Jane C. Desmond
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226144054
- eISBN:
- 9780226375519
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226375519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Behavior / Behavioral Ecology
In this book, author Jane C. Desmond offers a performative analysis of the social phenomena that construct human-animal relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Desmond explores the shared ...
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In this book, author Jane C. Desmond offers a performative analysis of the social phenomena that construct human-animal relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Desmond explores the shared conditions of embodiment and physical copresence that shape human relationships with animals. She begins by examining human interactions with the bodies of non-individuated animals, including museum exhibitions of dead animals and taxidermy displays. Desmond uses the Body Worlds exhibit of plasticized human corpses as a point of contrast to argue that while human corpses are put on display in a way that emphasizes their universality, exhibits featuring dead animal bodies invite genericization. The following sections of the book deal with known or individuated animals such as pets. Desmond analyzes animal burial and mourning practices, paying special attention to pet obituaries and pet cemeteries, and discusses the underlying implications of cross-species kinship. She compares these grieving practices to humans’ uncompassionate treatment of animal roadkill. In the last part of the book, Desmond explores the marketing of animal intimacy, in particular the marketing of artwork created by animals. She focuses on the body traces left by animal artists as well as the distinction between primates and other animals that make art. Ultimately, Desmond uses these various examples to question the complicated politics of human-animal relations and interactions.Less
In this book, author Jane C. Desmond offers a performative analysis of the social phenomena that construct human-animal relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Desmond explores the shared conditions of embodiment and physical copresence that shape human relationships with animals. She begins by examining human interactions with the bodies of non-individuated animals, including museum exhibitions of dead animals and taxidermy displays. Desmond uses the Body Worlds exhibit of plasticized human corpses as a point of contrast to argue that while human corpses are put on display in a way that emphasizes their universality, exhibits featuring dead animal bodies invite genericization. The following sections of the book deal with known or individuated animals such as pets. Desmond analyzes animal burial and mourning practices, paying special attention to pet obituaries and pet cemeteries, and discusses the underlying implications of cross-species kinship. She compares these grieving practices to humans’ uncompassionate treatment of animal roadkill. In the last part of the book, Desmond explores the marketing of animal intimacy, in particular the marketing of artwork created by animals. She focuses on the body traces left by animal artists as well as the distinction between primates and other animals that make art. Ultimately, Desmond uses these various examples to question the complicated politics of human-animal relations and interactions.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226610894
- eISBN:
- 9780226610924
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226610924.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter describes taxidermy and museum collections in relation to natural history. Philipp Leopold Martin's aim was to raise the profile of practice within natural history and simultaneously to ...
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This chapter describes taxidermy and museum collections in relation to natural history. Philipp Leopold Martin's aim was to raise the profile of practice within natural history and simultaneously to make living nature more accessible. A picture of the political economy of natural history in the German states is presented. A central theme of Martin's Praxis of Natural History was a reformist impulse to reconstruct dead animals in a way that was both “natural” and “lively.” Martin knew of both Herrmann Ploucquet's and Franz Leven's work and may have been inspired by them to pursue his own path to a private museum of animal reconstructions in the mid-1860s. The museums of Martin, Ploucquet, and Leven might be viewed as “public” in the sense of seeking a general audience, but they differed from the museums run by states, cities, and voluntary organizations.Less
This chapter describes taxidermy and museum collections in relation to natural history. Philipp Leopold Martin's aim was to raise the profile of practice within natural history and simultaneously to make living nature more accessible. A picture of the political economy of natural history in the German states is presented. A central theme of Martin's Praxis of Natural History was a reformist impulse to reconstruct dead animals in a way that was both “natural” and “lively.” Martin knew of both Herrmann Ploucquet's and Franz Leven's work and may have been inspired by them to pursue his own path to a private museum of animal reconstructions in the mid-1860s. The museums of Martin, Ploucquet, and Leven might be viewed as “public” in the sense of seeking a general audience, but they differed from the museums run by states, cities, and voluntary organizations.
Jane C. Desmond
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226144054
- eISBN:
- 9780226375519
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226375519.003.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Behavior / Behavioral Ecology
In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses ...
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In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses the challenges and particularities of the academic and scientific field of “animal studies”, as well as the functionality of experience and her own anxieties about what “animals” are actually involved in animal studies. Desmond wraps up the introduction with a general statement about the book’s purpose, and her hopes that it will help us understand how so many arenas of everyday life unfold in an embodied concert with animals.Less
In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses the challenges and particularities of the academic and scientific field of “animal studies”, as well as the functionality of experience and her own anxieties about what “animals” are actually involved in animal studies. Desmond wraps up the introduction with a general statement about the book’s purpose, and her hopes that it will help us understand how so many arenas of everyday life unfold in an embodied concert with animals.
Jane C. Desmond
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226144054
- eISBN:
- 9780226375519
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226375519.003.0002
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Behavior / Behavioral Ecology
In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s ...
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In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions of plastinated human cadavers. She suggests that even though both display bodies in aesthetically framed ways, the Body Worlds exhibit is a form of “antitaxidermy” and this distinction is key to the exhibit’s success. Through her analysis, Desmond shows how notions of human specificity, universality, and social differentiation are inscribed in or on the body in ways that are fundamentally different from those of nonhuman animals. She also discusses taxidermy, which she argues is a distinctive way of human relating with dead animals that melds uniqueness and genericism.Less
In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions of plastinated human cadavers. She suggests that even though both display bodies in aesthetically framed ways, the Body Worlds exhibit is a form of “antitaxidermy” and this distinction is key to the exhibit’s success. Through her analysis, Desmond shows how notions of human specificity, universality, and social differentiation are inscribed in or on the body in ways that are fundamentally different from those of nonhuman animals. She also discusses taxidermy, which she argues is a distinctive way of human relating with dead animals that melds uniqueness and genericism.
Jane C. Desmond
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226144054
- eISBN:
- 9780226375519
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226375519.003.0003
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Behavior / Behavioral Ecology
In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential ...
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In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential effects on viewers. She asks what is different between displays featuring human cadavers and those featuring dead animal bodies. Desmond argues that just as the human Body Worlds exhibits were, the animal exhibit is built on a series of omissions that construct its ultimate argument, but that these omissions differ from those that were essential to the human shows. Additionally, she discusses how the materialization of this newest exhibit takes place under a set of specific conditions of possibility, and those conditions are different for the human and the animal exhibits.Less
In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential effects on viewers. She asks what is different between displays featuring human cadavers and those featuring dead animal bodies. Desmond argues that just as the human Body Worlds exhibits were, the animal exhibit is built on a series of omissions that construct its ultimate argument, but that these omissions differ from those that were essential to the human shows. Additionally, she discusses how the materialization of this newest exhibit takes place under a set of specific conditions of possibility, and those conditions are different for the human and the animal exhibits.
Laura McMahon
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474446389
- eISBN:
- 9781474464710
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the ...
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This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the exhibition of animals both living and dead, still and moving, Côté’s film invokes two key metaphorical positionings (cinema as zoo/taxidermy), privileging a self-reflexive form of ontological investigation. This chapter traces these ontological investments by drawing on accounts such as Lippit on the ‘electric’ animal, Bellour on hypnotic animal images and Haraway on taxidermy. Folded into Bestiaire’s set of somewhat essentialising, ontologising reflections, however, is an implicit questioning of the politics of the zoo and its links to biopower, neocolonialism, captivity and suffering. Structured by these tensions between the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, Bestiaire reflects on the zoo both as a metaphor for cinematic ‘animality’ qua cinematic specificity and as a set of lived, material conditions. While Bestiaire’s distension of ‘dead time’ keeps the focus above all on questions of captivity – its durational aesthetic bearing witness to lives left in limbo – its Deleuzian time-images invite attentiveness to animal worlds of embodiment, perception and meaning-making that reach beyond the biopolitical grid of imprisoned life.Less
This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the exhibition of animals both living and dead, still and moving, Côté’s film invokes two key metaphorical positionings (cinema as zoo/taxidermy), privileging a self-reflexive form of ontological investigation. This chapter traces these ontological investments by drawing on accounts such as Lippit on the ‘electric’ animal, Bellour on hypnotic animal images and Haraway on taxidermy. Folded into Bestiaire’s set of somewhat essentialising, ontologising reflections, however, is an implicit questioning of the politics of the zoo and its links to biopower, neocolonialism, captivity and suffering. Structured by these tensions between the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, Bestiaire reflects on the zoo both as a metaphor for cinematic ‘animality’ qua cinematic specificity and as a set of lived, material conditions. While Bestiaire’s distension of ‘dead time’ keeps the focus above all on questions of captivity – its durational aesthetic bearing witness to lives left in limbo – its Deleuzian time-images invite attentiveness to animal worlds of embodiment, perception and meaning-making that reach beyond the biopolitical grid of imprisoned life.
Scott MacDonald
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190052126
- eISBN:
- 9780190052164
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” ...
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The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” filmmaking), locating these films within the tradition established a century ago by the development of the habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The habitat diorama provides precise documentation of the specifics of animal life that is, insofar as possible, devoid of political argument. The aim of the habitat diorama, and of the films discussed throughout the book, is to be as purely educational as cinema can be: the creator of the habitat dioramas and the film documents discussed provide precise visions of what the makers believe we need to see, in order to understand more of the world around us.Less
The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” filmmaking), locating these films within the tradition established a century ago by the development of the habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The habitat diorama provides precise documentation of the specifics of animal life that is, insofar as possible, devoid of political argument. The aim of the habitat diorama, and of the films discussed throughout the book, is to be as purely educational as cinema can be: the creator of the habitat dioramas and the film documents discussed provide precise visions of what the makers believe we need to see, in order to understand more of the world around us.
