ABSTRACT
As one of the founding departments for anthropology in the United States, the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian was an innovator in the use of mannequins as a means to bring culture, race, and technology to life for public audiences. By 1893 and the Chicago World’s Fair, the production of life groups formed a major endeavor of the museum. Revisiting these activities today provides insight into nineteenth-century frameworks for the reenactment of anthropological and Indigenous knowledge based in fieldwork, as well as interests in documenting the physical attributes of humans. This chapter examines the origins of these mannequins as well as considers the contemporary contexts they inhabit, including the practice of using specific individuals as the basis for museum mannequins, which then are used to represent human types only distinguishable by their race, gender, age, etc. Although these still inhabit museums around the world, the identities of the individuals used as models are not shared with visitors. Rather than seeing these displays only through historic lenses, this paper uses contemporary oral accounts to tell the stories of individuals memorialized via mannequins in the name of science.
