The second half of the nineteenth century witness an anthropology that from the narrow scientific fields shifts to the forestage of exhibitions and universal expositions. It takes a more essentially popular, pedagogical and often absolutely spectacular capacity and role, using archeomedia’s technological know-how, like peepshow, stereoscopy, magic lantern, panorama and moving panorama, diorama, stereorama and cinerama. On closer inspection, it is indeed a reciprocal exchange: these means of entertainment too, in turn willingly draw from ethnography to put on stage an exoticism which is more and more alluring, prurient, feral, and also revolting, but which does pay well at the box office. It is a variegated Otherness which turns up, sometimes near, some other three-dimensional and tangible, in other words “alive”; it follows postures and is in relation with activities, situations and environments which instead hypostasize and strictly control it, thus reasserting the hegemony of a western perspective which depicts intriguing “postcards” of this otherness, and puts a price on it with the complicity of Anthropology; rather with a certain Anthropology which embellishes the world, changing it in a sort of ethno-show.

Etno-show. Quando l’antropologia andò in scena, un’antropologia bella da vedere / Baldi, Alberto. - In: ETNOANTROPOLOGIA. - ISSN 2284-0176. - 4:2(2016), pp. 37-82.

Etno-show. Quando l’antropologia andò in scena, un’antropologia bella da vedere

BALDI, ALBERTO
2016

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century witness an anthropology that from the narrow scientific fields shifts to the forestage of exhibitions and universal expositions. It takes a more essentially popular, pedagogical and often absolutely spectacular capacity and role, using archeomedia’s technological know-how, like peepshow, stereoscopy, magic lantern, panorama and moving panorama, diorama, stereorama and cinerama. On closer inspection, it is indeed a reciprocal exchange: these means of entertainment too, in turn willingly draw from ethnography to put on stage an exoticism which is more and more alluring, prurient, feral, and also revolting, but which does pay well at the box office. It is a variegated Otherness which turns up, sometimes near, some other three-dimensional and tangible, in other words “alive”; it follows postures and is in relation with activities, situations and environments which instead hypostasize and strictly control it, thus reasserting the hegemony of a western perspective which depicts intriguing “postcards” of this otherness, and puts a price on it with the complicity of Anthropology; rather with a certain Anthropology which embellishes the world, changing it in a sort of ethno-show.
2016
Etno-show. Quando l’antropologia andò in scena, un’antropologia bella da vedere / Baldi, Alberto. - In: ETNOANTROPOLOGIA. - ISSN 2284-0176. - 4:2(2016), pp. 37-82.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11588/680184
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