Relocating the “Human Zoo”: Exotic Displays, Metropolitan Identity, and Ethnographic Knowledge in Late Nineteenth-Century Budapest

Abstract

This article inquires into the meaning and valence of late nineteenth-century exotic displays in Budapest, a location without the colonial stakes that apparently determined the course of the “human zoo” in most Western European contexts. It explores the reporting on ethnic shows in the metropolitan press, points out stereotypical and more idiosyncratic representations, and examines these against the background of arising scientific discourses in anthropology and ethnography. While in some corners at least the ethnic shows were understood and promoted as potential instruments of engendering a cosmopolitan sense of “being-in-the-world” for a recently emancipated province of a continental empire, the responses do not appear to have satisfied such expectations.