The forgotten history of human zoos | Hacker News Reader

The forgotten history of human zoos

the-open-mind.com

60 pointsmercurial29 comments

I have a pet-peeve about articles that tries to paint a bad thing even worse.

This is bad enough as is. You do not need to exaggerate and call fences cages.

The Paris world fair is also a bit of a (dark) gray area. If you read the wikipedia article, it seems less clear that these are people who are kidnapped into a zoo and more like people hired to enact a stereotypic view of their culture.

Moreover, the 1931 exhibit was setup to show cultural diversity and compassion towards the colonies. It was obviously a marketing stunt, attempting to legitimize an illicit sovereignty, but it is not unfair to expect those participants to be treated better and not die within the year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Colonial_Exposition

The article also focuses heavily on white peoples explotation, but again wikipedia points to the oldest known human zoo from the 1500's in Mexico. Interesting stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo

Thanks for making those points. A lot of the articles on the linked site seem questionable (to put it very very mildly).

And yet we're still smug about the fact we're so 'enlightened'.

Meanwhile, this was happening not even 100 years ago.

Maybe a little historical perspective is needed next time we demonize others for what we consider overly-conservative values, in light of the fact that western society hasn't exactly been particularly progressive throughout the ages...

You only have to look at the present to see that we aren't properly enlightened yet. Look at the range of sexualities that are still criminalized: pedophilia, bestiality, incest. We make a show of being accepting of homosexuality, but it's a farce when we realize that we only accept it because it's been repeatedly promoted by bold members of that group willing to risk it all in an attempt to change society. People (in the UK at least) are still being imprisoned for having consensual sex with their adult relatives. It's still a common fear that pedophiles shouldn't be left alone with children in case they rape them. Much like the fear of homosexual men was 50-odd years ago (turns out not all gays are rapists after all). Farmers regularly rape animals for profit, but if they do it for pleasure, it's a crime.

Did you just compare racists with pedophiles?

Did you just call homosexual people, racists?

Not quite. I was trying to show that even today we're not very enlightened by comparing blacks with pedophiles. These are both groups of people who have been seen as "inferior" and "acceptable to abuse" simply for existing, rather than for causing harm.

pretty sure that isn't what you said.

Well that escalated quickly.

I was thinking more along the lines of not being too harsh on those with more 'traditional values'. Like our Muslim neighbours, or those who think women should stay at home, or maybe are uncomfortable with modern ideas of gender and sexuality.

Not sure I'd throw in paedophilia (since minors are unable to legally consent to sex with adults), or bestiality (animals definitely can't consent to that), or incest (if it results in a child it can have severe consequences for said child).

Regardless, while it's great that we now recognize people of other races are equal (at least nominally), we shouldn't be too smug when denouncing others who aren't as 'progressive' as we are (see all the propaganda regarding homosexuality in Russia - where it's actually legal; versus India where same sex relations are illegal).

>Not sure I'd throw in paedophilia (since minors are unable to legally consent to sex with adults), or bestiality (animals definitely can't consent to that), or incest (if it results in a child it can have severe consequences for said child).

I don't remember asking the cow if it wanted to be made into a burger.

Also, we don't ban those with genetic disorders from having children. We educate them and try to help them, but we ban them.

As for the first one, it is a harder topic to deal with, but look at the things we ban that don't hurt children that could potentially serve as a substitute.

Traditional conservative values are relative. Western women are forbidden from going topless in public even though men are allowed. They also can't show their pubic hair but can show their head hair. The differences seem kind of arbitrary.

Pedophilia as a sexuality is harmless. It's only a desire. We shouldn't assume all pedophiles have had sex with children. Probably the vast majority haven't.

Consent isn't so meaningful when it comes to animals. Females of some species don't consent - they're forced to have sex by the males of their own species (walrusses I think). So clearly consent isn't actually something we require from animals. As Lawton said, we do far worse things than rape. We torture dogs by locking them in solitary confinement for most of their life. We of course kill animals just for fun. It's hard to imagine that rape (assuming you can't measure consent somehow) can be worse than psychological torture and murder combined.

Harm to children isn't why we don't like incest, otherwise we'd be banning people with even minor genetic problems from having children (heart disease risk, low IQ, etc). We don't like incest because it's a weird sexual deviancy which repulses us just like homosexuality does to many people.

If you want to look at a thing we wrongly criminalize that won't immediately turn the majority of the population against you, consider drugs and how we lock some people up for decades for possessing a plant.

Both examples are systemic of a couple of sociological concepts that continue to be very popular in the American sociopolitical venue.

1) Moral Entrepreneurs - People (like politicians) that build their reputations by clearly defining an enemy (i.e. drugs, sexual "deviants", etc) and then work against the defined problem as their heroic stance for good in the face of the Evil that has been created. And their primary tool:

2) Moral Panics - Created by those who fear or stand to benefit from what they consider deviant or wrong, these are campaigns to alert and threaten the public with an apparently deviant behavior and popularize sentiment against those who practice it.

>a thing we wrongly criminalize that won't immediately turn the majority of the population against you

20 years ago talking about drugs in a favorable light would have turned the majority of the population against you because the moral panic was still in effect. There are currently minors being charged with manufacturing and distributing child pornography for taking a picture of themselves and MMS'ing it to their girl/boyfriend and being labelled as pedophiles. In another 15 years it will probably be understood that sexual preferences do not necessarily dictate sexual abuse and that many people labeled as pedophiles have been wrongly labeled in largely the same way as the guy who was found to be in possession of less than a gram of weed while walking past a school and hit with charges as a drug dealer with intent to distribute to minors or the gay man charged with sodomy 50 years ago. It's all a matter of the time and context of issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

seeing "1931" in there is so depressing. I realise we've made progress since then, but that still isn't very far on a "cultural mentality" scale

I was convinced it was a typo before I looked it up. It's so horrendous what we did (and still do) to eachother.

Indeed - we live in a sanitized world thinking that civil rights happened with the civil war. I'm ashamed to even look at these pics.

Surely people know the civil rights movement, 50 years ago?

In school it's summarised as "Rosa Parks sat in a white person's bus spot, MLK was shot, and the Civil Rights Act was signed". Really no talk of the lynching beforehand (or anything else in the systematic oppression of blacks).

For the people who think of REM as Old Fogey Music, the Civil Rights Movement is a foreign to them as the roaring 20s liberation was to us.

I'd thought I'd just point to:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/10/us/map-of-73-y...

but along the way I also found:

"Researchers said they determined that 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950." (My emphasis)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/02/10...

Australia, 1967. Aborigines are finally recognized as persons and granted rights under the Constitution. Up until then, they were to be treated as 'native fauna' - i.e. animals.

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/ab...

It seems clear cut now when we grow up being told "everyone is equal", but that's because we have the luxury of seeing all moderns humans as a single species with no close living relatives. How would we classify Neanderthals if we found them alive today? How far removed from "our own race" do you have to go before something isn't a human? How about someone with a different number of chromosomes such as a Down's syndrome patient?

I think the real problem isn't classifying animals - aborigines really do have a different genetic history from every other race. It's that we somehow equate "not properly human" with "deserves to be abused". Until we can escape from that mentality, we're really no better than these zoo keepers. We've just moved the threshold a bit.

I've heard of the forced removal of children from their families but this timeline paints a really dark picture for me of Australia's history. Makes early 20th century Australia seems comparable if not worse than apartheid South Africa.

Its a dirty little secret, but Australia is still a very racist and intolerant place. Basically, Australia got away with its own "slow and steady" apartheid - a true travesty, to this day, and which still causes untold pain and suffering to a portion of its population. Alas, this is the price paid by generations for the luxury most Australians enjoy today. As an ex-pat, I hope to see things change, but I'm very much afraid that the more things get swept under the rug the more they stay the same.

They still exist.

Across the world we have many locations(Amazon and some islands) where we have 'quaint' tribes living in isolation, with people from the outside more or less forbidden from visiting them so the rest of the world can still have the wonder of real life tribes living amongst us.

The fact there is quite a movement(often amongst the left) to encourage tribal societies to stay technology backwards shows people still think it's ok to keep others as entertainment.

I think the discussion on whether to bring these tribes into the 21st century or not is an interesting one.

Linking it to human zoos is just stupid. It's apples and oranges.

The emergence of modern zoological gardens is intimately tied to colonialism; given the prevailing mentality at the time (the world is a God given property to the white man), these horrors are sadly unsurprising. I really recommend the book "New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century" for an in depth history of zoos amd treatment of that colonialism connection, it's fascinating.

Much of this was terrible. Some of it was little different from Epcot Center - a cross-cultural experience arranged for mutual benefit.

Did I mistakenly go to Tumblr?

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