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r&frAijC /&' <£/£/VMAs /Iff ABRAHAM'S SHORT DIARY and two letters provide subjective and necessarily limited accounts of the journey but cannot convey an idea of the complicated processes involved in bringing over the Inuit group, nor of what happened before and after their visit. As further textual sources to consult there are a number of Moravian materials, contemporary newspaper accounts, Virchow's scholarly article, Captain Jacobsen's diary, and the memoirs of Carl Hagenbeck. These sources are not here presented in any detail. Our focus was to present the voice of Abraham. The following account, however, may help to contextualize historically and ideologically Abraham's tragic story. The visit by the Labrador Inuit took place only a decade after the founding of the German national state, the Kaiserreich, in 1871, and the newly-founded German Empire was seeking to enter the international arena, flexing its muscle to become established as an imperialist colonial power, eager for its "place in the sun." In this ideological climate, there was an immense interest not only in foreign countries and their raw materials, their plants and animals , but also in "exotic" peoples and their cultures . Volkerschauen, which might be translated as "peoples exhibitions," provided ethnographic peep shows of cultures perceived by Europeans as "primitive" and altogether alien and inferior, but at the same time as curiously exciting and even desirable "Others." Only a decade later, from America, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show would tour major European cities, but in the late 1870s in Germany, Carl Hagenbeck was the first to come up with the idea of satisfying the German "colonial gaze" by "importing" Indigenous peoples from overseas to exhibit them and have them observed, both as living objects of ethnographic research, and as exotic fetishes of voyeuristic desires. In 1877, Hagenbeck had presented to the public a group of Inuit from Greenland, whom Jacobsen had "delivered." In 1880 Hagenbeck tried to repeat the earlier success. He knew of the popular curiosity. In his memoirs, published in 1909, he praises his relationship with the Greenlanders, but he never mentions the THE DIARY OFABRAHAM ULRIKAB [75] ppendix C economic flop and human catastrophe of this 1880 venture with Abraham and the others from Labrador. The account would not have fitted his self-celebratory success story. Like Jacobsen, the would-be ethnologist, Hagenbeck also was keenly aware of the scientific interest. At the time, biologists, physicians , historians, anthropologists, linguists, and members of the fledgling Volkerkunde (peoples science, ethnography) were eager to weigh, measure, observe, and interview "primitives ," and to assign them "their" definite place within a hierarchically structuring theory of human "races." Based on ethnocentric ideas about the genetic evolution of humans, their research invariably and automatically placed Europeans complacently at the top of the evolutionary scale. One of the most salient methods of asserting "racial" differences became measuring dimensions of the human body and expressing proportional relationships between body parts in "objective" mathematical equations or correlations, so-called anthropometry. Particularly widespread became the study of facial featuresand human skulls (phrenology, craniology). The interest in this empirical method (craniometry), or rather the general interest in phrenology, was shared, for example, by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Germany's most prominent literary figure. His and his contemporaries ' approach went back to neo-classical studies of antiques, especially classical Greek statues, as embodiments of perfect beauty and harmony, whose body proportions and profiles were seen as paradigmaticand ideal,1 whereas deviations from that ideal were read as deficiencies not only physical but also mental and moral - there wasa belief in phrenology, for example, that certain individuals had a Diebsknochen (thief's bone), i.e. a certain identifiable bone structure in the skull which indicated a propensity for stealing. The later move in phrenology from lofty idealism to concrete discrimination, based on physical differences, must have been a gradual 1 Examples of such scientific studies are found in the works of Adolph Zeising (1810-1876), who wrote several articles and books about the golden number (goldener Schnitt) in nature, especially in the proportions of the human body and facial features. He compared the dimensions and angles found in the profiles of classical statues with those of "Europeans," "Mongols," "Negroes," "Hottentots," "Americans," etc., and even "cretins," who all show up as "deviant" from the classic ideal. For the most substantial and diligently researched and documented account of Zeising's life and works, including a CD with archival materials, see: Roger Herz-Fischler, Adolph Zeising: The Life and Work of...

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