Human zoo exhibits, crips and cryptids

Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo has written this article about indigenous African people, of the physically small ethnic groups often called "pygmies", being exhibited in a zoo. He then takes the article into speculation about what would happen if cryptid hominid species such as "Bigfoot" were discovered. I'm not sure quite what to think of the linkage there, but from a human biodiversity point of view this says a lot about the prevalent mentality to me...

quote: "Why do humans in power treat other humans who happen to physically appear to be different than them, so inhumanely?"

if that question isn't fundamental to disability, i don't know what is...

For quite a few years i didn't believe that there actually were such people as "pygmies" - i thought they were a racist fiction invented by imperialist explorers. It wasn't until i read a music review of a collaboration between some electronic music composer and a group from one "pygmy" tribe that i realised they were actually real ethnic groups, who have of course been "othered" and described in almost certainly distorted and exaggerated ways from their "discovery" right up to the present. I'm not sure how much to believe of the claims about them - my cynical bullshit-detector side strongly suspects they are nowhere near as utterly removed from the rest of humanity as they are portrayed to be, and are probably just as much caught up in urbanisation and proletarianisation as any other Majority World people... in fact, given how multicultural Britain is, i reckon there must be some people from these ethnic groups living in some shitty inner-city housing somewhere in Britain (some might even be posting on the internet)...

This made me think, if they did come to live here, would they, in fact, be regarded as disabled people? Their short stature would probably qualify them as Persons of Restricted Growth, but unlike most people in that category, their size isn't an "impairment", but the "norm" for their ethnicity... there are other ethnic groups in which particular impairments are particularly prevalent, such as the people with the "ostrich feet" syndrome, and in which people with those conditions are not particularly regarded as impaired or disabled (i think Mike Oliver writes a bit about this in The Politics of Disablement), but this seems a bit different... would such people, in our society where most things are routinely geared towards people of "normal" (ie tall by global standards) height, would these people be "disabled"? is there a real dividing line, in biological terms, between genetic impairments and "normal" natural genetic variation?

(If anyone from a "pygmy" ethnic group is posting on the internet, then i'd absolutely love to hear their perspective on this...)

Also someone at the Cryptomundo blog posted the perceptive comment: "Did anyone ask the pygmies how they felt about it? Maybe they would have preferred staying at the zoo rather than being shuffled of to “accommodations at a local school,” which I read as folding cots in the gym. Want to treat them with due respect? Give them the choice. Don’t dictate what’s best for them.", which made me consider the perspective of a people whose culture emphasises respect for non-human nature - they might consider being treated like animals less degrading than being treated like children... but, instinctively, to me both those options - both of which are routinely done to disabled people of many types of impairments - are inherently degrading...

Cryptid hominids (stuff like Bigfoot/Sasquatch, Orang Pendek, Almas, etc) are one of my sillier perseverations. Or maybe not so silly, actually, given that it does seem that quite a few autistic people are into that sort of stuff, and there is even a theory, popular among certain segments of the Aspie community, that autism itself comes from the intermixing of modern humans with Neanderthal or other non-modern-human hominid species. (This sometimes gets linked in with speculation about mythological archetypes such as elves, faeries, trolls, etc, and the "changeling" myths - another area i'm interested in, and that absolutely fascinates me from a speculative-fiction kind of viewpoint, but that seems just that bit of speculation too far for me to accept as "real life"... the idea that a Sasquatch might have been captured and put in a mental hospital tho... whoa. Shivers down my spine, even tho i know it's highly unlikely... but that is just what the US establishment would do to one...)

Speculative stuff aside, i do believe there is a real, relevant link between this kind of stuff and disability politics. Disabled people, gender variant people, indigenous peoples of colonised areas, and "mystery" animals have all been exhibited in circuses, theatres, etc as "freaks", have all been the subjects (or possibly objects) of all kinds of pseudoscientific and mytho-religous speculation, have all been described by science in deeply "othering" terms (and then their descriptions used to add "validity" to all kinds of extremely dodgy pseudoscientific politics), and all represent biodiversity in forms that establishments, past and present, have wished to exclude, denigrate, refuse to recognise, or suppress... no wonder, then, if crips identify with cryptids ;)

I didn't actually mean to delve quite so far into the realms of such oddness so early in this blog. Oh well, organic development, i guess...