Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
reach, while the bars and cages constraining wild beasts demonstrated human power
over the domain of nature. The flowering of zoo building in the nineteenth century
was supported by vast networks of animal trading that spanned from Western
Europe and the United States to those parts of the world divided into imperial
territories. Huge numbers of living animals were mobilised through the formal
collecting trips of individuals
5
or organisations such as the Dutch East India
Company (Flint 1996), public donations, royal gifts from colonial territories, and
more informal mechanisms.
6
This huge influx of animals was readily absorbed into
Europe, where in the 1860s zoological gardens were being established at the rate of
one a year (Reichenbach 1996).
7
Even when zoo exhibits were derived from pre-
existing animal collections,
8
or breeding programmes at other zoos, the value of the
animals was premised on this imagined geographical movement from the wild to the
disciplining spaces of the zoo.
The movements of animals associated with zoos are significant not only for this
displacement, but more precisely in the centralisation of animals in particular
locations, notably cities, alongside other institutions such as natural history museums
and scientific societies. As Anderson (1995:279) points out, bringing wild animals
into the city was especially meaningful in the nineteenth century as representing 'the
ultimate triumph of modern man
[sic]
over nature, of city over country, of reason
over nature's apparent wildness and chaos'. While the exhibition and ordering of
caged animals within metropolitan zoos demonstrated human power over nature,
other forms of animal life such as livestock, seen as dirty, degrading and polluting,
were systematically being removed from the urban sphere (Philo 1995). The city
was increasingly defined as a civilised space removed from nature. However, animals
within
the zoo were celebrated by city officials and scientific institutes as symbols
that lent pre-eminence to established cities such as London (Ritvo 1996); or order,
authority and identity to newly established colonial cities such as Adelaide
(Anderson 1995). The symbolic, as well as financial, value of these collections of
animals derived from their systematic organisation and accumulation according to
evolving discourses of natural history and animal breeding.
The presence of such animals in the city was valuable for communicating the
moral order of nature and humankind, as revealed through the taxonomic
classifications of natural history (Anderson 1995; Haraway 1989; Ritvo 1987). The
exhibition of animals acted as a form of living library where this order could be
studied, displayed and communicated; and zoological societies strove to realise a
collection that could 'furnish every possible link in the grand procession of
organised life' (Ritvo 1996:46). Animals were valuable not merely corporeally, but
also for the information about the order of nature manifested in their forms and
functions, stabilised and made visible within the zoo (Stemerding 1993; Parry
2000). Individual animals were made to stand in for whole species and families: a
single lion signified all lions (Berger 1980). As indicated, the spatial arrangement of
animal cages reflected this ordering of nature. Anderson (1995:283) documents that
within Adelaide Zoo 'the exhibits were set out in conformity with prevailing
classifications based on visible characteristics—reptiles, birds, mammals and fish—
