Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity, the concept of liminality has a special resonance for historical animal studies.
Assembling an impressive cast of contributors, this volume employs liminality as a lens through which to study the social and cultural history of animals in the modern city. It includes a variety of case studies, such as the horse-human relationship in the towns of New Spain, hunting practices in 17th-century France, the birth of the zoo in Germany and the role of the stray dog in the Victorian city, demonstrating the interrelated nature of animal and human histories.
Animal History in the Modern City is a vital resource for scholars and students interested in animal studies, urban history and historical geography.
Author(s): Clemens Wischermann (editor), Aline Steinbrecher (editor), Philip Howell (editor)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 264
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Liminality: A Governing Category in Animate History
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Liminal Lives in the New World
Liminal lives in Tenochtitlán
Blurring and clarifying the borders of human and non-human lives
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Liminal Moments: Royal Hunts and Animal Lives in and around Seventeenth-Century Paris
Noble horses and stray dogs: City, court and the animal kingdom
Hunting in the city: Louis XIII and the origins of game animals
Escaping the city: Versailles and the machinery of life and death
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Antisocial Animals in the British Atlantic World: Liminality and Nuisance in Glasgow and New York City, 1660–1760
Living nuisances
‘Zombie’ nuisances
Resisting liminality
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Canaries and Pigeons on the Threshold: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study of Liminal Animal Lives in a Southwest German Hometown
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: The Giraffe’s Journey in France (1826–7): Entering Another World
Preamble: Taking the giraffe’s standpoint?
Back to the giraffe: Her confusing arrival in Marseilles
Winter in Marseilles: Fear, puzzlement, adaptation
From Aix to Paris: The trauma of transit
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: The Elimination of the German Butcher Dog and the Rise of the Modern Slaughterhouse
No ordinary dog: The butcher dog in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany
The rise of the modern slaughterhouse and the elimination of the butcher dog32
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: It’s Just an Act! Dogs as Actors in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Europe
Dogs as liminal animals in the modern city
Liminal animal actors
Munito, the ‘wonderful dog’
Rudolf Lang and his performing dogs
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Between Wild and Domestic, Animal and Human, Life and Death: The Problem of the Stray in the Victorian City
Between wild and domestic: The Battersea Dogs’ Home and the problem of the ‘stray’
Between animal and human: Beastly slumming at the Dogs Home
Between life and death: The purgatory of the stray
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush: Humans, Leopards and Initiation in West African History
Expanding the ethnographic concept of liminality
When leopards come to town, the boys go to the forest
Colonial migration – or: From leopards to crocodiles
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11: Betwixt and Between: Making Makeshift Animals in Nineteenth-Century Zoological Gardens
Introduction: Articulating the history of the modern zoo
Betwixt and between: The zoo and the fair
Penning the animal: Imagining and representing captive animals
Liminal figures: Zoo workers as middlemen
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Liminality in the Post-War Zoo: Animals in East and West Berlin, 1955–61
The liminality of the zoo
Playing with the liminal: The design and orchestration of the zoo
The liminality of the zoo animal
The liminality of the Cold War era
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Backyard Birds and Human-Made Bat Houses: Domiciles of the Wild in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Cities
Birdhouses
Bat bridges
Building a wilder urban world
Notes
Bibliography
Index
