ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Jussieu’s Problem: Elephant Agency, Logistics, and the Embodied Colonial Archive

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 1

English Abstract

In 1795, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu of the Jardin des plantes was confronted with a unique problem: how do you transport two elephants (named Hans and Marguerite) roughly 500 kilometers from Het Loo in the Netherlands to Paris? Enormous efforts were mounted over a period of three years before they finally succeeded. In my paper, I will explore some counterfactuals in which the pachyderms are made to walk the whole way instead of relying on an (energy) expensive method of constructing iron cages, wagons, and drafting horses and boats to ferry the elephants to the menagerie—all this, in the midst of multifront war. Ultimately, I alight on a key figure of absence: the South Asian mahout, an elephant trainer and rider, who was an important player in previous instances of elephant transportation and without whom it was nearly impossible to get the elephants to move. Revisiting the erasure of the mahout further entails telling the history of mahouts and elephants in Ceylon, where Hans and Marguerite were originally captured. And through a more-than-human perspective centering Hans and Marguerite as agents, I argue that the elephants were an embodied colonial archive which, without (human) subaltern knowledge, was only rendered legible and pliable through the imperial logic of an energy-intensive solution. By the time I return to revolutionary France, I submit that what began as Jussieu’s problem was really Hans and Marguerite’s problem too. This work thus problematizes the sharing of techniques of animal management by focusing on peripheral knowledges which were elided and eliminated at the metropole.

Author

• Jed Chew, University of Chicago