Beastly Natures

by Brantz, Dorothee

• ISBN13: 9780813929477
• ISBN10: 0813929474
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

Although the animal may be, as Nietzsche argued, ahistorical, living completely in the present, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in human history. The fascination with animals that leads not only to a desire to observe and even live alongside them, but to capture or kill them, is found in all civilizations. The essays collected in Beastly Natures show how animals have been brought into human culture, literally helping to build our societies (as domesticated animals have done) or contributing, often in problematic ways, to our concept of the wild.The book begins with a group of essays that approach the historical relevance of human-animal relations seen from the perspectives of various disciplines and suggest ways in which animals might be brought into formal studies of history. Differences in species and location can greatly affect the shape of human-animal interaction, and so the essays that follow address a wide spectrum of topics, including the demanding fate of the working horse, the complex image of the American alligator (at turns a dangerous predator and a tourist attraction), the zoo gardens of Victorian England, the iconography of the rhinoceros and the preference it reveals in society for myth over science, relations between humans and wolves in Europe, and what we can learn from society's enthusiasm for "political" animals, such as the pets of the American presidents and the Soviet Union's "space dogs." Taken together, these essays suggest new ways of looking not only at animals but at human history.Contributors: Mark V. Barrow Jr., Virginia Tech * Peter Edwards, Roehampton University * Kelly Enright, Rutgers University * Oliver Hochadel, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona * Uwe Lübken, Rachel Carson Center, Munich * Garry Marvin, Roehampton University * Clay McShane, Northeastern University * Amy Nelson, Virginia Tech * Susan Pearson, Northwestern University * Helena Pycior, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee * Harriet Ritvo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Nigel Rothfels, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee * Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University * Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
An Anthropological History of Animals and the Environment 2	p. 17
Touching Animals: The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals	p. 38
Wolves in Sheep's (and Others') Clothing	p. 59
Acculturating Wild Creatures
Darwin in the Monkey Cage: The Zoological Garden as a Medium of Evolutionary Theory	p. 81
Why the Rhinoceros Doesn't Talk: The Cultural Life of a Wild Animal in America	p. 108
The Alligator's Allure: Changing Perceptions of a Charismatic Carnivore	p. 127
Animals in the Service of Society
Nature Bridled: The Treatment and Training of Horses in Early Modern England	p. 155
The Public and Private Lives of ôFirst Dogsö: Warren G. Harding's Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala	p. 176
The Legacy of Laika: Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs	p. 204
Animating the City and the Countryside
The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City	p. 227
ôPoor Dumb Brutesö or ôFriends in Needö?: Animals and River Floods in Modern Germany and the United States	p. 246
Counting Sheep in the English Lake District: Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History	p. 264
Notes on Contributors	p. 281
Index	p. 285
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