Nineteenth-century European academics exhibited living non-Europeans as spectacle at scholarly congresses

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Said’s Orientalism and the framing in Mitchell’s own argument about Europeans rendering things up to be viewed; also echoes the spectacle-degradation dynamic central to ‘On Sacrifice’ and to the reader’s general interest in how display practices constitute power.
• SEED: Essay angle: the 19th-century scholarly congress as zoo — how ‘expertise’ was staged by literally parading its objects before audiences, and what modern conference or academic practice still does this.
• CANDY: Max Müller presenting ‘two rival Japanese priests’ like showmen exhibiting monkeys is a delightfully absurd and tweetable image of Victorian Orientalism.
• SHARE: Send to a friend who works on Victorian studies or display culture — the Berlin congress detail of producing a live Pandit as a ‘paper illustration’ is exactly their kind of period detail.