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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human zoo | 4/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:06:34.331855+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== United Kingdom and France === Between 1 May and 31 October 1908, the Scottish National Exhibition, opened by one of Queen Victoria's grandsons, Prince Arthur of Connaught, was held in Saughton Park, Edinburgh. One of the attractions was the Senegal Village with its French-speaking Senegalese residents, on show demonstrating their way of life, art and craft while living in beehive huts. In 1909, the infrastructure of the 1908 Scottish National Exhibition in Edinburgh was used to construct the new Marine Gardens to the coast near Edinburgh at Portobello. A group of Somali men, women, and children were shipped over to be part of the exhibition, living in thatched huts. In 1924, the British Empire Exhibition had ethnographic displays across the Wembley Park site. Archival records indicate that 273 people from Britain’s colonies took part in this live ethnographic display. The official guide described the arrangement in strikingly clinical terms: "Every section of the empire is represented at Wembley. Many of the colonies have representatives of their local inhabitants at work in local conditions. The following list gives the name of the races and the approximate numbers actually living in the exhibition: Malays 20, Burmans 30, Hong Kong Chinese 160, West Africans 60, and Palestinians 3. In addition there are Indians, Singhalese, West Indians, and natives of British Guiana, who live outside the exhibition, but attend their respective pavilions daily." In 1925, a display at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, England, was entitled "Cannibals" and featured black Africans in supposedly native dress. In 1931, around 100 other New Caledonian Kanaks were put on display at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris.
=== Spain ===
Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, several exhibitions of non-Western people were held in Spain, following those held in other areas like the United Kingdom. The first of them was held in 1887 by the Ministry of Overseas, which exhibited a group of between forty and fifty Filipino people (then a Spanish territory) together with local products and plants in the Retiro Park in Madrid. For this exhibition, the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro was built, as well as its pond, which sought to recreate the "natural habitat" of the exposed people. At least four people died during the exhibition. In the following years, private companies organized similar exhibitions in Barcelona and Madrid, including of people who were not from Spanish territories, like the Ashanti or the Inuit. Until 1918, exhibitions of African people were held in the Ronda de la Universitat in Barcelona, which were later taken to other European countries. There are also records of another exhibition in the Ibero-American Exposition of Seville in 1929 and an additional one of Fang people from Equatorial Guinea in Valencia in 1942. Until 1997, the "Negro of Banyoles", an embalmed African man, was exhibited in the Darder Museum in Girona.
=== Japan ===
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan, like Western colonial powers, held a "human zoo" (人間動物園, ningen dōbutsuen) exhibiting people from various ethnic groups, including Ryukyuans, Ainu, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans, to show off the inferiority of other Asian peoples and the superiority of the Japanese.
=== United States (1930s) === By the 1930s, a new kind of human zoo appeared in America, nude shows masquerading as education. These included the Zoro Garden Nudist Colony at the Pacific International Exposition in San Diego, California (1935–36) and the Sally Rand Nude Ranch at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939). The former was supposedly a real nudist colony, which used hired performers instead of actual nudists. The latter featured women wearing cowboy hats, gunbelts and boots, and little else. The Golden Gate fair also featured a "Greenwich Village" show, described in the Official Guide Book as "Model artists' colony and revue theatre."
=== Ethnological expositions during Nazi Germany === As ethnogenic expositions were discontinued in Germany around 1931, there were many repercussions for the performers. Many of the people brought from their homelands to work in the exhibits had created families in Germany, and there were many children that had been born in Germany. Once they no longer worked in the zoos or for performance acts, these people were stuck living in Germany where they had no rights and were harshly discriminated against. During the rise of the Nazi party, the foreign actors in these stage shows were typically able to stay out of concentration camps because there were so few of them that the Nazis did not see them as a real threat. Although they were able to avoid concentration camps, they were not able to participate in German life as citizens of ethnically German origin could. The Hitler Youth did not allow children of foreign parents to participate, and adults were rejected as German soldiers. Many ended up working in war industry factories or foreign laborer camps. Hans Massaquoi in his 1999 book Destined to Witness observed a human zoo within the Hamburg zoo Tierpark Hagenbeck during the pre-Nazi Germany period, in which an African family was placed with the animals, openly laughed at, and otherwise treated rudely by the public crowd. And then they turned upon him, a fellow spectator, due to his mixed appearance. The date, according to his book, was approximately 1930.
== Exhibitions after 1940 ==