Well, I've been a tourist in a lot of countries and what each country sells to
its tourists is the stereotype of what it is. In Ireland, there was this
peasants' dinner in a big barn with lamb stew and Irish potatoes and some sort
of typical Irish entertainment. In Beijing, there was a visit to a poor
person's hovel in one of the many back alleys.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:41 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Human Zoos in the Age of Trump
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
