FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE ANTROPOLOGICHESKIJ FORUMRUS | ENG
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Antropologicheskij forum, 2019, no. 43
Maria Leskinen Institute for Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences Abstract: The article analyzes the phenomenon of “human zoos” (or “ethnic shows” / “living exhibitions”) in Russian cities (St Petersburg, Moscow) in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This kind of demonstration of representatives of non-European “savage” peoples in their “natural conditions” was widespread in Europe at the time. “Living human exhibitions” of Russian inorodtsy (reindeer herders, indigenous non-Slavic peoples from of the Russian North) in the 1870s to 1910s were mentioned in several Soviet articles from the 1940s on pre-revolutionary history of the oldest Russian zoos, as well as in contemporary Russian studies on entertainment and leisure in the urban Russian landscape at the beginning of the 20th century. These shows are declared as being similar to the “negro villages” or to the Dahomean Amazon show in Western Europe. Notes of these cases, however, lacked details and verifiable information (such as exact dates or printed publications) of such events. At this (early) stage of the study, no information about such representations in zoos (as it was presented in historiography) has been discovered. There are no eyewitness references about “ethnic exhibitions” of inorodtsy, neither in the Russian literature of this time nor in memoirs. However, research has established that, during the 19th to 20th century, the inhabitants of the Russian capital could see Samoyeds, their reindeers and their chums on the Neva-river when the Samoyeds came to work during Sviatki or Maslenitsa holidays; for Moscow residents, such entertainment became popular only at the beginning of the 20th century, but it took place precisely in the zoo — as collected visual sources from 1907 and 1911 reflect. The phenomenon of “silence” about such ethnic entertainments is also a question for this research. Keywords: Russian Empire, human zoos, inorodtsy, Nenets, Saami, ethnocultural stereotypes. Acknowledgements: My work on the article was supported by a scholarship from the German Historical Institute in Moscow (Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau), 2019. To cite: Leskinen M., ‘“Chto my, Gagenbeki kakie, chto li”: lyudi v zoosadakh Rossiyskoy imperii’ [“Are We Some Kind of Hagenbecks?”: People in the Russian Empire’s Zoos], Antropologicheskij forum, 2019, no. 43, pp. 61–88. doi: 10.31250/1815-8870-2019-15-43-61-88 URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/043/leskinen.pdf |
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