Race And The Igorot Living Exhibit Of 1904

Diamond Clark

SOCI 343

24 February 2023

Race and the Igorot Living Exhibit of 1904

In 1904, the World’s Fair, held in St. Louis, Missouri, aimed to represent the achievements of the United States as a center for innovation and technological advancement, as well as an outstanding military power. Although the fair showcased numerous areas of American excellence and economic development, a lasting stain on the legacy of the event lends itself to the living exhibits of ethnic minorities for entertainment purposes. This paper examines how the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and its exhibition of the Filipino Igorot People reflected and perpetuated the racial and ethnic structures of the time. When examining the mechanisms in which race was reinforced

As stated in The Matrix of Race, “[Stock stories] inform and organize the practices of social institutions and are encoded in law, public policy, public space, history, and culture. Stock stories are shaped by the White racial frame” (Coates et al., 2018, p. 54). In this particular incident, the stock story depicting indigenous Filipino populations as savage, barbaric, and animalistic, through the exhibition of exploited cultural practices is very much a live characterization of a stock story being encoded in culture. This particular stock story, as well as the exhibit itself, is solely grounded within the white racial framework, which is why the experience, designed to be consumed and enjoyed by white people, ultimately led to its permeation into the larger American white consciousness. The Asian American Education Project writes,“The word ‘savage’ has been used throughout American history to justify the mistreatment and subjugation of different people, as well as to disguise racism as American benevolence– as applied to Native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and other groups in America'' (The Asian American Education Project, 2020). What may have been considered a blatantly racist display of the Igorot and various ethnic minority groups in the living

As the fair was held less than two years after the culmination of the Philippine-American war, in which the Philippines became a U.S. territory, fair organizers wanted to convey the superiority of American culture, as well as the power and greatness of its military, through a display of the “pitiful reality” of Philippine ethnic tribes, essentially serving as a souvenir of the wartime victory. A section of the University of Delaware’s Special Collections Online Exhibits and Finding Aids states of the Philippine village exhibit, “They were displayed as savages in need of the civilizing presence of the white man. The ‘civilizing’ force was the American government who had taken over that country, officially at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1899, and in fact after the Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902” (University of Delaware). By parading this exhibit as a trophy of America’s latest military victory, while also emphasizing the distinctions and perceived inferiorities of Filipino and Filipino-Indigenous cultures, the United States was able to not only reckon with, but also celebrate and justify the acquisition of the Philippines as a territory. The Matrix of Race presents colonialism through three primary lenses: