Engaging with the Past: Zoos and Heritage

Engaging with the Past: February Group Meeting

The group met on Wednesday 25^th February to discuss the topic of ‘zoos’. This topic was partly prompted by the interests of one of the group regulars, Sarah May, who also co-authored one of the articles within the special issue journal we considered. Unfortunately, Sarah could not be present this month.

What was both interesting, surprising and in some senses incredibly obvious, was the prospect of thinking about zoos as a type of ‘museum’, with ‘exhibits’, some of which are in ‘cases’ and undergo curatorial choices in terms of particular representations. Additionally, Museums and Zoos both have parallel imperial histories, having been bound up with the promotion, representation and control of empire and colonial space. Both have historically exhibited the exotic ‘other’, through material culture or through ‘exotic’ animals, especially from the African continent. Both also have parallel nineteenth century contexts of ‘civilising’ public missions (see Helen Cowie’s research, below). Through curatorial choices in both institutions, such representation is also bound up with issues of control; through colonising the ‘wild’ or the ‘past’. Both the ‘wild’ and the ‘past’ are the creation of those with the power to represent them, through museum display or zoological interpretation, and such curatorial decisions are enacted in both spaces around their viewing publics – both zoos and museums exhibit ‘things’ (inanimate or alive) primarily for their visitors, from the perspective of being viewed. The artificial landscapes of zoos are perhaps more like theatres, for animals to perform being animals to humans.

However, zoos, like other examples of heritage, represents the particular ‘present’ in which they were created; the context and anxieties of their own time and changing social and political values. Whilst zoos may have historically been about displaying empire, power, entertainment and civilising missions, in the post-animal rights era, the focus is much more solidly on ‘conservation’ as justification for their continuation. However, perceiving zoos as institutions of conservation is itself a conception specific to later 20^th and early 21^st centuries, where will the focus shift to next? Whilst this relatively recent shift towards ‘conservation’ might appease some modern sensibilities surrounding the containment and display of animals, it nonetheless brings the connection between museums and zoos conceptually closer. Further, both zoos and museums have their *star* exhibits; their Mona Lisa’s, Turners, Pandas and Polar Bears. Like museums, such exhibits can be loaned or gifted for political, power and diplomatic reasons (the ‘diplomatic Panda’ move; think Parthenon sculptures being ‘loaned’ to a Russian Museum, point made by @greg_jenner). However, loaning is itself a power move, the power to loan is the power to rightfully own.

Sometimes the links between zoos and museums overlap, the World Museum in Liverpool is legally both a zoo and a museum (with an aquarium and insect house). However, Cumberland Natural History Museum in Portsmouth removed some of its aquaria to avoid becoming classified as a zoo, due to the expensive overheads and staffing this would bring forth. Museums currently have enough financial problems being a museum, let alone anything else.

One of the most interesting themes to emerge from our reading was what the zoo as an artificial and imagined landscape could tell us, or reflect about the social, cultural and political context of their locations. This in particular came through in Tony Axelsson and Sarah May’s article “Constructed Landscapes in Zoos and Heritage”. Here, the imagined, ‘other’, landscapes of zoos reflected their own national and local contexts. Whilst an imagined ‘Africa’ is often central within European zoo landscapes, Dublin Zoo’s ‘African Plains’ section reflected a sense of Irish natural cultural heritage through a particular mythical ‘wilderness’ specific to Ireland, performed through the use masses of water and lakes. What’s also important here is the sense that the ‘wild’ and the ‘wilderness’ are themselves human constructions, specific to cultural contexts and varying between different places and people. However, as far as landscape is concerned, what is also significant is the extent to which zoos are historical landscapes as much as ecological ones.

Andrew Shapland and David Van Reybrouck’s article “Competing Natural and Historical Heritage: The Penguin Pool at London Zoo” looked at the changing significance of this enclosure. Built in 1934, The Penguin Pool is Grade 1 listed for its architectural significance, however it has been empty of penguins for some time since its construction is not suitable for them, and indeed was causing joint problems and arthritis in the penguins. However, the pool was listed for its significance of being an important example of Modernist design, a movement which holds functionality and purpose at its core. The Penguin Pool has, in many respects, lost this purpose having lost its penguins; its “penguinness”. There are plans to insert penguin statues in this space, or create ‘bionic penguins’ to create a visitor experience based on a penguin’s point of view. London Zoo has several such enclosures which have long since been deemed unsuitable for living animals, but are considered architecturally significant. Will they remain empty? Will London Zoo itself become a sort of Zoo Museum? Cataloguing the way humans represented animals in the 20^th Century? Is London Zoo to become the Pitt Rivers of Zoos? The listing of enclosures has frozen London Zoo – and means it cannot reinvent itself in the way other zoos have, keeping the focus on ‘exhibiting’ without changing social values, architectural conservation over wildlife conservation. We began by thinking about zoos as museums conceptually, and ended by considering London Zoo as a possible Zoo Museum, a Zooseum if you will.

Twitter responses:

@essiepett recommended looking at the history of the Johannesburg Zoo in relation to its philanthropic history and desegregation before apartheid.

There was much in the way of silliness surrounding “penguinness” from @lottelydia and @ProfDaveAndress

TOPIC: Zoos

READING: Special Issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies: “Zoos as Heritage: An Archaeological Perspective” Volume 14, Issue 1, 2008 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13527250701711994#.VPRVQGVFCzk)

PRESENT: Jessica Moody, Katy Ball, Rob James and Thomas Rodgers

LOCATION: The Kings Street Tavern, Portsmouth.

FOOD: Carrot Cake.

DRINK: Yes.

Further Reading:

Helen Cowie works on zoos, nature and menageries in the nineteenth century http://www.york.ac.uk/history/staff/profiles/cowie/#publications

Ito, Takashi. London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828-1859. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014) (suggested through Twitter by @_MattShaw)