20190724T090020190724T1145Europe/AmsterdamOn 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 fos ...
Drift 27, Rm. 032History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
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.
Organized by Lisa Onaga and Tamar Novick
Elephant Empire beyond the Colonial FrontierView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 07:30:00 UTC
Animal trade constitutes one of the key factors of animal mobility beyond their natural habitats. Exotic specimens found their way to menageries and zoos following the routes of colonial conquest and possession of land and natural resources. Whereas zoological gardens and animal collections in North America and Western Europe are well researched, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the history and legacy of these modernizing institutions in Eastern Europe. In this presentation, I investigate the traffic in exotic animals to this region with a focus on a particular species. Historically, elephants have been considered prime symbols of power and triumph of the colonial empire, and thus were often the jewels of colonial animal collections across Europe (Ritvo 1987). I explore how the colonial origin of elephants as both big game (being hunted for ivory, taxidermy, meat) and charismatic megafauna (spectacular mammals on display) translates into a geopolitical context without direct overseas colonies, in order to trace the material links between species, race, transnational commodity networks, and structures of identity formation. From this vantage point I suggest that studying public zoos in Eastern Europe offers a unique insight into a physical presence of colonial imperialism (via traffic in exotic species) in an area without overseas colonies, through a site where modernist models of citizenship, nationhood, and Europeanness are forged at the interface between science, education, and transnational politics.
Presenters Marianna Szczygielska Max Planck Institute For The History Of Science, Berlin
Alfred Wallace’s Baby Orangutan: A Game, a Pet, a SpecimenView Abstract Organized SessionBiology09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 08:00:00 UTC
British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace was a freelance collector. During his expedition to the Malay Archipelago he had collected 125,000 specimens, mostly insects and birds, thousands of them previously unfamiliar to European naturalists. Wallace dried, labeled, preserved and packed the specimens and periodically shipped them to his London agent for sale. In the morning of 16 May 1855 Wallace picked up a young orangutan from a swamp in the island of Borneo, Southeast Asia. He carried the little creature home, and for a while lived with the orangutan in his “bachelor establishment.” The relations Wallace had cultivated with the young orangutan are peculiar in the context of hunting tradition. Read on the backdrop of imperial hunting, the encounter between the naturalist and the orangutan is an anomalous, a momentary breach of the hunters’ agenda. However, when re-contextualized in the history of animal experimentation, Wallace’s treatment of the orangutan joined other incidences in which scientists observed their pet animals, occasionally even subjected them to experiments. Drawing from historian of science Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990), I’ll argue that the encounter between Wallace and the baby orangutan is of special analytical value as it is situated at the juncture of hunting narratives, per ownership, colonial bioprospecting and laboratory culture. The entrance of the baby orangutan into Wallace’s home provides an early example for the future complex attitudes towards primates in research, intertwining ideas about family life, care, use and abuse.
The “African Horse Sickness” and the Threat of MovementView Abstract Organized SessionTechnology10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 08:45:00 UTC
This talk centers on the “African Horse Sickness” that plagued the Middle East for the first time in 1944, resulting in the termination of thousands of animal lives. In that context, equines were cardinal to agricultural work and economy, to connecting rural and urban areas as transporters of goods, but also to the governing rule and its policing powers under the Mandate system. The disease hit the region in a transformative period, moreover, as the role of animals as global migrant-laborers was shifting. Soon after, automated machines relieved their burden, and transformed the relations between farmers, veterinarians, the state, and the global market. Debates about the nature and management of this disease, which never threatened human lives, but influenced them in fundamental ways nevertheless, ultimately contributed to new ideas about energy, work, and migration, and to studies in epidemiology and agricultural production.
Tamar Novick Max Planck Institute For The History Of Science, Berlin
More Than Just Poop: Guano in Late 19th and Early 20th Century ChinaView Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 09:15:00 UTC
This paper investigates how the Chinese started to know about the agricultural value of guano and search for their own potential guano islands in late 19th and early 20th Century. Since the early nineteenth century, because of its nitrate-rich quality, guano has been recognized by chemists worldwide as the finest fertilizer. It became a highly valuable resource and hot commodity desired and harvested by Western and Japanese powers. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, many Chinese intellectuals also realized the value of guano as an effective fertilizer through Western books. They started to regard it as the best fertilizer, even more valuable than human and animal manure, which had been applied to enrich the soil fertility in China for centuries. Two opposite opinions towards this previously unknown resource emerged. One acknowledged the unavailability of guano due to the lack of seabirds' islands and suggested to look for other alternative manure. Based on their understandings of chemical knowledge, many Chinese intellectuals started to argue for suitable manure that contain vital elements (such as nitrogen and phosphorus). The other opinion urged the Qing government to defend the territorial sovereignty of some islands near Kanton from the Japanese occupation and reclaim the exploitation right of guano back. As the second opinion developed, rather than its agricultural value, bird excrement mattered greatly due to its economic and geopolitical significance. By looking at the fate of guano in China, this paper aims to shed some light on the entwined relations between knowledge of animals and social, economic and political power.
Commentary: On the Move: Animal Histories Unleashed from the Cabinet of CuriositiesView Abstract Organized Session10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 09:15:00 UTC
Marianna Szczygielska
