ABSTRACT
The Departments of Anthropology and Physical Culture conformed to the trend of physical taxonomy, which informed the St Louis Fairs underlying ideology. An Activital or culture type was studied in life and movement exhibits, or reconstructions of lifestyle and environment. The Indian School was a prime example. The Anthropological Games was not simply an offshoot of the Olympics. Rather, the results of both the Anthropological and Olympic Games was interpreted according to the prevailing racial myths of the time, and used to weave the American community into one great, racially stratified body. This notion of the body is important, as it presupposes a vision of race in its totality. The athletic result was more or less discredited, and the notion of their illegitimacy clashed with arguments for the intellectual incapacity of natives to adapt their physical abilities to a given task or to manage their efforts. The racialization of American politics appeared across a number of domains.
