Harriet Ritvo

on the animal turn

offers several narratives of its past. Though they speak of the same place, each of these narratives is radically different, depending on the narrator’s ethnic-religious identity. For the Jews, a town like Buczacz was a venerable old shtetl. For the Ukrainians, it was part of their ancestral lands, ruled and exploited by the Poles and their Jewish agents. For the Poles, it was a borderland they had civilized and protected from savage invaders from the east and the south, an outpost of European culture and Roman Catholic faith. While undertaking this research, I became fascinated as well with the current Ukrainian politics of memory, and how they relate to a past largely unknown to the present population. My ruminations on this issue culminated in a book, which Princeton University Press is publishing this fall, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, a journey in time and space into this cradle of Jewish mysticism, Ukrainian nationalism, and Polish Romanticism. Since its independence, Ukraine has been obliterating the last remnants of Jewish civilization from this region and replacing them with the symbols of a resurgent local nationalism. The book documents cemeteries turned into markets, synagogues made into garbage dumps and sports halls, unmarked sites of mass killings, and staircases made out of gravestones. Conversely, it also reveals the rapid erection of statues, memorials, and museums that not only celebrate the Ukrainian nation but also glorify nationalist leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of the Jews. The book includes sixty out of hundreds of photographs I took in order to record this second destruction as well as the rapidly vanishing remnants of a world that is no more. Learned attention to animals is far from new. The scienti1⁄2c study of animals stretches back at least to Aristotle. Livestock have attracted the interest of scholars with either a practical or theoretical interest in agriculture. Critics of art and literature have explicated animal symbols and animal themes. Historians

Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient Britons

BEGINNING IN THE SECOND HALF of the eighteenth century, British public attention was intermittently captivated by a small but distinguished group of cattle. These striking animals were white (a color not usually favored by British stockbreeders); they were powerfully built; and they roamed the parks of their wealthy proprietors untroubled by the restraints that conditioned the existence of ordinary domestic beasts. At the time when widespread celebration of the breeding methods associated with Robert Bakewell emphasized the vulnerability of livestock animals to human manipulation, these cattle gloried in their wildness.! The most famous of them lived at Chillingham, the remote Northumberland seat of the earls of Tankerville, and other herds, the number of which fluctuated constantly, were scattered across northern England and southern Scotland. Many of these herds were founded during the nineteenth century by landowners who admired the animals. So compelling was their appeal that proprietors who could not afford such a substantial investment in fancy livestock nevertheless occasionally commissioned portraits of their estates adorned by white cattle that, as far as can be determined from any corroborating historical records, never lived there.2 Imposing though it was, the physical presence of these animals accounted only in part for their appeal to the British imagination. Their figuration in a variety of discourses-from elite cultural productions to the technical literature of agriculture and natural history to mass-market journalism-suggested that they also carried a serious symbolic charge for a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences. That they were, without question, magnificent animals did not sufficiently explain their charisma. Eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain was well supplied with animals who might, from one perspective or another, claim magnificence (caged lions, mountainous swine, sheep with eight legs); most of them were lucky to attract attention as simple curiosities. The qualities embodied by (or associated with) certain animals, however, linked them metaphorically or metonymically with issues of great or contentious concern in the human arena. Such connections were powerful, whether or not they were explicit or even manifest to those who made them. The interpretive process that they

The Periodical Press in Eighteenth-Century English and French Society: A Cross-Cultural Approach

Historians have long recognized that the large body of periodical literature surviving from the eighteenth century, along with the smaller amount preserved from the seventeenth century, is an important source of insight into the early development of modern society in the West. Newspapers and other periodicals—magazines, reviews, and a miscellany of other publications difficult to characterize precisely—provided eighteenth-century readers with fundamental information about their world and with news of the ways in which it was changing. It is not surprising that this voluminous printed record also yields evidence to those seeking to understand that world from the vantage point of a subsequent era.

Manchester v. Thirlmere and the Construction of the Victorian Environment

The proposed conversion of Thirlmere, in the Lake District, into a reservoir for the city of Manchester sparked a conflict that has served as a prototype for subsequent environmental confrontations. The debate had a heavy symbolic charge: the icon of progress confronted the icon of unspoiled countryside. During construction, and even after the reservoir opened in 1894, critics attempted a rearguard defense of what they regarded as the pristine Lake District landscape. The appeal of the pristine was the most compelling element of anti-reservoir arguments, but the exigencies of municipal progress proved still more powerful.

Beasts in the jungle (or wherever)

Dædalus Spring 2008 When Byron wrote that “the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold” (“The Destruction of Sennacherib,” 1815), his audience had no trouble understanding the simile or feeling its force, even though wolves had not threatened most British flocks since the Wars of the Roses. Almost two centuries later, expressions such as “the wolf is at the door” remain evocative, although the Anglophone experience of wolves has diminished still further. For most of us, they are only to be encountered (if at all) in zoos or in establishments like Wolf Hollow. Located in Ipswich, just north of Boston, Wolf Hollow is the home of a pack of gray wolves who live a sheltered suburban existence behind a high chain-link fence. Their captivity has modi1⁄2ed their nomadic habits and their 1⁄2erce independent dispositions. (The pack was established twenty years ago with pups, so that only inherent inclinations, and not con1⁄2rmed behaviors, needed to be modi1⁄2ed.) Their relationship with their caretakers seems affectionate and playful, sometimes even engagingly doglike–so much so that visitors need to be warned that it would be very dangerous for strangers to presume on this super1⁄2cial affability. The animals themselves give occasional indications that they retain the capacities of their freeroaming relatives–that though apparently reconciled to con1⁄2nement, they are far from tame. When large, loud vehicles rumble past on nearby Route 133, the wolves tend to howl. And despite their secure enclosure within the builtup landscape of North American sprawl, their calls evoke the eerie menace that has immemorially echoed through the wild woods of fairy tale and fable. The symbolic resonance of large ferocious wild animals–the traditional repHarriet Ritvo

The London Zoo and the Victorians 1828–1859: Creatures Great and Small

The Zoological Society of London was established in 1826, and its menagerie in Regents Park opened two years later. Even before the animals were available for public inspection it attracted anticip...

Creatures Great and Small

The Zoological Society of London was established in 1826, and its menagerie in Regents Park opened two years later. Even before the animals were available for public inspection it attracted anticip...

The London Zoo and the Victorians 1828–1859

The Zoological Society of London was established in 1826, and its menagerie in Regents Park opened two years later. Even before the animals were available for public inspection it attracted anticip...

Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850

his later years, to his profit. In formal terms, a knighthood in 1897 and the presidency of the Royal Society in 1913 were culminations. As this summary suggests, Crookes’ career was multifarious, but with multiple cris-crossing interconnections between its various stages. Another unifying motif, according to Brock, was the entrepreneurial drive in which experimental skill and theoretical insight were pressed to commercial advantage. Yet without belabouring the point, Brock also suggests a nuance to the commercialization of science: for Crookes, the value was measured not such much quantitatively in the manner of a modern corporation as in the personal values of professional respect and social status. In achieving this goal, Crookes evidently succeeded. Although it is hard to criticize this (literally and figuratively) hefty book for not doing more, one might wish for more comparative examinations: was Crookes’s mode of commercialization idiosyncratic or common in the Victorian social context? How did more academically ‘mainstream’ chemists perceive and receive Crookes’s work? Anyone interested in the history of chemistry or in the history of the organization of science in nineteenthcentury Britain will be inspired with such questions by reading Brock’s richly detailed account.

Making Animals Real

We are frequently told that animals are good to think with. That they can be hard to write about is mentioned less often. One reason for this may be that there is voluminous evidence to the contrary: a steadily increasing stream of academic books and articles about animals, and even an emergent field called ‘animal studies’. Like many labels, however, this one is an umbrella, convenient rather than definitive. The nature of the animals (or, more abstractly, ‘the animal’) discussed in the work it subsumes is extremely varied. At least potentially, it conflates all non-human kinds, from ants to zebras. (This generous, homogenizing embrace produces its own limitations, of course, and it is still more likely to submerge the experiences of individual animals.) Since such work is normally produced by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, rather than by zoologists or veterinarians, it describes or engages a range of human relationships with other creatures. One relationship, however, is oddly absent—or perhaps not so oddly, in view of the conventional constraints on academic prose. As Donna Haraway points out in When species meet, people in general are extremely likely to own companion animals. In 2006, about 63 percent of American households had pets, including 73.9 million dogs and 90.5 million cats, among many other kinds of animals (p. 47). It is probably safe to assume (based on anecdote and observation, rather than statistics) that scholars who choose other animals or human–animal relationships as their research area are even more likely to live with domesticated animals than are other members of their society. Perhaps—to speculate more extravagantly—they are more likely to volunteer at humane societies and zoos, or to go birding or otherwise seek out wild animals on their own turf. But this concrete experience with animals seldom surfaces in their scholarship, although it may underlie and inform it. And the personality and experience of their animal subjects tends to be similarly elusive. In both Haraway’s When species meet (along with some of her earlier work) and Sarah Franklin’s Dolly mixtures: The remaking of genealogy, on the contrary, members of their touchstone species are insistently present. The books themselves are very different, although each author is appreciatively aware of the other’s work. Haraway takes the acknowledgment of animal presence as her subject and her mission in When species meet, beginning with the question ‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’ then declaring that ‘I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from the ordinary’(p. 3). Franklin’s ovine subjects emerge in her discussion more obliquely. Her opening questions are less tactile, more conventionally abstract and academic: for example, she asks ‘how we can position a shapeshifting sheep within a broader discussion about kind and type, species and breed, sex and nation, empire and colony, capital and livestock?’(p. 4). And of course, dogs and sheep are very different creatures, both intrinsically and in their relation to humans, although some of them have a long shared history. It is also significant that the individual animal who anchors Haraway’s narrative is her own beloved companion Cayenne Pepper, who would have no public profile if she did not live with a distinguished scholar, while the individual animal who anchors Franklin’s narrative was an international celebrity, who was reported to enjoy the human attention that attended her fame while she