Peabody Museum: All the World is Here - Anthropology on Display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair

Date: 

Wednesday, December 6, 2017, 6:00pm

Location: 

Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
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Free Public Lecture

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.

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