Editor’s introduction

Abstract

The history of anthropology is a haunted one, built on its association with colonialism and colonial states, its participation in the exploitation of indigenous people and, of course, scientific racism. It is not, however, a unitary history. We celebrate anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead for their rejection of racism and support for progressive causes. At the same time, Boas was known for what would now be seen as highly unethical acts in the collection of human remains. The nineteenth century was, as Alex W. Barker reminds us, the great age of collection, from small cabinets of curiosities to the great museums that still exist to this day. Much of this collecting was done willy-nilly, according to the salvage mentality prevalent at the time. Anything and everything should be collected and catalogued, with some sense being made of it at a later date. To a certain degree that is indeed what happened: the amassed human remains provided a data set so large that many questions about human variation were answered and, ironically, the very concept of race—the premise upon which these remains were collected—was discredited. If all this happened behind the scenes, at the museum’s back door, what happened in the front was equally important to the history of the discipline. During the discipline’s “museum period,” such displays were the primary means of interpreting and communicating information about human biological and cultural variation to a larger public. If this was true of museums in general, it was especially true of World’s Fairs and similar exhibitions, such as the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago discussed here. These were intended to express a wide range of ideas about the American nation and its role in the world, the advances of technology and, of course, human variation. The role of indigenous peoples is central to this and deeply ambiguous. The use of indigenous families—from North America and elsewhere—as living displays raises concerns in our era that were not considered in the 1890s. The role of American Indians—living within the territory of the United States—was especially fraught. While Native Americans were, as Barker asserts, the glue that held American anthropology together in their guise as representatives of primitive societies, they also represented populations that constituted part of the modern American society being celebrated. One wonders if the mask often slipped and the illusion shattered.