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Ethnobiology and Conservation
Currently there are many interfaces that allow the relationship between humans and animals, including zoos. Throughout history, the change in zoo structure has accompanied the social and cultural changes of human society. Nevertheless, despite the remarkable progress since early zoos were organized, there is still a great need for improvements of zoos around the world. A critical look at the relationship between humans and animals that led to the establishment of zoos was the aim of this study. Zoos currently follow some precepts (entertainment, education, research and conservation), however has not been enough to bind changes in zoos that still lack in accomplishing these pillars. Such lacks create a scenario for discussions between those who believe in the potential of conservation projects developed by zoos and those who find hostile and inadequate to animal life. It can be suggested that the bedrocks were the result of how human beings have perceived animals over time, since perception interferes with the way people deal with what surrounds them. In this way, the merely utilitarian vision of prehistoric times came from the perception that people had about animals at that time. Understanding the evolution of people's perception of animals and how this perception has influenced the configuration of zoos can tell us the directions they can take from now on. We believe that the next step is to turn our attention to the visitors, not only to meet their leisure expectations, but for them to become allies in the fight for biodiversity conservation.
Zoo Landscapes and the Construction of Nature. Kurt Braegger's landscape design of the Basel Zoo
European Architectural History Network Third International Meeting. Session: Histories of Environmental Consciousness. Conference Proceedings, Turin, Italy. , 2014
Since the 1950s zoos have taken up the mission to make their audience aware of conservational issues. The ideological shift towards conservational goals as well as public concerns about living conditions of captive wild animals influenced the concepts of zoo design. Zoos had to integrate popular imaginations about naturalness and scientific research on ecological issues, an ambivalent mixture between science and aesthetics. During the 1950s and the beginning 1960s planners have worked on a new master plan for the Zoological Garden of Basel in Switzerland. The old buildings of the nineteenth-century’s city zoo were demolished and replaced with animal houses styled according to post-war modernism. Veterinary and behavioural research as well as new materials like concrete, glass and tiles supported the conditions for conservational tasks like health and fertility. Nevertheless, the zoo’s environment should appear as a surrogate of Nature to enhance the public’s awareness of conservational concerns and ecological relations. The artist Kurt Brägger modelled illusionistic natural habitats with the help of a semiotic program, which transferred geomorphological structures of the regional landscape of Basel into the zoo. A dramaturgy of sight-lines and lightning effects led the visitors through the park to immerse the recipients into a coherent landscape experience. The new landscape design and the souterrain buildings of the 1960s relied on contemporary theoretical studies about walking experiences and phenomenological space. Conservational claims and ecological rhetorics were closely related to behavioural research on the relational space of territory and social behaviour. All these ideas influenced the design of Nature for both kind of users, for visitors and animals. The represention of zoological research contrasted the immersive effects of the popular themed exhibition space. Hence, the built environment of the zoo condensed and combined contradictory ideas of progress, conservation and reassurance.
Zoo and perceptions of animals and nature around 1900
2015
This article points out central historical themes in the debates and arguments given by the directors of Copenhagen Zoo for the zoo as an alternative to nature. When Copenhagen Zoo was founded in 1859, its purpose was divided equally between entertainment, enlightenment and symbolizing the glory of the Danish capital. During this period though, it also became possible for the zoo to stage itself as a kinder place for animals than “real” nature. In the early 20th century, the zoo attracted attention from animal rights movements, wherefore the debates came to be structured around two radically different perceptions of nature. The article takes its outset in the arguments formulated by the three successive directors: Julius Schiøtt, Waldemar Dreyer and Theodor Alving.
Looking at zoos from the perspective of zoo personnel, this article explores the importance of vision in the zoo’s presentation of its animals as well as the major technologies that the zoo uses to intensify such animal visions. On the one end of the spectrum, zoogeography and immersion design are used at the zoo exhibit to enable zoogoers to see animals in their naturalistic settings. On the opposite end of the spectrum, animals are caged and cared for in the highly artificial settings of the zoo’s holding area, with little or no exposure to the public gaze. In between these most visible and most invisible zoo spaces, the zoo also contains numerous other spaces with varying degrees of animal visibility. The zoo’s gift shops, carousels, and promenades, despite not being exhibit spaces per se, nonetheless relay an important message that translates the zoo’s mission of nature conservation into small acts of capital. Drawing on thirty-five semi-structured, in depth interviews conducted between May 2009 and December 2010, mostly with zoo directors, curators, registrars, and designers, the article moves beyond the established Foucaultian and post-Foucaultian notions of panopticon and exhibition to suggest that, rather than being an end in itself, the act of seeing practiced at the zoo serves to reify nature as a pre-existing entity and to reeducate the populace about the proper relationship between humans and animals.
H uman zoos are situated at the nexus of performance and subalternity whereby the latter articulates diversity/"alterity" with inequality and subjugation. In the case of the imperial and colonial forms of human zoo which are abundantly documented in this catalogue as well as in many studies in recent years, 1 the intercultural performance collapses under the weight of the subalternity of its actors/ extras which was sustained by the colonial system. The main victim of this performative implosion is inter-subjectivity. The analysis of artistic performances dealing with subalternity will show that this lack of inter-subjectivity allows us to repudiate human zoos on aesthetic grounds. Hence human zoos are not only ethically but also aesthetically bad performances.
Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of 'Human' Geography
This paper develops a cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that inscribes various human strategies for domesticating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide, South Australia, the paper charts the mutable discursive frames and practices through which animals were fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public by the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. The visual technologies at the Adelaide Zoo are documented from the time of menagerie-style caging in the late nineteenth century, through the era of the Fairground between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, up to the contemporary era of naturalistic enclosures when exhibits such as the fanciful World of Primates continue to craft the means for the human experience of nature. Woven into the story are more general themes concerning the construction of nature under colonialism, the gendered and racialized underpinnings of ‘human’ boundary-making practices in relation to ‘non-human’ animals and that form of power and possession known as domestication.