A Century of Elision? Ethnic Shows in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, 1879—1914

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, exhibitions of “exotic” human beings for the Western European public were promoted as displays of “savage” or “primitive” people from other continents. According to some scholars, the popularity of exhibiting otherness was based on a tradition of exhibiting human deviations—”human monsters” and “freak shows” in mobile circuses, at local fairs, carnivals, and so on (Blanchard et al. 2008, 6; Bõetsch 2011). Today, the various forms of live displays of non-European people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are called ethnic shows, ethnographic shows, living ethnological exhibitions, anthropo-zoological exhibitions, native villages, colonial exhibitions, and Vólkerschauen/Vólkerausstellungen, among other terms. The term “human zoo” ¹ is used today as a general term for this type of exhibition; however, its use is criticized for having a degrading tone that suggests discrimination and violence and for not taking into account the context of the events and indigenous agency (see e.g., Abbattista 2015; Sánchez-Gómez 2013; Thode-Arora in this volume).