ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on copies of actual people and the practices employed in producing and exhibiting these specific types of copies: The artefactualisation necessary in turning the living bodies into copies for museum representation. The copying of human bodies for research and display was thus integral to the practices of ethnographic museums. Mannequins are not ethnographic objects collected in faraway lands but are rather designed and produced as exhibition technologies to help show the bodies, clothes, practices and cultures of different peoples and to bring life and human likeness into exhibitions. Ethnographic mannequins were a significant presence in the South African museum (SAM), a museum of natural history. When dealing with ethnographic mannequins, it is important to address both the production and the display processes, since both have been characterised as acts of actual or symbolic violence or transgression. According to Leslie Witz, the mannequins at the SAM were taken to represent a racial type of ‘bushmen’.
