Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo has had Massai “cultural interpreters” in the zoo’s “African Village” (actually a Kikuyu village), which includes a number of homes and a school house—with the seats facing a plain with giraffes and zebras. What else would African/Kikuyu/Maasai children focus their eyes on in school? To their credit, in the zoo, they are not decked out in traditional hear (as they were in San Diego and NYC), though they do sport it in the zoo’s literature. Oh yeah: the advertisements alternate the logo “This Close” with close-ups of zebra stripes, elephant skins and Maasai necklaces. If you Google the Seattle Zoo and Maasai, you;ll find lots of hits because a number of people made quite a stink about this during the summer of 2007.

Finally, in DC, the Smithsonian includes exhibits of African cultures along with its lesson plans about butterflies, dinosaurs and other fauna. See: http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/

And, as a friend pointed out to me, the museum is also featuring, significantly, a temporary exhibit on Rastafarianism and another on Mexican people and religion.
And permanent exhibits of Korean people, ‘Western Culture’ (indigenous peoples of the Americas). see
http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/current.html

So yeah, apparently in this post-race moment, it seems unremarkable and even enjoyable to many to engage in “cultural exchange” with non-Western peoples in zoos and natural history museums.

This makes me so sad.

Or that in 2008 someone would have written a book called “The great tribes” of anywhere, or that the author and her agent would have thought of taking a Maasai man to the MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY as some sort of mascot for said book.

Good Lord.