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Continental Creatures: Animals and History in Contemporary Europe

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2018

ANDREW J. P. FLACK
ANDREW J. P. FLACK*
Affiliation:
Historical Studies, 13-15 Woodland Road, University of Bristol, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1TB; Andrew.flack@bristol.ac.uk
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Extract

In Norse mythology Fenrir, a wolf God born of the God of fire, possessed so much power that he horrified the other gods. Restrained by a chain forged from elements of the earth – such as the breath of fish and the roots of mountains – his power was held in check so that it could not be unleashed across the realms of gods and men. The chains of his captivity appeared to be fragile but were in fact supernaturally robust, though his eventual catastrophic escape was foretold by oracles of the age.

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Review Article
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Contemporary European History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 517 - 529
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 ‘Canis Lupus’, available at http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/3746/0 [last visited 23 August 2016].

2 L. Boitani, ‘Wolf Conservation and Recovery’, in L. D. Mech, and L. Boitani, eds., Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation, (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 317–40. For wider scholarship on post-war rural nostalgia, see Mendras, Henri, La Fin des Paysans: Innovations et changement dans le agriculture franaise(Paris: S.E.D.E.I.S 1967).Google Scholar

3 Regan, Tom, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Singer, Peter Animal Liberation (London: Cape, 1975).Google Scholar

4 Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allan Lane, 1984)Google Scholar; Evans, E. P., The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: W. Heinemann, 1906)Google Scholar. See also Radclyffe Dugmore, A., The Romance of the Beaver: Being the History of the Beaver in the Western Hemisphere (London: Heinemann, 1914)Google Scholar and Ritchie, James, The Influences of Man on Animal Life in Scotland: A Study in Faunal Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920)Google Scholar.

5 Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Ritvo has continued to shape the field in the years since: Ritvo, Harriet, The Platypus and the Mermaid and other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Ritvo, Harriet, ‘Animal Planet’, Environmental History, 9, 2 (2004), 204–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ritvo, Harriet, ‘Among Animals’, Environment and History, 20 (2014), 491–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 Plenty of recent works do an excellent job engaging with the real animal. Indeed, in many works the lives of animals are rendered visceral: Braitman, Laurel, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery help us Understand Ourselves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014)Google Scholar; Coleman, Jon, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Hribal, Jason, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Oakland: AK Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Mikhail, Alan, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (New York: Oxford, 2014)Google Scholar; Tucker Jones, Ryan, ‘Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from Below the Waves, The American Historical Review, 118, 2 (2013) 349–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’ <http://valplumwood.com/2008/03/08/being-prey/> (2000); Ritvo, Platypus; Walker, Brett L., ‘Animals and the Intimacy of History’, History & Theory, 52, 4 (2013), 45–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Recent works of note include Flack, Andrew, ‘In Sight, Insane: Animal Agency, Captivity and the Frozen Wilderness in the late Twentieth Century’, Environment and History, 22, 4 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Pearson, Chris, ‘Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58, 2 (2016), 463–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many of these works have been founded on insights drawn from the social sciences: Barad, Karen, ‘Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices’, in Biagioli, Mario, ed., The Science Studies Reader, (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–11Google Scholar; Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For an excellent delineation of these very recent innovations see Specht, Joshua, ‘Animal History after its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary Approaches, and the Animal Lens’, History Compass, 14, 7 (2016), 326–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See, for instance, Kean, Hilda, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998)Google Scholar.

11 See the following journals: Society & Animals, Critical Animal Studies, Anthrozoos.

12 Alberti, Samuel J. M. M., ed., The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Lorimer, Jamie, ‘Nonhuman Charisma: Which Species Trigger our Emotions and Why?’ ECOS, 27, 1 (2006), 20–7Google Scholar. For a fascinating exception see Thérèse Takeda, Junko, ‘Global Insects: Silkworms, Sericulture, and Statecraft in Napoleonic France and Tokugawa Japan’, French History, 28, 2 (2014), 207–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 On zoos see, for instance, Hanson, Elizabeth, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Miller, Ian Jared, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

14 Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28,2 (2002), 369–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Darwin, Charles R., On the Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection: or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859)Google Scholar; Darwin, Charles R., The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871).Google Scholar

16 Derrida, ‘Animal’. Also see Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002).

17 Specht, ‘Animal History after its Triumph’.

18 See the follow for examples of multispecies ethnographies: Eben Kirksey, S. and Helmreich, Stefan, ‘The emergence of interspecies ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology, 24, 4 (2010), 545–76Google Scholar; Fuetes, Agustín, ‘Natural cultural encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology’, Cultural Anthropology, 24, 4 (2010): 600–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Ingold, Tim, Lines: A Brief History (London and New York: Routledge, 2007Google Scholar;) Latour, Reassembling the Social.

20 Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 Adams, Carol and Donovan, Josephine, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emel, Jody, ‘Are you man enough, big and bad enough? Ecofeminism and Wolf Eradication in the USA’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (1995), 707–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).Google Scholar

22 Deleauze, Felix and Guattari, Gilles, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

23 See writings of French anarchists, including, for example, Michel, Louise, Mémoires tome I (Paris, 1886)Google Scholar, Chapter 9, and Fernand Pelloutier and Pelloutier, Maurice, La vie ouvrière en France (Paris: Schleicher frères, 1900)Google Scholar, Chapter 10.

24 The different cultural perceptions of a whole host of species have been considered in the Reaktion series of Animal books. There are also a few works that specifically deal with the notion of a hierarchy of being. See, for instance, Desmond, Jane C., Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

25 See, for instance, Pearson, Chris, Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of War and Militarization in Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).Google Scholar

26 Spiegel, Marjorie, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (London: Heretic, 1988)Google Scholar.

27 There is, of course, an ongoing scholarly conversation about whether or not the Holocaust can be judged to be ‘outside’ of history. See Bartov, Omer, ‘Seeking the Roots of Modern Genocide: On the Macro- and Microhistory of Mass Murder,’ in Gellately, Robert and Kiernan, Ben, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Man Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, CUP, 2003), 75–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Yehuda Bauer, ‘On the Holocaust and Other Genocides’, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D. C., 5 October 2006. 2006).

28 Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, Volume 3.

29 Cole, Tim, ‘“Nature was Helping Us”: Forests, Trees and Environmental Histories of the Holocaust’, Environmental History 19, 4 (2014), 665–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weber, Suzanne W., ‘The Forest as a Liminal Space: A Transformation of Cultural Norms during the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies, 14,1 (2008), 35–60.Google Scholar

30 Lestel, in Mackenzie, Louisa and Posthumus, Stephanie, eds., French Thinking about Animals (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2015), 65–71.Google Scholar