Anthropologists and Their Monsters

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of the discipline of physical anthropology in the Czech lands and its first public presentation at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition held in 1895 in Prague. The search for the physical characteristics of Czechs involved a large-scale anthropometric survey in Czech schools and among the adult population from 1893 to 1895, which was subsequently presented at this exhibition. This article focuses on the production of expert knowledge within the context of contemporary nationalist discourses. Comparison with anthropological traditions in other parts of the Habsburg Empire (Vienna and Budapest) show how the Czech tradition differed in strongly insisting on the existence of a “Czech type” resulting from anthropology’s entanglement with Czech nationalist discourses, which in the 1880s and 1890s partly subscribed to a social-Darwinist vision of the Czech collective body. Taking the notion of disability as an analytical category into the analysis, the article confirms how the search for the “Czech type” depended on the notion of bodily ab/normality and how people with disabilities served as the “internal Others” against which the “normal” Czech self could emerge. This is most vividly demonstrated by the wax figure of Josef Drásal, a professional freak show “Giant,” who was exhibited at the 1895 anthropological display in reference to the normative size of the human body, the strength and ability of the national collective, and the rather problematic relationship of Czech nationalism to “peasants.”