Dagnosław Demski and Dominika Czarnecka's edited volume, Staged Otherness: Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939, is the final result of a collective research project begun in 2016. It pioneered a topic little known to students of the Russian and Habsburg empires and the interwar nation-states that succeeded them. “Ethnic/ethnographic shows” (the term consciously used in the collection to underscore their performative component as well as the agency of the performers) have been associated with western modern urbanity, mass culture, science, and colonialism but have remained largely invisible beyond Vienna's Landstrasse (as in the famous expression attributed to Metternich: “Asia begins at the Landstrasse”). Staged Otherness crosses this symbolic border and unearths the ethnic shows’ itineraries, their reception, and cultural functions in “Central and Eastern Europe” (CEE). Concepts that had originated in studies of western Europe such as ethnic shows, Völkerschauen, or human zoos proved utterly unfamiliar to archivists in St. Petersburg, Riga, and Warsaw, necessitating truly creative approaches on the part of the project participants. The multilingual press became their main pass into the liminal world of “staged otherness.” Without exaggeration, the result of their collective endeavor is a treasure trove of exciting new materials and stories.
The editors seem overly eager to fit the entire archive of this innovative project under their declared “multiperspectival approach” (35). This creates some conceptual problems. For example, they apply the term “CEE” to the period 1850–1939 and to a region encompassing lands from Germany to Siberia, thus using a geopolitical concept that belongs to the post–World War II reality. Should this mean that, in addition to uncovering the phenomenon of ethnic shows, they aspire to question the assumed secondhand modernity of the region? Some chapters seem to reflect this perspective, whereas others offer a fresh view on the Russian and Habsburg empires, traditionally amalgamated into a “type” and opposed to western overseas empires. This move justified their exclusion from discussions of race and racism, the white-black color line, and other aspects of modern colonialism that are so visible in the lens of ethnic shows. However, such a revision does not mean re-modernizing the region into the “First World,” and requires a developed imperial/postimperial framework for the volume. Some chapters in the collection cross the line into the interwar period without paying much attention to the radically changing context for the “staging of Otherness.” These conceptual incoherencies ensuing from the editors’ “multiperspectival approach” undermine the cumulative analytical contribution of the collection. No wonder it has no formal Conclusion, and its brief Epilogue is structured by repetitive references to the “feeling of something unfinished” (433–37).
The same all-embracing approach is reflected in the volume's three-part structure. Part I (4 chapters), “European versus Indigenous Agency,” in addition to the opening chapter by Hilke Thode-Arora summarizing her well-known research on the Hegenbeck family's ethnic shows in their western context, includes three original case studies: one, extending the history of Somali ethnographic shows under the Hegenbecks into the CEE; another, on the ethnographic performance of a scholar-adventurer and his personal “savage” set in the Czech lands; and the third, on the 1882 exhibition of the Samoyed from the Russian Empire in Vienna. All three offer the most original theorizing of the selected cases and cohere well with five chapters in Part III, “Across Local Contexts” (although the editors admit that the last chapter by István Sántoba is an outlier in terms of approach). This part presents unevenly theorized region-centered studies of ethnic shows in the Slovene lands, the Banat, and Transylvania, in the Polish press (“during the Partition Era”), and in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Part II features three chapters (two of them by the editors) that should resonate with the rest on a conceptual level, but they do not. The focus here is on ethnic shows as a spectacle: the show as a dramatic medium, a theatrical encounter (re)producing ethnographic difference, and the movements on stage coded as exotic. The third chapter is more concerned with the (ethnic) circus as an institution. None of the three is essentially about the region; instead they apply region-specific material comparatively to pursue an original anthropological agenda that does not resonate with other parts of the volume. Sántoba's outlier chapter in Part III would fit better in Part II, as it is written in a similar anthropological mode, bringing together three distinct cases of representation of the “exotic” (Peter the Great's Kunstkamera; late imperial St. Petersburg's Zoopark and Lunapark; and early Soviet public performances of shamanism). Sántoba's personal observations regarding the invisibility of these episodes in Russian archives and collective memory (with one exception—Kunstkamera's exhibition of freaks) provide the analytical framework. With this chapter added, Part II could easily compose a separate volume, while the big themes common to the remaining two parts would become more central to the project.
These main thematic threads include but are not limited to: the problematization of whiteness and color in what are perceived as colorless imperial and postimperial formations; degrees and modalities of otherness and savagery; the overlap of internal and external, often imagined, colonial hierarchies in the two empires; the entanglement of racial and cultural coding of otherness; and the surprising invisibility of ethnic shows in some regional contexts. Thus, all three chapters on the Russian empire document many ethnic “exotic” performances but find few discursive traces of them in the Russian literature, mass press, science, or public memory (see especially the chapter by Maria Leskinen). Polish anthropologists, we learn, “were rather indifferent to the exhibitions” of African “types” in late nineteenth-century Warsaw (the chapter by Izabela Kopania), which contrasted to their involvement with local Polish ethnography (this chapter conspicuously avoids discussing their synchronic interest in Jewish anthropology and otherness). These common themes constitute the core of the collection's contribution to many revisionist conversations currently happening in the field of Eurasian and east European studies. Staged Otherness, although uneven, as many collections are, is a fascinating and inspiring read and an example of truly pioneering scholarship.
