human zoo

A group of Igorot people displayed during the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904 The Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, brought to the 1889 Paris World's Fair by Belgian whaling entrepreneur Maurice Maître

Human zoos, also known as ethnological expositions, was a colonial practice of publicly displaying people, usually in a so-called "natural" or "primitive" state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that depicted marginalized groups as "savage". They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits' inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple colonial exhibitions and at temporary exhibitions in animal zoos.