On the Move: Animal Histories Unleashed from the Cabinet of Curiosities

Animals, as defined by Aristotelian terms, are actualized in connection to their movement, potential, and purpose. Our knowledge of animals in the history of science, furthermore, as developed from this historiography, has been constrained by foci upon specific charismatic animals at work or in motion. In order to enrich our understanding of animals in the history of science, this panel takes movement as its central point of investigation. It examines the relations between various types of movement, from mechanical motion to geographic translocation, and the knowledge of animals’ lives, bodies, and excretions. The panel explores a layered concept of animal movement through these questions: How have people tried to understand animals and their physical movements? What kind of scientific knowledge has been produced in relation to animals as they are introduced or re-introduced to various localities? The presenters specifically look into animals as mobilizers of scientific knowledge. Marianna Szczygielska focuses on the movement of elephants into Eastern European circuses and zoos during the colonial period, in order to delve into connections between veterinary science and concepts of zoological species, race, and identity. Shira Shmuely offers a critical analysis of Alfred Russell Wallace’s adopted baby orangutan in order to shed light on the malleable boundaries between natural history, hunting, pet-keeping, and experimentation in physiology and anatomy. Sijia Cheng excavates the development of chemistry in late 19th and early 20th century China that emerged from debates over the political control of seabirds and their guano. Tamar Novick examines the 1944 outbreak of African Horse Sickness as the roles of animals as global migrant-laborers began to shift and thus fostered new thoughts about epidemiology and agriculture. Together, these papers offer a critical if not also complementary response to mobility studies from the history of science perspective by investigating how actions connected to the movement, re-rooting, and thus re-contextualizing animals generate new productive tensions among different ways of knowing.