Practicum
The Word
For Americans, and indeed much of the Western world, "exotic" is a term that conjures up images of far-off places and their treasures. This adjective has long history of being pinned to animals, food, cultural practices, and even women from countries outside of the white ethnosphere. These elements of foreign lands are often seen as something someone can have, rather than entities of their own right. What happens, and what does it say about ourselves when we use "exotic" to describe the other to ourselves and those around us?
A Brief History
"Exotic" has its roots in the Greek prefix "exo-", which indicates "outside". Around the late 16th century European words had been derived from this root to refer to things that came from outside one's own country. As time progressed, "exotic" came to refer more exclusively to striking and unusual things from outside of Europe.
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When Europeans began settling North America, its wildlife and native peoples also received a similar perspective. Case in point- there was a time where beavers were seen as highly valuable and exotic. Their unusual appearance compounded with the commercial value of their fur and the utility of their scent glands in perfume made them a fascination for the upper class.
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To the left is a Quagga, a now-extinct subspecies of zebra once common in European menageries. Their high mortality rate in these menageries was a contributing factor to their extinction. This occurred hand in hand with the rise of European Colonialism, which is discussed in more detail below.
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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Image Credit: The Quagga Project
Colonialism
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Image Credit: Look and Learn
In order to give the history of the peoples subjected to live in "human zoos", this website will not contain images taken of them. If you would like to learn more about human zoos, please visit the following articles and websites below, which dedicate the needed time and attention to this tragic part of world history.
As European powers expanded their power to other continents, mainly Africa and Asia, the riches of those places became highly desirable to the upper class. "Exotic" began to become a buzzword for lavish items that could act as status symbols. The more engaging, the better. Examples include dyes, art, and clothes. But humanity is most intrigued by the living and the breathing, and so that term expanded to include animals, and most disgustingly, other human beings. So began the commodification of living beings from far-off places in Western Culture.
To many the British Empire is notorious for its acquisition of art other artifacts from what were foreign cultures to them (a prime example of this being the mummified remains in the British Museum. This "looting" of foreign continents expanded to animals as well. The Tower of London Menagerie contained hundreds of animals over hundreds of years. It should be noted that a quite few stories from the days of the menagerie belong in the "What Could Go Wrong" section of this website. Elephants, baboons, leopards, and polar bears are just a few examples of the animals contained at the Tower of London Menagerie over its existence.
From the 1800s to the mid 1900s, "human zoos" were put on in Europe, North America, and even Japan. These "zoos" promoted ideas of exoticism- or perhaps better stated as otherness- to majority white audiences. Native groups from the Americas, Asia and especially Africa were forced to live outside and be gawked at for the sake of entertainment, whilst the people who promoted those zoos spread harmful stereotypes to support the idea that the West needed to civilize the rest of the world. Unsurprisingly, the word "exotic" was often used as a descriptor at these horrible displays.
The Modern Age
