Etno-show Quando l’antropologia andò in scena, un’antropologia bella da vedere

• Main Author: Alberto Baldi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: CLUEB 2017-07-01
• Series: EtnoAntropologia
• Subjects: archeomedia, moving panorama, stereoscopy, diorama, universal expositions.
• Online Access: http://www.rivisteclueb.it/riviste/index.php/etnoantropologia/article/view/223

<p>The second half of the nineteenth century witness an anthropology that from the narrow scientific fields shifts to the forestage of exhibitions and universal expositions. It takes a more essentially<br />popular, pedagogical and often absolutely spectacular capacity and role, using archeomedia’s technological know-how, like peepshow, stereoscopy, magic lantern, panorama and moving panorama, diorama, stereorama and cinerama. On closer inspection, it is indeed a reciprocal exchange: these means of entertainment too, in turn willingly draw from ethnography to put on stage an exoticism which is more and more alluring, prurient, feral, and also revolting, but which does pay well at the box office. It is a variegated Otherness which turns up, sometimes near, some other three-dimensional and<br />tangible, in other words “alive”; it follows postures and is in relation with activities, situations and environments which instead hypostasize and strictly control it, thus reasserting the hegemony of a western perspective which depicts intriguing “postcards” of this otherness, and puts a price on it with the complicity of Anthropology; rather with a certain Anthropology which embellishes the world, changing it in a sort of ethno-show.</p>