What was the Human zoos?

The Human zoos (also known as "ethnological expositions" or "Negro Villages") was publicly exhibits human in the 19th and 20th centuries, usually in a "natural" or "primitive" state. He was often highlighted differences between the Europeans Western culture and non-European peoples. Have been criticized as highly degrading and racist.

First Human Zoo

One of the first known zoos that of Moctezuma in Mexico, consisted not only a huge collection of animals, but were unusual people, for example, dwarfs, albinos, etc. During the Renaissance, The Medicis expand a large menagerie at the Vatican. In the 16th century, the cardinal had a collection of people from different races and exotic animals. It is reported that a host of "Barbarians" talking over twenty languages ​​and was also Tartars, Indians, Turks and Africans.

1870 +

Exhibitions of exotic populations became popular in several countries in the 1870's. Human zoos were found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, ​​London, Milan, New York and Warsaw with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors in each report. In Germany, Carl Hagenbeck, a marketer of wild living creature and future entrepreneur of many European zoos decided in 1874 to display Samoa as "purely natural" populations. In 1904, Apache, Igorots (the Philippines) and Ota Benga displayed and named as "savages" from World's Fair in St. Louis. In 1906, amateur anthropologist Madison Grant , head of the Zoological Society of New York, had put Ota Benga dwarfs and available to the Bronx Zoo in New York along with monkeys and other animals.

The HERITAGE

The concept of human zoo has not completely disappeared. A Congolese village appears in the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. An African village was opened in the garden Augsburg in Germany in July 2005. In August 2005, the London Zoo displays also people with fig leaves (although in this case, Participants were volunteers). In 2007, the garden was an Adelaide man's inner garden. In 2007 also, Pygmy presented at the Pan-African Music Festival where it was housed in a zoo in Brazzaville, Congo.

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