“Show Meets Science:” How Hagenbeck’s “Human Zoos” Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation

Abstract

This chapter attempts to explain the role of “human zoos” in the emergence of scientific ethnography and its display in museums by examining the case of the private portfolio of the first director of the Natural History Museum Vienna, Ferdinand von Hochstetter. This vast portfolio includes photographs of the first Völkerschauen (“peoples’ exhibitions”) by Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913). Some of the pictures of the Greenland Inuit appear to have been the templates for at least two sculptures of “native types” that the Austrian sculptor Viktor Tilgner used for his Inuit caryatids in the exhibition hall. This discovery sheds new light on the complex relation between “human zoos” and early ethnographic science.