Human Displays: Sara Baartman, Minik Wallace, Ota Benga, and Ishi

The story of Sara Baartman is haunting and heart-breaking, and it's told well in Zola Maseko's The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: "The Hottentot Venus".

Sara Baartman (I pulled this photo from here,
but I do not know the original source. I suspect
that this was completed while she was being
 examined at the Natural History Museum in Paris.)

The outlines of her biography are spare: Baartman, a member of the Khoikhoi people of southern Africa was born in the late 18th century, displayed in London's Piccadilly Square as "The Hottentot Venus" in 1810, baptized in Manchester in 1811, sold to an animal trainer in Paris in 1814, examined (measured and drawn) by French scientists at the Natural History Museum  in 1815, dissected and dismembered in 1816 (after her death in 1815), displayed (in the form of skeleton and plaster cast) in museums, and buried in South Africa in 2004.

The Dutch called the Khoikhoi people "Hottentot," and Sara's name "Hottentot Venus" was meant to suggest hers was the ideal Khoikhoi woman's body. For Europeans, however, the ideal Khoikhoi woman's body was a spectacle and monstrosity with its large buttocks and purported animal-like genitalia. As Yvette Abrahams, a member of South Africa's Gender Equality Commission, said in the film, scientific racism was built on the body of Sara Baartman when the French scientists examined Baartman to determine if she was human.

I showed The Life and Times of Sara Baartman in both my visual anthropology course and my introduction to cultural anthropology course. (And I'll almost certainly show it in the museum anthropology course I am scheduled to teach in the spring.) Through the film you get a very good picture of the intersection of colonization, race, and natural science in the early 19th century, and that picture provides an excellent springboard for a discussion on the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline.

Baartman's story of exploitation is not very different from other so-called primitive peoples.

Consider the story of Minik Wallace.

Minik in New York 1897. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Minik was a member of the Inughuit people of northern Greenland and was brought to the United States when he was about seven years old along with his father Qisuk and four other Inughuit in 1897 by the American explorer Robert E. Perry. Although they were not subjected to the sort of freak show display as Baartman had been at London's Piccadilly, they were briefly displayed at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

The AMNH served as their custodian, and upon the death of four of the Inughuit (including Minik's father) from tuberculosis soon after their arrival in the US, Minik was adopted by curator William Wallace. A burial was staged for Minik's benefit, but Qisuk's body, like Sara Baartman's 100 years earlier, was considered too important as scientific material to be buried. Qisuk's body was "defleshed" so that the AMNH researchers could study his skeleton. The skeleton was then put on display and eventually Minik discovered the remains were those of his father. He sought to have the skeleton released so that it could be properly buried, but he was not successful.

Minik remained in New York until about 1910 when he returned to Greenland for about six years and attempted to be reintegrated into the Inughuit community. He returned to New York in 1916 and he died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic.

In the 1990s efforts, led by Kenn Harper, resulted in the AMNH's release of the skeletons, and they were returned to Greenland where they were buried.

There are also Ota Benga, the Mbuti man displayed at the Bronx Zoo in the early twentieth century, and Ishi, the last member of the Yahi whose brain was part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection.

Check out artist Fred Wilson's work titled "Ota Benga" here and also here.


References:

• Engstfeld, Axel. 2005. Minik: The Lost Eskimo. American Experience Series. Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation. 60 min.

• Green, Rayna. 1992. Ishi: The Last Yahi. American Experience Series. Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation. 57 min.

• Harper, Kenn. 2000. Give me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. New York: Simon and Schuster.

• Maseko, Zola. 1998. The Life and Times of Sara Baartman. Brooklyn: Icarus Films. 53 min.

• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004.  "Ishi's Brains, Ishi's Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide." In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Edited by Nancy Scheper Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. Oxford: Blackwell. 61–68.

• Starn, Orin. 2004.  Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian. New York: W.W. Norton.