World fairs have been held since the 1790s, mainly in Europe on different occasions,
including the coronation of kings, and they expanded to the USA for celebrating
industrialization, modernity, and the achievements of the Western world. Some of the
fairs even included human exhibitions—mainly Africans and Aboriginals—to show the
“vision of empire” (see Rydell 1985). The 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World's Fair
presented a Negro Village (
Displaying humans at the fairs is an issue that has raised contemporary debate in anthropology in relation to post-colonialism. If you are an anthropologist expecting to read about a criticism for this shameful act of “human” display, which is also a part of the anthropological legacy of the order of the day, you will be disappointed, because these instances are only “reported” in the current book. Authors offer a different spin on the relation of anthropology to the Fair and they focus on how anthropology “became a catalytic event in the professionalization of American anthropology” (xix), since the relationship between anthropology and the Fair is considered to be a seminal moment in American anthropological praxis. This central argument is important because the Fair brought scholars together from diverse anthropological centers, such as Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, as anthropology claimed a space of its own.
The World's Columbian Exposition (also known as the World's Fair, Columbian Exposition, Chicago World's Fair, and Chicago Columbian Exposition), was held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492. The extravaganza took place between May and October 1893 on 683 acres, with more than 26 million visitors altogether. The Fair displayed new machinery, celebrating industrialization and the power of industrial trade (although the time in which Fair took place coincided with an economic depression) and it coincided with the first Anthropology Congress, drawing an astounding number of historians, statesmen, businessmen, and anthropologists to the 1893 fairgrounds.
Seven essays by four authors, Curtis M. Hinsley (historian), David R. Wilcox (anthropologist/museologist), Ira Jacknis (museologist), James Snead (anthropologist), mostly come from a 1999 symposium, adopting more of a “reporting” tone in order to show how things took place at the Fair in relation to anthropology’s professionalization. Additionally, this collection of texts includes documents labelled A-L and visual interludes prepared by Hinsley comprised of posters, newspaper clippings, caricatures, and portraits of the “exhibited peoples” (an Eskimo woman, an Apache Indian man, a Samoan man, a man representing the Turkish Jewry).
Through these seven essays the book underlines—many times—that “after 1893 the landscape of the embryonic field of American anthropology—ethnology, archeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and folklore—displayed new patterns of organization, discourse, standards of training, and levels of private support and public awareness” (xix). This point is made especially well in Hinsley’s essay, arguing that Frederic Ward Putnam, who approached anthropology from a purely educational perspective, considered the Fair an opportunity to cultivate anthropology's image as a legitimate scientific practice for a greater audience. This essay is followed by three documents, Documents A, B, and C: Boas's Ethnology at the Exposition; Putnams's address to the commercial club in Chicago; and a report on Putnam in the Chicago Herald.
Essay Two by Hinsley is about Daniel Garrison Brinton, who is considered to be among the founders of American Anthropology, was a member of the American Folklore Society, and also held the first chair in archaeology. Hinsley shows that although Brinton offered an air of authority to the meeting, his scientific views and methods showed an “armchair” approach, mostly relying on already written sources— perhaps because of his worsened health due to sunstroke. This essay is followed by an appendix that deals with the registered members at the Fair. Similarly, Essay Three, authored by Wilcox, is on Frank Hamilton Cushing, followed by Documents E, F, and G, after which a visual interlude is inserted.
In Essay Four, Ira Jacknis shows interest particularly in museum curation—including dioramas, sculptures, models, and photography, a combination of methods for featuring a spectacle. Essay Five, “Relic Hunters in the White City,” continues with the focus on material culture with a look at the relationship between museum professionals and “relic hunters.” Documents H and I support the arguments for designed landscape in Chicago as the White City and can be read together with Essay Six by Donald McVicker, which deals with Chicago as an emergent Midwestern urban center of the nineteenth century.
With all due respect to the contributors, a major critique can be advanced about the issue of power and representation in regards to anthropology’s collaborators: certainly anthropology is about power, and the Fair was also celebrating power, the 400th anniversary of colonialist power. This point remains in the background, and instead, the main narrative is that institutions represented in the Fair found common ground in Chicago, and that the personal and professional ties established set the course for a professional anthropology. However, issues of how the “government anthropology” practiced by the Washington men affected anthropology in later years, and the role of private benefactors in anthropology, remain unanswered.
A second important criticism relates to the treatment of certain scholars who are deemed more important than others: Powell of the Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Museum; Putnam of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge; and Brinton of the University Pennsylvania Academy of Natural Sciences are well presented. However, Boas and Newell, both of whom are important personages in the formation of folklore studies and anthropology in the United States, seem to be overshadowed. In a similar vein, one can discover figures such as Otis Mason in between the lines of various chapters, while the aforementioned trio gets chapters of their own. Boas offered a direct statement on Brinton’s 1895 letter (Document K); they had a strong agreement on the scope of anthropology, despite Brinton adhering to arm-chair and Boas to fieldwork.
The book could have benefited from a contribution of a folklorist, and could have focused on the life and work of Boas and perhaps other figures in this moment of “coalescence.” Furthermore, one is looking for a critical voice on the differences and borders of “anthropology,” “ethnology,” and “folklore” as they were practiced then.
Lastly, the authors do not inquire into the time-frame of the Fair. If the economic context was not a favorable one, due to a four-year nationwide economic depression, and since, after the Fair, workers at the Pullmann corporation set fire to the fairgrounds (xv), how can we focus on anthropology as the victor in this disciplinary landscape?
A timely conclusion, however, is the last essay by Wilcox, where he deepens his analysis to see what happened when the discipline “went national” after the Fair. This essay offers a useful overview of major changes in the discipline between 1893 and 1915 and summarizes the contributions of both well-known and lesser-known practitioners. This section summarizes points foregrounded in the earlier chapters and argues that the 1893 Fair ought to be seen as a “consensus point” for the field (414).
All in all, this book presents the reader with a detailed description of anthropology’s situation in the nineteenth-century United States. Arriving at the last chapter, we see that the Fair was a turning point for anthropology as it gained power in the public arena—especially through collaborating with businessmen and private benefactors, with the line between them seeming to be elastic and even porous. Today, hegemonic anthropologies that embody a history of power have been criticized through the notion of “world anthropologies,” a voice that reflects a critical stance in the history of anthropology (for example, Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). The relationship among disciplines, statesmen, and businessmen involved in many anthropological projects makes the reader wonder how anthropology might have developed differently in the United States, and how this history impacts the critical stance of anthropologies in other places or anthropologies practiced in other ways, and indeed, how this situation might affect domestic and foreign policies. These important questions are posed, but left unanswered in part, in the afterword.
Works Cited
Robert W. Rydell. 1985. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar. 2006. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. London: Bloomsbury.
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[Review length: 1398 words • Review posted on April 12, 2017]