Prince Roland Bonaparte’s Anthropological Photographs in the Era of Human Exhibitions: Race, Science and the Colonialism of the Gaze

ABSTRACT

This article addresses a set of anthropological photographs belonging to the collections of Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924) located at the National Library of France and the Quai Branly Museum. The great-nephew of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most active patrons of French scientific societies from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The hundreds of photographs he produced and collected in albums served as an empirical substrate for the research of anthropologists and naturalists of the time, who endeavored to naturalize and hierarchize racial differences. In general terms, the scope of the article consists of, firstly, investigating the role played by photography in anthropological research and in sustaining the epistemic framework of the so-called scientific racism. Likewise, the text links this documentation to the visual culture of European colonialism based on the display of racialized bodies for the purposes of entertainment and science.

Keywords:
Photography; Roland Bonaparte; Anthropology; Race; Colonialism