"100% Pure American Bison:" Environmental Networks and Animal Vitality in the American Zoo

• In Event: Creaturely Chronicles: Histories of Animal-Human Relations

Abstract

Iconic interspecies encounters define American environmental cultures within United States zoos. The legacies of the Zoo’s animal life extend beyond its representation and historical infrastructures (Smith 2017). Yet, embodied interspecies relationships between humans and non-humans have thus far been neglected within scholarly analysis of zoos as cultural institutions and the material networks that sustain them. This paper looks to the persistence of American bison (B. bison) in United States zoos—specifically the species’ mythic origin story at the Smithsonian National Zoo and their 2014 return to the Zoo’s Rock Creek Park campus. Working through the biography of conservationist William Temple Hornaday (b. 1854), Smithsonian exhibit design records, public reception, and the persistence of bison within zoo exhibition, I explore the extractive relationship between animals, embodiment, and hetero-national identity to argue that embodied interspecies encounters are central to the historical formation and ongoing function of American zoos. I prioritize the material networks of interspecies embodiment within and beyond zoos, and through national parks and agriculture. I necessarily expand upon the underlying ideas of zoos — their architectures and economies — to account for their animal life by analyzing the raced and sexualized paradigms that come to bear on animal husbandry and assisted reproduction. In doing so, zoo exhibits become participatory spaces of knowledge creation, as human and non-human animal bodies interact, collide, and even attempt to avoid each other—often in ways that are ideologically skewed and which limit more ethical conceptions of life across species lines.

Author

• Dominic Dongilli, University of Iowa