Reinert, Wiebke. "Betwixt and Between: Making Makeshift Animals in Nineteenth- Century Zoological Gardens." Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality
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Reinert, Wiebke. "Betwixt and Between: Making Makeshift Animals in Nineteenth- Century Zoological Gardens." Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality. By Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher and Philip Howell. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 181–200. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350054066.0016>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 02:42 UTC. Copyright © Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, Philip Howell and Contributors, 2019 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Animal History in the Modern City Betwixt and Between 11 Betwixt and Between: Making Makeshift Animals in Nineteenth- Century Zoological Gardens Wiebke Reinert pen1 VERB [WITH OBJECT] write or compose Origin Middle English (originally denoting a feather with a sharpened quill): from Old French penne, from Latin penna ‹feather› (in late Latin ‹pen›). pen2 VERB [WITH OBJECT] 1. put or keep (an animal) in a pen 1.1. (pen someone up/in) confine someone in a restricted space1 Introduction: Articulating the history of the modern zoo The zoological garden as a distinctive form of animal keeping in the modern world is a well-studied institution.2 The zoo is a place where animals are physically present and made manifest to human observers, providing unparalleled opportunities to investigate human–animal relations in modern societies and cities (zoological gardens being quintessentially urban phenomena). However, many zoo histories are premised on the problematic assumption that they represent a kind of ‘fresh start’.3 Conventional histories tend to draw sharp dividing lines between modern and premodern eras, attaching little or no value to the continuity of animal exhibition, albeit in very different urban and social settings. We can argue, however, that the putative transformation in relations between watching humans and watched animals raises the question of liminality right from the start: for any account of the emergence of the zoo implies a movement from a definitivebefore to a prospective after, and thus invokes a characteristic liminal period that involves at the same time a no longer and Animal History in the Modern City.indb 181 17-05-2018 17:20:33 182 Animal History in the Modern City a not yet.4 Understanding zoos in the early years of their development means putting this liminality centre stage, and in this chapter I want to consider the development of zoos not only from the perspective of the animals themselves, but also in terms of the ambiguous experience zoos offered, as places of both entertainment and instruction, education and spectacle. Speaking of liminal animals, liminal spaces or liminality necessarily involves the idea of a before and after, but it is necessary to look more closely at the stability that is the frame for this liminality, and which makes liminality the uncertain, potentially transgressive phenomenon that it is (for liminality has the potential to tell us about not only what, at certain times, is defined as appropriate and accepted, but also disapproved of as misplaced). As regards our specific interest in the entanglements of humans and animals, it is these connections and separations, the process of valuing and devaluing, placing and displacing, and interactions and demarcations, which appear to cross and be negotiated in liminal periods.5 Drawing on the history of German zoological gardens, this chapter stresses the difficulties involved in ‘articulating’ the zoo, joining its elements together and making it work, such as by regulating and representing the paying public as well as the lives of its animal captives: nineteenth-century European zoos are exemplary liminal sites because of, for instance, the collision between high nature and popular culture, and the necessarily incomplete transition from its predecessors and competitors in the business of animal spectacle to the familiar and apparently straightforwardly modern institution. I take a close look in particular at three examples of characterizing and popularizing zoo animals, first considering the zoo’s liminal history and geography, then considering the ways in which animals’ liminal lives at the zoo were imagined and represented, before concluding with a consideration of the vital role of animals’ wards and keepers, as ‘middlemen’. These three examples explore liminality as a characteristic effect of the development of a zoo culture for the masses as well as the leisure class. Betwixt and between: The zoo and the fair Zoological gardens were certainly not the only urban sites or locations where ‘exotic’ animals could be observed in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Travelling menageries, circuses, itinerant animal trainers, the private homes or palaces of aficionados, even pubs, all exhibited various kinds of animals on a regular if not always permanent basis. ‘Towards the middle of the nineteenth century’, as David Wilson has noted, ‘the favoured locales for the kind of entertainment involving easily portable exhibits of the sort that formerly occupied booths at the now declining or extinct fairs were taverns and assembly rooms in working-class neighbourhoods’.6 Though the nature of these neighbourhoods will not be explored in detail here, it is noteworthy that quite a few of these earlier animal exhibitions were positioned further away from city centres than the zoological gardens familiar in modern times. There were pragmatic as well as cultural reasons for this, of course: a lack of space, real or perceived, in the heart of the city; the fact that many exotic animals were kept in country house menageries; the desire to keep carnivals and their dubious characters outside the city walls; the objectionable Animal History in the Modern City.indb 182 17-05-2018 17:20:33 Betwixt and Between 183 sounds and smells and other ‘nuisances’ that came with animals’ permanent presence in human neighbourhoods. We should resist the temptation to conclude that the zoo marked a decisive move of animal shows into the heart of the city, however, simply achieving a bourgeois respectability that the fairs and travelling menageries never could. Sure enough, a zoological garden and a fair are categorically very different institutions, most obviously in terms of the former’s permanence and institutional character. Focussing on actual practices, including the activities of keepers and their animal charges, reveals that zoos had much in common with the other sites of ‘popular tradition’, since the zoo like the fair brought together the exotic and the familiar, the villager and the townsman, the professional performer and the bourgeois observer.7 As Helen Cowie remarks, Menageries have typically been portrayed as promoting entertainment rather than providing education. This was the view put forward by the directors of the newly established zoological gardens, who contrasted the spacious, genteel atmosphere of their own institutions with the cramped, sometimes unseemly conditions of the travelling wild beast show. It has also been the general view of historians, who have tended to draw a sharp distinction between the menagerie and the zoo.8 In this regard it makes sense to speak of liminal periods and spaces rather than a simple substitution or replacement of the traditional fair by the modern zoo. The utility of liminality as an analytical framework is especially obvious when it comes to the zoo as an innovation since, for all that they have been seen as a ‘tribute to bourgeois self- confidence’,9 zoos were highly fragile and insecure institutions, not least financially. ‘Betwixt and between’, ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’,10 as Victor Turner put it, applies equally well to the animals exhibited: for captive zoo animals remained in a threshold-status, caught between science and spectacle, education and entertainment, taxonomy and amusement, exotic and familiar, the near and the distant. The zoo’s claim to provide a space of rational and cultivated leisure was also pointedly asserted by way of comparison to its urban competitors, either specific, in terms of animal exhibitions, or general, in the developing spaces of leisure in the city.11 The zoo could not simply be a site of elevating knowledge about the animal kingdom; to make zoo visits interesting and popular (and to ensure that zoos were viable economically), animals and the environments in which they lived and performed (park, enclosures and cages) had to affect visitors in an emotional register. Zoos were no different from other forms of recreation in the city that mobilize desires, hopes and fears, pleasure, relief and satisfaction: the familiar effects of entertainment and enjoyment.12 Rather than representing a sharp break with a liminal past, the development of a zoo culture for the masses reproduced the characteristic forms of liminal ambivalence. Harriet Ritvo has even suggested that this liminality may be the most interesting thing about zoos.13 As an example of the latter, Gustav Friedrich Werner from Stuttgart, began to earn his nickname of ‘Affenwerner’, by exhibiting animals in and around his tavern in the 1840s.14 In much the same manner, the founder of Leipzig Zoo was the enterprising landlord Ernst Pinkert, who developed his zoological career by enlivening his restaurant with animals in 1874. In the Leipzig quarter of Lindenau, the pub owner Animal