The 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games and Anthropology Days: Sport Before the Laughter Left

The 1904 Olympic Games and Anthropology Days were a pivotal point in the history of American anthropology and of the Olympic Games. This is because they were anchored within larger transformations in global culture – namely, the decline of empire, the rise of the nation-state, and the ensuing decline of the Victorian evolutionary racial schemes. Anthropology Days reflected the notion of ‘culture’; whilst the Olympic events and other sports reflected nation-building.

But Anthropology Days were considered an embarrassment by Pierre de Coubertin – the founder of the modern Olympics. Because of their association with them, today’s sport historians often regard the St. Louis Olympics as a shameful event which almost killed the Olympic Movement.

St. Louis 1904 became a counter-model that sent the Olympic Games off onto another trajectory that emphasized a global sports mono-culture contested by athletes representing nations, and discouraged the cultural diversity of indigenous sports. As part of this shift, international sport was transformed from a carnivalistic spectacle into a serious ritual. The "laughter of the pygmies" would no longer find a space in sport, which became a "ritual of records."

This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport