Susan Brownell , editor. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism.(Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology.)Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press . 2008 . Pp. xviii, 471. $55.00.

Abstract

The 1904 Olympic Games held in conjunction with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (LPE) in St. Louis would hardly be recognizable as “Olympic” by the standards of contemporary world citizens. Part world's fair and part freak show, the 1904 Olympics were as much about the display of “primitive” and “savage” bodies as they were about sports. The thirteen contributors to this volume not only illuminate this strange event but deconstruct two highly reified yet seemingly disparate modern institutions: the academic field of anthropology and the modern Olympics. Collectively, their work delves into the significance of the Olympic movement itself and its relation to the development of anthropology. The essays included in this book address a fascinating topic. The athletic contests that comprised these Olympics took place over a six-month time span, from May 14 to November 19, 1904. International competition in what contemporary observers might indentify as Olympic events took place only over one week, from August 29 to September 3. Of 687 athletes, 525 were Americans and 41 were Canadians. Even more noteworthy than this rather anemic international participation, however, were the exhibitions held in tandem with the games. Just as in Paris four years earlier, organizers staged these Olympics as part of a World's Fair (the LPE). Visitors to the fair flocked to its Department of Anthropology centerpiece, a display of “ethnological exhibits” featuring “primitive” or “savage” peoples arranged along a line that reflected the organizers' theories of cultural development.