Trophying human ‘otherness’. From Christopher Columbus to contemporary ethno-ecology (fifteenth-twenty first centuries)

Abstract

Recent studies on human live ethno-exhibitions have concentrated on their nineteenth-twentieth centuries forms, considering them as a typical expression of Western capitalist, imperialist and racialist culture and using for them the definition of ‘human zoos’. This essay aims to put in a longer historical perspective the phenomena of live human ethno-exhibitions, suggesting, first, to connect them to the practice of abducting exotic humans at the epoch of the discovery of the New World, and, second, to underline their relationship with the ancient “Roman triumphal culture” and its public exhibition of stranger, exotic captives as preys and trophies on the same plane as booty of other kinds. At the same time, a continuity can be envisaged between early modern practices of ethno-exhibitions of exotic living humans and present-day episodes registered by news reporting which testify how the use of reifying human beings and making of them ‘trophies’ of ideological discourses of different sort – humanitarian, conservationist, ecological – has survived in many unexpected contexts even in the twenty first century and not only in the Western World.