Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life

747 Pages·2016·4.55 MB·English

by  Jane C. Desmond

Displaying Death and Animating Life
Animal Lives
A series edited by Jane C. Desmond, Barbara J. King, and Kim Marra
Displaying Death and Animating Life
Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and
Everyday Life
Jane C. Desmond
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
Jane C. Desmond is professor of anthropology and gender and women’s studies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-22614405-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-22614406-1 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-22637551-9 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226375519.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Desmond, Jane C., author.
Title: Displaying death and animating life : human-animal relations in art, science, and everyday life / Jane
C. Desmond.
Other titles: Animal lives (University of Chicago. Press) Description: Chicago ; London : The University of
Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Animal lives Identifiers: LCCN 2015046019 | ISBN 9780226144054 (cloth :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226144061 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226375519 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH:
Human-animal relationships. | Human-animal relationships in mass media. | Human-animal relationships in
art.
Classification: LCC QL85.D485 2016 | DDC 590—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046019
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Passionate Encounters with Animals in Everyday Life—Beyond
the Mainstream
Part One Theaters of the Dead: Humans and Nonhuman Animals
2 Postmortem Exhibitions: Taxidermied Animals and Plastinated Corpses in the
Theaters of the Dead
3 Inside “Animal” and Outside “Culture”: The Limits to “Sameness” and
Rhetorics of Salvation in von Hagens’s Animal Inside Out Body Worlds
Exhibition
Part Two Mourning and the Unmourned
4 On the Margins of Death: Pet Cemeteries and Mourning Practices
5 Grievable Lives and New Kinships: Pet Cemeteries and the Changing
Geographies of Death
6 Animal Deaths and the Written Record of History: The Inflammatory Politics
of Pet Obituaries in Newspapers
7 Requiem for Roadkill: Death, Denial, and Mourning on America’s Roads
Part Three Animating Life: Cognition, Expressivity, and the Art Market
Part Three Animating Life: Cognition, Expressivity, and the Art Market
8 “Art” by Animals, Part 1: The Transnational Market for Art by (Nonprimate)
Animals
9 “Art” by Animals, Part 2: When the Artist Is an Ape—Popular and Scientific
Discourse and Paintings by Primates
10 Conclusion: “Every Bird a ‘Blueboy’” and Why It Matters for “Animal
Studies”
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
It’s always such a pleasure to write the acknowledgments section of a book. No
book is written alone, whether we recognize the work of so many scholars
coming before us or the community of scholars and friends who provide the
context for new work and urge us on while providing the invigorating challenge
of engaged critique. This book has taken nearly a decade to complete in the
midst of other obligations and projects, and I have many individuals and
institutions to thank for sustaining me and this set of investigations along the
way.
In 1999, when I published Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki
to Sea World, which compared the “cultural tourism” industry with the “animal
tourism” industries in zoos and theme parks, the number of humanities scholars
who were taking “human-animal” relations seriously was relatively few. It’s
been exciting to be in on the ground floor of this emergent scholarly
community’s explosive growth. Now, colleagues at all career stages and across
multiple disciplines feel freer to focus on the human and nonhuman animal
interface, and this once neglected and very important aspect of social
organization is entering a period of intense development as increasingly,
institutional structures like conferences, book series (like the one I am editing at
the University of Chicago Press), and curricular changes adjust to this new arena
of knowledge production.
My own work was inspired by key scholars in animal studies during this
emergent period, many of whom made significant contributions in clearing a
space for important, intellectual community building and foundation-setting
conversations to happen. I particularly thank Nigel Rothfels, Erica Fudge, Kari
Weil, Harriet Ritvo, Ralph Acampora, Susan McHugh, Barbara J. King, Kim
Marra, and the many others whose names appear throughout the endnotes of this
work.
My superb editor at the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell, has been
essential to the development of this project. He maintained a passion for these
issues over a long period of time, even as they morphed into totally
unanticipated realms. His abiding support, creative mind, and stimulating
intellectual engagement deserve special recognition and personal thanks here.
Sincere thanks also to trenchant thinkers and generous colleagues Kim Marra
and Barbara J. King for joining me in starting a new Animal Lives book series at
Chicago, with Doug’s support. Working with Doug, Kim, and Barbara has been
a terrifically exciting and pleasurable experience that always advances my
thinking. Their influence is felt in these pages.
thinking. Their influence is felt in these pages.
Key institutional structures also helped me move ahead with this work, even
in its formative stages. At the University of Iowa, Jay Semel and the Obermann
Center for Advanced Studies offered a transformative setting off campus, and
support in terms of time released from teaching, for “Articulating the Animal,” a
faculty working group initiative that I co-convened in 2005–6 with my
marvelous colleague Teresa Mangum of the English Department. Meeting every
week with a small interdisciplinary group of colleagues (Ed Wasserman, Mary
Trachsel, Kim Marra, and Pamela White) invigorated my belief in animal studies
and shaped my thinking. An article from an art newspaper that Pam casually
dropped on my desk one day gave rise to the final third of this book, about art by
animals.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I moved in 2007, I
was fortunate once again to receive institutional support. A faculty fellowship
from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities brought my work on
this book into the rich interdisciplinary seminar ecology led by IPRH director
Diane Harris. The UIUC Center for Advanced Study, and especially associate
director Masumi Iriye, were my mainstays for “Knowing Animals: Histories,
Strategies, and Futures in Human-Animal Relations,” a yearlong, campus-wide
initiative I spearheaded in 2010–11. My graduate students in the associated
seminar, “Knowing Animals,” produced stimulating work that continued to
move my thinking forward, and I thank them, especially the artist Maria Lux,
and my assistant, Michele Hanks, now Dr. Hanks, for their passionate and
challenging engagement with the issues. In addition, the UIUC supported a
sabbatical in 2013–14 that enabled me to bring this manuscript to completion.
My colleagues in American Studies at Iowa and in the Departments of
Anthropology and of Gender and Women’s Studies at Illinois have also been
supportive, even when this work was far afield from their own. I especially
thank Paul Garber and Rebecca Stumpf of the UIUC Anthropology Department
for guiding me in my exploration of primatology. Most recently, colleagues at
the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine have become important
interlocutors as I continue to think about animals.
At the Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden, I thank the curatorial staff
for granting me access behind the scenes and for welcoming my research so
warmly. Scholars Linda Kalof, Georgina Montgomery, Julie Smith, Robert
Mitchell, Una Chaudhuri, Jonathan Skinner, Helen Kopnina, Eleanora
Shoreman-Ouimet, and others helped bring early versions of chapters to fruition
through invitations to contribute to their innovative edited books. Graduate
assistants and undergraduates at UIUC and at Iowa dug up important leads.
Thanks over the years especially to Nikki Taylor, Sharon Lake, Brian Hallstoos,
Thanks over the years especially to Nikki Taylor, Sharon Lake, Brian Hallstoos,
Danielle Rich, and Lance Larkin.
Audiences along the way—at the International Society for Anthrozoology
conferences, at many wonderful animal studies conferences, and at lectures at
the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College, Dublin, the
Polish Association for American Studies meetings in Lodz, the Summer School
for American Studies at Orientale University in Naples, Italy, and Miami
University of Ohio—all provided further stimulation in the form of probing
questions. The faculty and graduate student working group at the International
Forum for U.S. Studies at UIUC gave very helpful feedback on the mourning
chapters.
Longtime friends Lucy Winner, Barbara Streeter, and Mary Bennett may not
know how much their constancy means in a long-term project. Thank you for
sending stories and clippings about animals, and for supporting my ever-
changing passions. My parents, Dr. Alton Desmond and Dorothy Ann Garfield
Desmond, provided a model of engagement by welcoming animals into our
home and by encouraging risk taking in pursuing the exploration of new realms.
One of my formative memories is of Robbie, our rescued robin, hopping down
the hall on his daily rounds. Although both parents are gone now, their influence
remains: from them I learned early on to see animals as “subjects” in their own
right and to question received knowledge.
My deepest thanks go to Virginia Dominguez, an extraordinary scholar and
thinker, and one who shares my deep passion for animals and for understanding
our human relations with them. She has accompanied me literally and
figuratively on this book’s journey for nearly a decade, bumping along rutted
roads to a country pet cemetery outside Rio, stopping at old bars in Wisconsin so
I could take pictures of comedic taxidermy installations, purchasing numerous
paintings produced by animal beings like Michael the gorilla, and welcoming
into our home felines Mocha and Pumpernickel; parakeets Zsuzsa and Mr.
Miklos, Sydney, Pesto, and Blueboy; rabbits Baylor, Chwistopher, Jasmine, and
Giorgio; and Mama the dog. Each of these nonhuman animals has been an
inspirational part of my life, and I thank them, as I thank my human
interlocutors, for challenging my assumptions about what “animals among us”
might mean for us, both as scholars and as citizens.
Earlier versions of some of the work in this book appeared as articles or
chapters in the following publications. I thank the publishers for the opportunity
to draw on them again in this manuscript, and I send huge thanks too to editor
(and animal lover) Linda Forman for helping me tame the mix of multiple styles
into one seamless whole.