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performances and physical presence of the animal which gave local expression and
meaning to these scientific understandings, and allowed them to engage with these
animals. Furthermore, the corporeal presence of the animals acted as a potent
reminder of their subjectivity and agency. The removal of living animals from the
spaces of our cities is to be celebrated in some respects, since animals have suffered
cruelty, indignity and death in the networks of the traditional zoo, but their fate as
endlessly circulated images—and the further disengagement of humankind from
animals—in the electronic zoo gives cause for further concern.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the networks of popular natural history as they define
and delimit the places occupied by animals in human culture. It has re-examined
the spatial practices of the traditional zoo, using this to explore the developments of
the electronic zoo. In the two empirical examples given there are important
overlaps. The electronic media do not determine a new way of looking at nature, but
enable the continued expansion and culmination of a subject—object relationship
forged in earlier modes of natural history. The geographical relationships are not
radically altered, but rather accelerated and extended in these new network
assemblages. What is different is the way that the animals are stabilised through
different forms of representation, in the shift from animal capture and display
through cages, bars and enclosures to the film technology and digital spaces of the
electronic zoo. The networks of the traditional zoo remind us that our constructions
of nature have always been mediated in various ways. However, I have argued that
the electronic zoo offers a different kind of place through which boundaries and
interactions between humans and non-human animals are recreated. In this
conclusion I speculate briefly on the nature of this new kind of place.
There is of course an extensive geographical literature on the meaning of place.
This has been recently enriched by reflection on the contribution of animals to
constructions of place (Philo 1995; Philo and Wolch 1998; Wolch and Emel 1998),
as well as speculations on the developments of cyberspace for our experience of place
(Adams 1998; Graham 1998). The first serves to remind us how people, plants and
animals are already interwoven into our everyday experiences of cities, suburbs,
country and wilderness. They recapture the ordinariness of the wild (Anderson
1997), seeking to relocate animals from their position within pristine utopias of
wilderness and to reclaim the heterogeneity of social spaces as ones shared between
humans and non-humans (Whatmore and Thorne 1998; Wolch
et al.
1995). The
second set of literatures on cyberspace contemplates whether these developing socio-
technical enterprises offer new spaces for exploring and communicating identity,
community and experience; what and who stands to benefit from access to the
spaces of virtual worlds, and conversely what is risked. Through conceiving of zoos
as places which are points in the branching networks and spatial processes of natural
history disciplines, I have been concerned with both of these reworkings of place,
and of course with the tensions between them.
