Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886
Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886
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示范主题：安达曼群岛在殖民和印度展览会上的展示，1886 年
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发表时间：
2009
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Claire Wintle
中科院分区：
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作者：
Claire Wintle
本文对1886年殖民地与印度展览会上的安达曼群岛展览进行了分析。它探索了如何展示接近真人大小的粘土模型，以及本土制造的产品，如何向受欢迎的英国观众展示该地区的特定愿景。本文利用视觉证据、档案材料和当代对展览的评论，研究了展览范式的机制，记录了它对观众对安达曼人认知的影响。它认为，这些模型的目的是并成功地被接受为工具，用来普及该地区人民在被认为是社会文化进化等级的最低点的学术判断，并展示了这个特定的展览是如何被用作大都市观众的动态、装饰性视觉娱乐的。我们将研究用泥人代替真实人体的含义，并将争辩说，这种特殊的媒介充当了一个吸收表面，英国观众可以在上面安全地假设关于他们遥远的主题的可感知的“真相”。虽然“活的展品”能够挑战它们的表现条件，但静态的模型被视为验证了殖民地对非西方“他者”的暴力堕落、公开的性行为和肉体可获得性的担忧。
This essay provides an analysis of the Andaman Islands exhibit at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. It explores the ways in which a display of near-life-size clay models, complete with indigenous-made manufactures, presented a specific vision of the region to a popular British audience. Using visual evidence, archival material and contemporary commentary on the exhibition, the essay investigates the mechanics of the exhibition paradigm, documenting its impact upon audiences’ perceptions of the Andamanese peoples. It argues that the models were intended and were successfully received as tools with which to popularize scholarly judgements of the region’s peoples at the lowest point of a perceived sociocultural-evolutionary hierarchy, and demonstrates how this specific exhibit was employed as dynamic, decorative visual entertainment for a metropolitan audience. The implications of the substitution of clay figures for real human bodies will be examined, and it will be argued that this particular medium acted as an absorbent surface upon which British audiences could safely posit perceived ‘truths’ about their distant subjects. Whereas ‘living exhibits’ were able to challenge the terms of their representation, the static models were seen to verify colonial concerns regarding the violent depravity, overt sexuality and corporeal availability of the non-Western ‘other’.