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In her essay “The Measure of America” for The New Yorker (March 8, 2004), the journalist and Columbia University Professor Dr. Claudia Roth Pierpont discusses the connection between the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and “How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism”. She referred to the German scholar Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, “staunch in the belief that America was politically an ideal country” (Roth Pierpont 2004: n.p.). Boas was concerned about the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, which he pursued in a lifetime of academic and field studies involving his students. The Chicago Exposition marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of America and was opened as the “White City” on the marshy lands along Lake Michigan. What was deemed to be the achievements of the nation, displays of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address and replicas of the Liberty Bell, could be admired. Where criticism of the young German anthropologist came into play was the exhibit of human characters, called The American Experience:

… [an] extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred ‘living exhibits’—whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: ‘broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,’ a contemporary magazine expounded, ‘bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men’ (ibid.).

“The American experience” was a popular theme during the whole 19th century, epitomized by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (founded 1883 by Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody), which displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. The show was tremendously popular and also very successful in Europe (invitation by the Pope twice) but remained controversial. It was, for instance, not admitted to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and Cody had to set up an independent exhibition near the Fair.

In the days leading up to the Fair’s opening, Franz Boas in his turn organized setting up houses in which a group of Northwest Coast Indians were to live temporarily, near a location on a small lake marked “Anthropology”. Boas had spent the preceding years researching the lives of these Indians—motivated by the Indian exhibits and artefacts of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This location contained Native American artefacts like masks and decorated tools which Boas had collected during his research and which he hoped would attract the admiration of visitors through their wealth of imagination.

The Indians on the Fair were asked to perform dances and other rituals to demonstrate examples of their culture and had been assured that they would be paid the respect they were owed, although that had not been their experience in the US of the 19th century. Their lives were, in reality, dominated by the aftermath of the Indian Removals between 1830 and 1850 and the infamous “Trail of Tears”, on which more than 100,000 Native Americans and their black slaves were forcefully removed from their land by the US government and where thousands of their people died. This catastrophe had been justified in the name of the new field of Anthropology and seen as a result of the “natural racial order” proposing the right of white settlers to seize the natives’ land and the prevailing system of slavery (adapted from: Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

The issues of slavery and of using living exhibits as an excuse of anthropological “research” is also featuring as a predominant topic in Colson Whitehead’s recent novel The Underground Railroad, in which the African-American writer remeasures the atrocities of slavery in the US. In Whitehead’s novel Cora, a runaway slave from a particularly savage cotton plantation in ante-bellum Georgia (in the 1850s), is offered a job in the “Museum of Natural Wonders” (clearly reminiscent of the New York American Museum of Natural History). She serves as a living exhibit in three different theme rooms:

“Scenes from Darkest Africa”

“Life on the Slave Ship”

“Typical Day on the Plantation” (Whitehead 2016: 130/1).

Cora is suspicious of the accuracy of the presentations and wary of the visitors’ behavior in “disrespectful fashion” and “rude suggestions” (ibid.: 132). Neither is she too convinced that her “habitat” really “illuminate[s] the American experience” (ibid.: 138), because her life as a slave tells her otherwise (cf. ibid.: 137-140).

Back in the last century, the anthropologist Boas assigned his twenty-three-year old student Margaret Mead a study on adolescence which she accomplished as an interrogation of Samoan girls about their sex lives:

With an introduction by Boas and a cover showing a bare-breasted girl rushing to a tryst with her lover beneath tropical palms, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published [by Mead] in 1928, was both an aphrodisiac and a call to arms. … dwelling on her tales of teen-age girls choosing strings of lovers with lighthearted ease, Americans conspired in the fantasy of a society in which there was no adolescent angst, no unhappy marriage, no jealousy, no Oedipus complex, and no emotional suffering of any kind. The utopian aspects of Mead’s book were as gratefully seized on as the sex: if nurture could so conclusively trump nature, then we, too, could be anything we wished—sexually free, unneurotic, even happy—just by changing the cultural rules (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

Nature or nurture? Boas’ point of view supported Margaret Mead’s findings in that his data about immigrant children in the US had opened minds to possibilities that were not covered by the contemporary scientific claims of hereditary limitations. Thus, it might boil down to the question of heredity or culture?

In the twenties, people were discovering that they lived in a culture … Although Boas argued for the recognition of plural cultures, he suggested not that all human achievements were equal … but that the range of intelligence and virtue ran the gamut about equally in every group. Thus, each person can be judged only as an individual. The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives. It was nature versus nurture with the scales reset: against our sealed-off genes, there was our accumulation of collective knowledge; in place of inherited learning, there was the social transmission of that knowledge from generation to generation. “Culture” was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to create mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked. And then Margaret Mead came home and wrote a best-seller that turned American culture upside down (ibid.; my emphasis).