December 06, 2018
Ira Jacknis, Research Anthropologist, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the first American fair to feature anthropology. The new discipline had its own building, supervised by Frederic Putnam, then director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. It competed, however, with another display of anthropology, organized by the Smithsonian Institution. In this lecture, Ira Jacknis will explore the many ways in which these exhibits offered competing versions of cultural reality and trace the innovations of anthropological display that have since become standard museum practice.