Zoos As Engineered Nature

Zoos as Engineered Nature KAREN RADER – FRIDAY 5/18 MBL HISTORY OF BIOLOGY SEMINAR – “A CENTURY OF ENGINEERING LIFE” I am NOT a historian of zoos but… … I know some! Zoo Displays as one window onto how institutions reflect and shape ideas about nature, animals, ecosystems. Share features w/museums, wilderness parks Driven in part by technologies of visualization and their interpretations, uses Embody values and assumptions about education, research, and human-animal relations Create opportunities for research and animal or ‘natural’ encounter that would otherwise be impossible Bird Hall at the Milwaukee Public Museum, c. 1920s School children examining the moose group at the American Museum of Natural History (n.d.) Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) Postcard from Hagenbeck Tierpark Hamburg, 1907) H.Warwick, keeper, with a tiger cub and a Peccary, taken at ZSL London Zoo, undated. Early animal keepers as ‘practical naturalists’ “Although not considered especially scientific in retrospect, practical naturalists working with living animals in and out of zoos in the later nineteenth century contributed (literally) volumes of information about animal habits, behavior, and basic living requirements – interests that in and of themselves, though not systematized, constituted an enormous expansion in explicit attention to living animals and thereby contributed directly to biological knowledge.” Lynn Nyhart, Modern Nature (2009), p. 108. Mitman (1996) “When Nature is the Zoo” Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo (1906) Mitman (1996) “When Nature is the Zoo” “Zoo exhibits were neither places to witness and affirm an imperial mastery over nature…nor places to affirm technological prowess….The new habitat display instead sought to blend the natural, technological, and social in a way that made possible an urban flight into an ephemeral experience of wilderness.”(p. 120) “The Zoo and the Aquarium have a peculiar and unique function in civic life. For a population cut off from almost all direct contact with nature there is something very recreative, mentally and physically, about looking at live animals.” Harmon Goldstone, NYC Park Planner and eventual creator of 1939’s World of Tomorrow Technocratic Optimism and the Management Ethos in Zoos “Missing from these histories, however, is an understanding of how power manifested through the methodological practices and management technologies employed within the field. To construe Osborne’s vision as one of technological control is to greatly simplify the meanings of power woven into the complex nexus of the technological and the social that constitutes the fabric of ecological science as environmental management.” (Mitman 1996, p. 119) Mitman (1996) “When Nature is the Zoo” Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie at Wilderness Society Council, 1946 Murie sketching an elk in Yellowstone, 1957 (Getty Images) Touchscreens for Orangutans (Perdue et al.) Touchscreens for Orangutans (Perdue et al.) Results -- Orangutans Results -- Orangutans Results -- Visitors “Zookeeping has never been a simple cultural enterprise precisely because its practitioners have repeatedly juggled what an animal-loving public wants to see and feel with what professionals want the public to find edifying.” Elizabeth Blackmar, American Historical Review (2003) From Boston Museum of Science Newsletter (1950s and early 1960s) Effects of Live Animal Demonstrations on Zoo Visitors' Retention of Information, Carolyn J. Heinrich & Barbara A. Birney (1995) At the Brookfield Zoo, “the results of both the on-site and delayed interviews indicated that the overall objective of the demonstrations—to highlight the animals' special abilities and show how people and animals work together—was being achieved. Remarkably high retention rates (as high as 83%) were attained with respect to a number of educational messages. The evaluation results also indicated that minor modifications to the demonstrations were needed to clarify intended messages about wild animals.” Oliver Hochadel, “Watching Exotic Animals Next Door: “Scientific”Observations at the Zoo (ca. 1870– 1910)” (Science in Context, 2011) The broader context for these “scientific” observations at the zoo is the longlasting tension between university scholars, usually only interested in anatomy and hence dead animals, and the so-called “reform movement” in natural history which emphasized the need to investigate the living animal. This created a sort of parallel tension on an epistemological level: what kind of claims should the science of animals consist of? Kartchner Caverns State Park (AZ) Matt Chew, “A Theme Park Grows Underground” (Boston Globe, 2000) “At its best and worst, the Kartchner Caverns extravaganza summarizes the current art and practice of "show-cave" development. It immerses visitors in an undeniably grand theme. But it neither aspires to nor achieves beyond what has gone before. We took something unimaginable and reduced it to what we could imagine, the predictable product of an unremarkable mindset.” Discussion Should historians of biology think with and identify different “engineering imaginaries”? “Engineering social worlds”? How do/should historians of biology account for intersectional notions of power in our accounts of engineering life: ecosystems and populations? Class, race, gender, disability through lenses: Technology, Capitalism,?.

Load more