At scholarly congresses non-European scholars were treated as specimens, not peers

Evidence

As though they were still in Paris, they found themselves something of an exhibit. ‘Bona fide Orientalists’, wrote a European participant in the congress, ‘were stared at as in a Barnum’s all-world show: the good Scandinavian people seemed to think that it was a collection of Orientals, not of Orientalists.’ Some of the Orientalists themselves seemed to delight in the role of showmen. At an earlier congress, in Berlin, we are told that ‘the grotesque idea was started of producing natives of Oriental countries as illustrations of a paper: thus the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford produced a real live Indian Pandit, and made him go through the ritual of Brahmanical prayer and worship before a hilarious assembly … Professor Max Müller of Oxford produced two rival Japanese priests, who exhibited their gifts; it had the appearance of two showmen exhibiting their monkeys.’ … ‘I have heard nothing so unworthy of a sensible man’, complained an Oxford scholar, ‘as … the whistling howls emitted by an Arabic student of El-Azhar of Cairo. Such exhibitions at Congresses are mischievous and degrading.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 53 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Intellectual congresses concentrated elite influence and steered lower-grade scholars; Nineteenth-century European academics exhibited living non-Europeans as spectacle at scholarly congresses — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 53; European émigré scholars faced anti-foreign prejudice within American academia. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 263 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century European academics exhibited living non-Europeans as spectacle at scholarly congresses #corroborates (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 53