ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the presentation of human freaks in sites intended for animals or inanimate artifacts, a practice that confuses the established relationships among audiences, performers, and professionals, as well as the function of newly established institutional spaces. The subsequent emergence of an institutional culture in the United States had particularly wide-ranging consequences for the common practice of displaying people of color as freaks. As the scientific professional and the entertainer sought authority over the exhibition of ethnographic freaks, their divergent styles would increasingly come into conflict. While individuals have been exhibited as freaks for hundreds of years, the orchestrated spectacle of the freak show was born in the mid-nineteenth century of a conjunction between scientific investigation and mass entertainment. Alfred Kroeber’s defensiveness must be understood as the by-product of his efforts to separate the goals and methods of anthropological study from popular forms of ethnographic inquiry.
