Konsum des Anderen. Schaustellungen »exotischer« Menschen in Wien

Abstract

Between 1870 and 1910 numerous groups of so called >exotic people<were presented to an interested Viennese public. In the very beginning these >exhibitions< were organized in the context of popular pleasure and therefore presented at fairgrounds such as Vienna's >Volksprater< or in vaudevilles and only later moved to locations which would also attract an educated bourgeois audience. Organizers like Carl Hagenbeck claimed that their shows had scientific credibility and marketed them as anthropological and ethnological events. At a first glance the public was offered the basic aspects of the European view of ethnicity (dancing, processions, music and cooking) whereas it was the >exotic< villages which proved particularly attractive to the spectators where they could observe the daily life of the >exotic< inhabitants. The author argues that the discussions concerning ,exotic people< were in fact discussions about the strange and the familiar within the visitors' own society. Discourses about the ,wild, and the ,exotic< were connected with anti-semitism, the conflicts between liberals and conservatives and other discourses concerning sexuality, gender and race.