Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
BBC's Natural History Unit for introducing me to the Wildscreen project, and to
Wildscreen for use of the image. The support of the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1
I use the term 'virtual animal' to signal the growing distance between the body of the
animal and its image, as created through the increased ability to manipulate and to
recontextualise images of animals. There is of course no clear-cut boundary between
older forms of visual capture such as photography, film or taxidermy and newer
technologies of digital imagery or animatronics. However, through these more
dynamic technologies, representations of animals can be made to perform, inhabit and
even reproduce within digital spaces. What I have labelled the 'electronic zoo' is a
space at the centre of the processes through which such virtual animals are created,
managed and displayed. Many of these animals are not truly virtual, in that they
ultimately do have an 'original', although this is perhaps not the case for extinct
animals only visually known to living humans through their capture on film or re-
creation in computer graphics. This issue is increasingly problematic for many of the
representational strategies used to create images of wildlife. This use of the term
'virtual animals' in this sense is perhaps provocative, but I hope that it is productive.
2
The adoption of ideas from 'actor-network theory' (ANT) and science studies can be
seen as part of an ongoing geographical project to challenge the dualisms of Western
experience and intellectual thought. Increasing numbers of geographical writers are
using the ideas of ANT (as contained in, e.g., Callon 1986; Latour 1987 1988, 1993;
Law 1991, 1994) to explore the assemblages of nature, technology and society with
which the discipline is concerned (Bingham 1996; Demeritt 1996; Hinchliffe 1996;
Murdoch and Clark 1994; Murdoch and Marsden 1995). There are now a number of
thoughtful introductions to the scope and limitations of this work in the geographical
literature (Amin and Thrift 1995; Murdoch 1997a, 1997b; Whatmore 1999).
3
This is demonstrated in the work of Outram (1996), who suggests that the Musée
National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, founded in 1793, acted as a microcosm where
debates on the use of space in the museum mirrored a period of transition in natural
history. Cuvier, trying to pioneer an approach to natural history which related living
beings through their internal structures rather than external characteristics, clashed
with his brother Frédéric, director of the zoo, over the appropriate allocation of space
between the living animals and the anatomy galleries.
4
There is a burgeoning academic literature on the institution of the zoo, which
particularly focuses on the establishment of European and colonial zoos from the mid-
nineteenth to the twentieth century, and on the parallel developments of American
zoological gardens (Anderson 1995; Hoage and Deiss 1996; Jardine et al. 1996).
These histories and geographies of zoological institutions usefully contextualise and
denaturalise different forms of animal display, revealing rich portraits of individual
organisations while reflecting more broadly on the range of processes through which
knowledge about nature is (re-)created (Allison 1995).
5
The German animal collector Carl Hagenbeck was perhaps the last of the great animal
traders (Montgomery 1995). He built an enormous capture—transport—delivery
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