The 1904 anthropology days and Olympic games : sport, race, and American imperialism
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Bibliographic Information
The 1904 anthropology days and Olympic games : sport, race, and American imperialism
（Critical studies in the history of anthropology series）
University of Nebraska Press, c2008
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 415-449) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
One of the more problematic sport spectacles in American history took place at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, which included the third modern Olympic Games. Associated with the Games was a curious event known as Anthropology Days organized by William J. McGee and James Sullivan, at that time the leading figures in American anthropology and sports, respectively. McGee recruited Natives who were participating in the fair’s ethnic displays to compete in sports events, with the “scientific” goal of measuring the physical prowess of “savages” as compared with “civilized men.” This interdisciplinary collection of essays assesses the ideas about race, imperialism, and Western civilization manifested in the 1904 World’s Fair and Olympic Games and shows how they are still relevant.
A turning point in both the history of the Olympics and the development of modern anthropology, these games expressed the conflict between the Old World emphasis on culture and New World emphasis on utilitarianism. Marked by Franz Boas’s paper at the Scientific Congress, the events in St. Louis witnessed the beginning of the shift in anthropological research from nineteenth-century evolutionary racial models to the cultural relativist paradigm that is now a cornerstone of modern American anthropology. Racist pseudoscience nonetheless reappears to this day in the realm of sports.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Bodies before Boas, Sport before the Laughter Left (Susan Brownell)
1. A “Special Olympics”: Testing Racial Strength and Endurance at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Nancy J. Parezo)
2. The “Physical Value” of Races and Nations: Anthropology and Athletics at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Mark Dyreson)
3. Pierre de Coubertin’s Concepts of Race, Nation, and Civilization (Otto J. Schantz)
4. Anthropology Days, the Construction of Whiteness and American Imperialism in the Philippines (Gerald R. Gems)
5. “From Savagery to Civic Organization”: The Non-Participation of Canadian “Indians” in the “Anthropology Days” of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games (Christine M. O’Bonsawin)
6. “Leav[ing] the White[s] . . . Far Behind Them”: The Girls from Fort Shaw (Montana) Indian School, Basketball Champions of the 1904 World’s Fair (Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith)
7. Germans and Others at the “American Games”: Problems of National and International Representation at the 1904 Olympics (Suzuko Mousel Knott)
8. Greece and the 1904 “American” Olympics (Alexander Kitroeff)
9. From the Anthropology Days to the Anthropological Olympics (John Bale)
10. Olympic Anthropology Days and the Progress of Exclusion: Towards an Anthropology of Democracy (Henning Eichberg)
11. The Growth of Scientific Standards from “Anthropology Days” to Present Days (Jonathan Marks)
Afterword: Back to the Future (Susan Brownell)
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