbed?
In retrospect, what's most sobering about the human zoos of an earlier
time is how oblivious those who participated in such degrading
spectacles were to the crimes being committed before their eyes. Many
of them would have judged themselves decent, enlightened citizens,
shining advocates of progress, science, and freedom. And yet, in
Berlin in 1882, the police had to be called in to quell a riot by
visitors to an exhibition of 11 Kaweshkar natives abducted from Tierra
del Fuego. Thousands of customers, having imbibed copious gallons of
beer, began to stone the hostages, demanding that they mate in public.
Or consider the fate of two female Kaweshkar whose sexual organs,
after they died in captivity, were carved from their dead bodies and
sent to be examined by a prominent German researcher interested in
discovering how such creatures might be distinct from European women.
So many decades later, it's easy enough to condemn such offenses. More
difficult and painful is to ask what injustices are happening now that
we take to be as normal as human zoos (or the disempowerment of women
and child
slavery) were just a few generations ago. Is it the thoughtless
annihilation of immeasurable species, the plundering of nature, the
loss of wisdom stored for millennia by ethnic groups that are fast
disappearing? Is it the punitive incarceration of millions, so many
lives wasted? Is it our incredibly counterproductive "war on drugs"
that unnecessarily ravages cities, nations, and lives? Or our
inability to rid ourselves of the plague of nuclear proliferation, the
brutality of widespread hunger, America's endless wars, the detention
centers for immigrants and their children in this country, the
spectacle of undocumented minors shut up in cages and crying for their
parents, or the overflowing refugee camps elsewhere in the world? And
what of so many children displaced in their war-torn lands or
incarcerated in poverty? Where is the indignation about them? Who
marches to have them released from their structural captivity? And who
even noticed the
10,000 children murdered or maimed in armed conflicts in 2017 alone,
deaths invisible to us if you didn't happen to catch a brief news item
quickly forgotten?
In reality, those human zoos of the not-so-distant past pose a
terrifying question for us: What everyday horrors of our world will
our descendants look back on with disgust in the future? How, they
will wonder, could their ancestors have been so blind as to condone
such transgressions against humaneness and humanity?
Ariel Dorfman / TomDispatch
