Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
increasingly, as informational patterns in multi-dimensional electronic spaces. In
occupying these spaces, plants and animals play important roles in practices which
define the complex relationships between human and non-human worlds; processes
of domesticating, commodifying, aestheticising, as well as constructing knowledge
about the natural world.
Natural history has lost ground as an academic discipline (Vernon 1993), but a
number of issues ensure that it has not lost importance as a complex set of socio-
spatial practices through which relationships between nature and society are
defined. The attentions of many biological scientists have moved away from
taxonomic description, yet there are still huge gaps in our knowledge about the natural
world, with an estimated 90 per cent of species still undescribed (May 1988).
Working at these absences on the local scale, natural history is still an area of
endeavour for large numbers of amateur practitioners (Harrison 1993); while
taxonomy has attracted renewed academic interest through the Darwin Programme
instigated after the Rio Conference in 1992. More pertinently for this chapter,
natural history has achieved immense significance as a popularisation of biological
knowledge, with an explosion of natural history publications and television
programmes featuring the natural world, and animals in particular (e.g. Franklin
1999; Marren 1995; Silverstone 1986; Wilson 1992). In the last forty years the
various ideas and images of natural history have become more widely available than
at any time in the past. These popular presentations of natural history in the media
are contested (Crowther 1997; Mills 1997), however, and there are other
popularisations of natural history which have recently declined in status. Zoos,
menageries and other forms of animal display have closed following attack from an
increasingly active animal rights lobby, and in response to perceived public
sensibility about the enclosure of live animals (Montgomery 1995). Natural history
as a complex, contested and changing network of practices, associated with defining
and structuring the borders between the human and non-human worlds, continues
to be of material, social and spatial significance.
This chapter is concerned with reviewing and developing the growing area of
research on human—animal relations and geography (Philo and Wolch 1998;
Wolch and Emel 1995, 1998) through attention to the changing institution of the
zoo within the networks of natural history. First, the chapter pulls together
literature on the spatial practices associated with natural history and traditional
zoos. Second, I focus on the construction and characteristics of a relatively new
space within the networks through which animals are woven into human culture,
exploring an emerging form of animal display that I term the 'electronic zoo'. In the
complex milieu of natural history, with its existing representational strategies that
range from notebook to camera, there are now further opportunities for the
construction and presentation of natural history knowledges. The latest electronic
spaces of digital imaging, the internet and virtual reality, take their place alongside
more established technologies such as film, photography and television. These offer
new ways of conceiving of and portraying natural history, and introduce the
possibility of different relationships between human and animal experiences. Recent
