If you want to know more of human zoos, I think a good start would be to read German Wikipedia article
Völkerschau – Wikipedia via Google translate and check references inside.
Note that some modern texts take 19.-early 20. century events out of the context of generally poor and dangerous life in the 19. century, pick selectively and describe using ideology from the modern America. The result is cheap thrill at 'savage 19. century people' which is itself guilty of falsehood and vilification of another culture.
Yes, I somewhat agree with you on some points that there are texts out there that try to frame these historic displays of "human zoos" through a specific ideological lens, do not see nuance and apply 21st century standards to the 19th / 21st century.
However, I also think that your interpretation of this phenomenon is very reductive and lacks a fair bit of nuance and acknowledgement of the far darker reality / history too.
That said, there is a really interesting paper by a historian called "
Human Zoos or Ethnic Shows? Essence and contingency in Living Ethnological Exhibitons" which somewhat backs some of your arguments (I agree with some of his points and others I just don't at all).
The author (Luis A. Sánchez-Gómez) who is a historian / researcher takes issue with the term "human zoos" and argues that this label doesn't accurately capture the complex reality of this phenomenon as it implies something which t it wasn't which is humans in total captivity.
He states that there were three categories of these kinds of exhibitions which were the following: Commercial (purely to generate profit through entertainment), Colonial (to specifically act as a form of colonial propaganda) and Missionary (to specifically act as a form of religious propaganda).
The most exploitative of these categories was probably the commercial and Gómez goes into detail about the now notorious Hagenbeck human zoos in Germany:
"Hagenbeck’s Völkerschauen or Völkerausstellungen constituted the paradigmatic example of a human zoo, which is also accepted by the French historians who organised the project under the same name. They tended to combine displays of people and animals and took place in zoos, so the analogy could not be clearer. Furthermore, the performances of the exhibited peoples were limited to songs, dances and rituals, and for the most part their activities consisted of little more than dayto-day tasks and activities. Therefore, little importance was attached to their knowledge or skills, but rather to the scrutiny of their gestures, their distinctive bodies and behaviours, which were invariably exotic but not always wild."
He suggests that they were clearly racist displays of human beings but that calling them "human zoos" doesn't quite capture what some of these exhibitions were:
"However, despite their obvious racial and largely racist components, Hagenbeck’s shows cannot be simply dismissed as human zoos. As an entrepreneur, the German’s objective was obviously to profit from the display of animals and people alike, and yet we cannot conclude that the humans were reduced to the status of animals. In fact, the natives were always employed and seem to have received fair treatment. Likewise, their display was based upon a premise of exoticism rather than savagery, in which key ideas of difference, faraway lands and adventure were ultimately exalted."
These shows could either reduce or dehumanize people or elevate them and invite curiosity about the world and people in distant lands (according to Gómez) :
"Hagenbeck’s employees were apparently healthy; sometimes slender, as were the Ethiopians, or even athletic, like the Sudanese. In some instances (for example, with people from India and Ceylon) their greatest appeal was their almost-fantastic exoticism, with their rich costumes and ritual gestures being regarded as remarkable and sophisticated Nevertheless, on many other occasions, people were displayed for their distinctiveness and supposed primitivism, as was the case on the dramatic tour of the Inuit Abraham Ulrikab and his family, from the Labrador Peninsula, all of whom fell ill and died on their journey due to a lack of appropriate vaccination."
"Other contemporary ethnic shows were far more exploitative and brutal. This was the case with several exhibitions that toured Europe towards the end of the 1870s, whose victims included Fuegians, Inuits, primitive Africans (especially Bushmen and Pygmies) or Australian aboriginal peoples. Some were complex and relatively sophisticated and included the recreation of native villages; in others, the entrepreneur simply portrayed his workers with their traditional clothes and weapons, emphasising their supposedly primitive condition."
According to the author it wasn't black and white but rather a shade of grey and there were both contractual agreements signed with the participants agency and agreement / consent and cases of outright exploitation, often of kidnap and restrictions on movement which really blur the boundaries and approximate something like captivity :
"In nearly all cases the impresario was a European or North American, who wielded almost absolute control over the lives of their “workers”. Formal contracts did exist and legal control became increasingly widespread, especially in Great Britain, (Qureshi, 2011: 273) as the nineteenth century progressed. It is also evident, nevertheless, that this contractual relationship could not mask the dominating, exploitative and almost penitentiary conditions of the bonds created. Whether Inuit, Bushmen, Australians, Pygmies, Samoans or Fuegians, it is hard to accept that all contracted peoples were aware of the implications of this legal binding with their employer."
"Whilst most were not captured or kidnapped (although this was documented on more than one occasion) it is reasonable to be skeptical about the voluntary nature of the commercial relationship. Moreover, those very same contracts (which they were probably unable to understand in the first place) committed the natives to conditions of travel, work and accommodation which were not always satisfactory. Very often their lives could be described as confined, not only when performances were taking place, but also when they were over. Exhibited individuals were very rarely given leave to move freely around the towns that the exhibitions visited."
Anyway, read the paper if you are interested, I highly recommend it as it is a very good summary of these events by a historian and very well researched in a way that conveys the nuance too.
