Anthropology Goes to the Fair

World's fairs and industrial expositions constituted a phenomenally successful popular culture movement during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the newest technological innovations, each exposition showcased commercial and cultural exhibits, entertainment concessions, national and corporate displays of wealth, and indigenous peoples from the colonial empires of the host country. As scientists claiming specialized knowledge about indigenous peoples, especially American Indians, anthropologists used expositions to promote their quest for professional status and authority. Anthropology Goes to the Fair takes readers through the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to see how anthropology, as conceptualized by W J McGee, the first president of the American Anthropological Association, showcased itself through programs, static displays, and living exhibits for millions of people "to show each half of the world how the other half lives." More than two thousand Native peoples negotiated and portrayed their own agendas on this world stage. The reader will see how anthropology itself was changed in the process. Nancy J. Parezo is a professor of American Indian studies and anthropology at the University of Arizona and the curator of ethnology at the Arizona State Museum. She is the editor of Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest. Don D. Fowler is a professor of anthropology, emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930.

"...the Fair itself tells us far more about American culture than it does about "savage" ones...Their story...has it allure. It calls attention to the presumption of an age so confident of its future that it had no difficulty appraising its encounters with the other - the exotic, the savage, the primitive - in a self-affirming fashion. It was out of this assumption that academic anthropology was born, and...that presumption is not without effect today, if only through its negation, in our encounters with the other." Vincent Crapanzano, Times Literary Supplement, 8th August 2008

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