ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

(Mis)Understanding Animals? Biology, Epistemic Uncertainty, and Non-Human Animal Management in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The seminal conceptual moments in the modern history of biology – Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Haeckel’s coinage of “ecology,” the advent of the American conservation movement – often seem to impose a sense of epistemic linearity and order on the past. In practice, though, professional and lay understanding of non-human animals and their relationships to their environments often remained hotly contested, uneven, and plural deep into the twentieth century. Epistemic uncertainty and contestation swirled among biologists, wildlife managers, hunters, and everyday people as they sought better ways of co-existing with, exploiting, and understanding the creatures in their midst. These controversies about knowledge were also often collisions between different cultures, classes, and uses.

This panel examines a few exemplary sites of modern epistemic contestation over non-human animals. Jonathan Saha explores a conflict over a tiger killing in colonial Myanmar as a window into the differing ethical and epistemological relationships to animals on both sides of the imperial divide. Barrie Blatchford and Alice Gorton both take up the practice of “acclimatization” – the purposeful introduction of wild animals to a new ecosystem – in very different chronological and geographical contexts. They survey the ecological impact of the practice and the long-running epistemological debate about acclimatization’s value and scientific validity. Finally, Max Long scrutinizes the disputed worth of the non-native Little Owl in 1920s and 1930s Britain, which polarized a wide range of observers and prompted the scientific adjudication of the question via a diet test.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Claire Cage, University of South Alabama

Individual Presentations

• Man-Eater or Honest Tiger? Contested Ethology in Colonial Myanmar - Jonathan Saha, Durham University

• The Little Owl controversy in twentieth-century England: Gamekeepers, protectionists, and the science of bird diets - Max Long, Lincoln College, University of Oxford

• America’s “Global Goose-Chaser”: Nelson Gardiner Bump, the Foreign Game Introduction Program, and the Scientific Theory of Wild Animal Introductions - Barrie Blatchford, University of Northern British Columbia

• The Rat Catchers: A Political Ecology of British Jamaica, 1771-1880 - Alice Louise Gorton, Columbia University

Session Organizer

• Barrie Blatchford, University of Northern British Columbia