Nick,

I have to confess that I was thinking of this less from the televisual 
point-of-view, and more towards looking at this as a form of affective 
colonialism. Zoos, museums, art galleries all do this from different angles, 
taking the object of attention out of the complex mesh of cultural, 
political and emotional ties surrounding its’ creation or prior existence, 
and putting it in a suitably ‘scientific’ environment in which guilt-free 
consumption can take place. As one example, the museums of the UK are full 
of the lootings of empire which, having been transcribed by the passage of 
time and their positioning within a scientific, ethnographic discourse, are 
now neutral objects under careful guardianship – witness the Elgin Marbles, 
which despite the damage done to them through various ‘restoration’ 
initiatives by the trustees of the British Museum, are kept ‘safe’ in a 
‘suitable environment’, away from the people of Greece, who plainly lack the 
knowledge and ability to maintain them.

I think (as to the engineering of artificial situations) that these 
site-specific interpretations do just that, really, and that just as these 
situations are the products of certain changeable social and cultural 
processes, so is the ethnographist or sociologist. As Bourdieu said of 
Bernard-Henri Levy: “It is vital to understand that he is only a sort of 
structural epiphenomenon, and that, like an electron, he is the expression 
of a field. You can’t understand anything if you don’t understand the field 
that produces him and gives him his parcel of power.” (Bourdieu, P. (1998) 
On Television and Journalism, Pluto Books, p.54).

With the African exhibition in the zoo, there is a further overarching 
structure which provides a suitable setting for such behaviours, what you 
might call a meta-discourse of psycho-imperialism. As a German best-seller 
of 1912, German Thought in the World, had it: “it is only when the 
indigenous peoples have learned to produce something of value in the service 
of the superior race… that they can be said to have a moral right to exist.” 
(quoted in Kotek, J. and Rigoulet, P. (2001) Le siecle des camps, Paris, 
p.92). For me there is more than a ghost of this persuasion in the placing 
of a cultural exhibition in such a setting; in this particular instance the 
‘indigenous peoples’ themselves are the product which is of value to the 
‘superior race’.

If you think this is a bit far-fetched, then there’s another example from 
Germany that might persuade you; the continuing use of medical specimens in 
German medical institutes that were taken from victims of the Nazis: “In 
1988, it was revealed that the Tübingen anatomical institute still had in 
its collections the remains of victims of Nazi terror. Despite the 
assertions of the then director of the anatomical institute that only two 
microscopic slides may have been derived from "possible" victims of the 
Nazis, 18 inquiries revealed that the Institute of Anatomy had received the 
cadavers of over 400 victims.”  (William E. Seidelman, Medicine and Murder 
in the Third Reich, Jewish Virtual Library, 
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/medmurder).

So far from being an isolated instance, it seems that there are quite a few 
institutions involved, and that the experimentation done at that juncture 
continues to inform medical knowledge and research: “The Institute of 
Anatomy of the University of Vienna was headed by the noted anatomist -- and 
Austro-Fascist -- Professor Dr. Eduard Pernkopf. Pernkopf, who was appointed 
dean of medicine at the university after the Anschlus was the founding 
editor of a major text on human anatomy, a text that is still considered a 
"masterpiece" and the "standard by which all other illustrated anatomic 
works are measured."22 The book continues to be published under the imprint 
of the original publisher, Urban and Schwarzenberg. In the book's 
illustrations, artists graphically expressed their Nazi sympathies: The 
artists Franz Batke, Eric Lepier and Karl Entresser incorporated Nazi 
iconography (swastikas or SS symbols) into their signatures.… Current 
editions of Pernkopf's Anatomy include paintings from the original editions, 
but Nazi iconography has been airbrushed out -- with two exceptions.” 
(Seidelmann, Op. cit.)

Not only that, but the practice of using nazi-era specimens for display or 
teaching purposes carries on to this day: “In March 1995 the Holocaust 
Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority of Israel, Yad Vashem, formally 
requested that the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck undertake an 
independent inquiry… a report was issued on October 1, 1998. The 
investigation revealed that the Institute of Anatomy received almost 1,400 
cadavers from the Gestapo execution chamber in the Vienna Regional Court 
(Landesgerichte). While the anatomical institute and its collection were 
destroyed by a bomb near the end of the war, the investigation did identify 
approximately 200 institute specimens from the Nazi era that were still in 
other universities' collections….The University of Innsbruck has refused to 
undertake any investigation..” (Seidelmann, Op.cit.)

Since then, other universities and institutions, the Max Planck Institute 
for Brain Research in Frankfurt, the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in 
Munich, the Humboldt University, the Berlin Charité Hospital, the University 
of Heidelberg and the Ludwig-Maximillian University of Munich have been 
asked to conduct similar enquiries but, mind-bogglingly enough, have 
refused. The pathetic remains of human beings, torn from their owners in the 
midst of overwhelmingly violent acts constituting an utter denial of all 
that enlightened science might reasonably claim to stand for, have been 
cleansed and purified by their transcription to scientific institutions and, 
thus purified, they may now be used in a truly progressive manner for the 
advancement of benign medical knowledge – forgetting the horrible, malignant 
medical knowledge that produced them. This speaks to my original point, the 
assignation of objects of affection and emotion, remains, to a value-free 
location, in the same way that the remains of Australian and Tasmanian 
aborigines, murdered by the settlers, came to form an interesting and 
exciting part of modern ethnographical collections in Britain……

Cheers,

Jon