Read an Excerpt

The Museum of Mankind


Spectacle is the origin of the world.
Tragedy stands before us, motionless and strangely
anachronistic. And so, in Chicago, at the World’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893 commemorating the
400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, a display of
relics on a stall in the central aisle included the desiccated
corpse of a newborn Indian baby. There were
twenty-one million visitors. They promenaded on the
wooden balconies of the Idaho Building, admired
the miracles of technology, like the gigantic chocolate
Venus de Milo at the entrance to the agricultural
pavilion, and then bought cones of sausages
for ten cents apiece. Huge numbers of buildings had
been erected, and the place resembled a gimcrack
St Petersburg, with its arches, its obelisks, its plaster
architecture borrowed from every age and every land.
The black-and-white photographs we have convey
the illusion of an extraordinary city, with palaces
fringed by statues and fountains, and ornamental
pools down to which stone steps slowly descend. Yet
it’s all fake.
But the highlight of the Columbian Exposition, its
apotheosis, the feature that was to attract the greatest
number of spectators, was the Wild West Show.
Everyone wanted to see it. And Charles Bristol—the
proprietor of the stall with the Indian relics and the
exhibit of the baby’s corpse—also wanted to drop
everything and go! He already knew the spectacle,
because right at the start of his career, he had been
the manager and wardrobe master for the Wild
West Show. But it was no longer the same, and it
had now become a colossal enterprise. There were
two performances
a day, and eighteen thousand
seats. Horses galloped past a backdrop of gigantic
painted canvases. It wasn’t the loose string of rodeos
and sharpshooters that he had known, but a veritable
enactment of History. So while the Columbian
Exposition was celebrating the industrial revolution,
Buffalo Bill was glorifying conquest.
Later on, much later on, Charles Bristol had
worked for the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company,
which employed nearly eight hundred Indians and
around fifty Whites to sell its stuff. Its flagship medicine
was Sagwa, a mixture of herbs and alcohol for
the treatment of rheumatism and dyspepsia. And
it would appear that cowboys suffered particularly
from wind and borborygmic dyspepsia, because right
across the country people were in search of a remedy.
Eventually, Charles Bristol abandoned the sale of
medicines and embarked on a series of long tours
with his collection of objets d’art. Two Winnebago
Indians who were part of the Medicine Company had
decided to follow him. The museum toured in the
Midwest and the little sketches it staged, where the
Indians performed dances to illustrate the specific
function of each object, were both entertaining and
educational.
Towards the end of 1890, barely three years before
the Columbian Exposition, Charles Bristol had joined
forces with a bum by the name of Riley Miller. Once
Bristol chummed up with Riley, the story becomes
hard to credit. Previously, according to him, Bristol
had accumulated his treasures thanks to his Indian
friendships—a long succession of little gifts. But Riley
Miller was a murderer and a thief. He would scalp
and strip dead Indians: he murdered them and then
took their moccasins, their weapons, their shirts,
their hair—everything. Men, women or children. A
part of the relics displayed by Bristol at the Chicago
Fair came from these activities. Later on, the history
museum in Nebraska bought Charles Bristol’s collection;
and today, somewhere in the museum’s reserve
collection, you might well come across the desiccated
body of the Indian baby from the Exposition. What
this tells us is that show business and the human
sciences had their origins in the same displays, with
curiosities lifted from the dead. Which means that
today, what you find on museum shelves throughout
the world is nothing but trophies and plunder. And
all the African, Indian or Asian objects that we admire
were stolen off corpses.