CONFERENCE:
Menageries and the Giving and Costly Pet

Saturday, February 8, 2014
Rhode Island Hall, Room 108

This conference explored the remarkable ways in which animals have been afforded space in human societies. Our speakers discussed this theme from two vantage points: the home and the menagerie (or zoo).

SCHEDULE

Each 30-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes for questions.

PARTICIPANTS & ABSTRACTS

Sarah Knight (University of Portsmouth, UK)
“My Family and Other Animals: Empirical and Psychological Approaches to Understanding Human-Animal Relationships”

This presentation provides an overview of the scientific study of human-animal relationships. The focus is on empirical research that has provided an understanding of psychological factors that underlie attitudes towards animals, and key findings that explain human-animal relationships, pet keeping in general, and pet keeping in older populations. A summary of some of the relevant research conducted by the speaker will be provided, together with key areas for future investigation.

Catherine J. Allen (George Washington University)
"Those Wild and Woolly Others: Human/Animal Relations in the High Andes"

For Quechua- and Aymara-speaking people in rural Andean communities the distinction between wild and domesticated is fundamental, affecting all aspects of life including relationships with animals.  My paper explores how interactions with wild animals (sallqa, e.g., foxes, bears, condors) entail modes of consciousness and temporal orientations distinct from those characteristic of quotidian relationships with domesticated creatures (uywa, e.g., llamas, sheep, dogs, children).

Peter Sahlins (University of California, Berkeley)
“How to Tame Your Chameleon: The Science and Love of an Exotic Species in the Age of Louis XIV"

This paper examines the lives and deaths of three chameleons in Paris between 1668 and 1673: one dissected by the French Royal Academy of Sciences under Claude Perrault; and two others kept by Madeleine de Scudery at her Parisian salon.  The paper explores how these chameleons, at once exotic specimens and domestic companions, became the object of science and the subject of love in the Age of Louis XIV.

Roel Sterckx (Cambridge University)
“Watching Humans Watching Animals in Early China”

The general paradigm that governs early Chinese views of the animal world is one of contingency between humans and animals. Human conduct -- and its ramifications in social and political life—was believed to have a moral impact on the animal realm; animals, in turn, were thought to behave in response to how humans conducted themselves. In this paper I will explore how, within this moralizing discourse, the tension between animals as objects and animals as companions may have played out. To do so I will focus on references to the pet, signifying animals, the image of caged animals and hunting parks.

Ian Miller (Harvard University)
"Power and Pathos: Sacrifice and the Culture of Imperial Catastrophe in Wartime Japan"

This paper explores the political utility of animals—as symbols and as living creatures—through an exploration of one of the strangest and most widely reported episodes from Japan during the Second World War: the mass-mediated sacrifice of famous elephants at Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoo in 1943.

Jeffrey Hyson (St. Joseph’s University)
"Making Pets at American Zoos"

What exactly is a "zoo animal"? Is it wild? tame? domesticated? Might it even be a pet? This paper will examine how animals at American zoos have been understood and categorized over the past one hundred and fifty years. By handling, breeding, naming, promoting, and observing zoo animals, Americans have both symbolically and practically transformed wild specimens into public pets. In the process, these redefined creatures have complicated and challenged some of the basic categories we use to describe the animal world.