Download or read book The Breathless Zoo written by Rachel Poliquin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to contemporary animal art, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing examines the cultural and poetic history of preserving animals in lively postures. But why would anyone want to preserve an animal, and what is this animal-thing now? Rachel Poliquin suggests that taxidermy is entwined with the enduring human longing to find meaning with and within the natural world. Her study draws out the longings at the heart of taxidermy—the longing for wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. In so doing, The Breathless Zoo explores the animal spectacles desired by particular communities, human assumptions of superiority, the yearnings for hidden truths within animal form, and the loneliness and longing that haunt our strange human existence, being both within and apart from nature.
Download or read book Why Do We Go to the Zoo written by Erik A. Garrett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite hundreds of millions of visitors each year, zoos have remained outside of the realm of philosophical analysis. This lack of theoretical examination is interesting considering the paradoxical position within which a zoo is situated, being a space of animal confinement as well as a site that provides valuable tools for species conservation, public education, and entertainment. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? argues that the zoo is a legitimate space of academic inquiry. The modes of communication taking place at the zoo that keep drawing us back time and time again beg for a careful investigation. In this book, the meaning of the zoo as communicative space is explored. This book relies on the phenomenological method from Edmund Husserl and a rhetorical approach to examine the interaction between people and animals in the zoo space. Phenomenology, the philosophy of examining the engaged everyday lived experience, is a natural method to use in the project. Despite its rich history and tradition it is interesting that there are very few books explaining “how to do” phenomenology. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? provides a detailed account of how to actually conduct a phenomenological analysis. The author spent thousands of hours in zoos watching people and animals interact as well as talking with people both formally and informally. This book asks readers to bracket their preconceptions of what goes on in the zoo and, instead, to explore the meaning of powerful zoo experiences while reminding us of the troubled history of zoos.
Download or read book Savages and Beasts written by Nigel Rothfels and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-10-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world's undisputed leader in the capture and transport of exotic animals. His business included procuring and exhibiting indigenous peoples in highly profitable spectacles throughout Europe and training exotic animals - humanely, Hagenbeck advertised - for circuses around the world.
Download or read book Zoo Culture written by Bob Mullan and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people go to zoos? Is the role of zoos to entertain or to educate? In this provocative book, the authors demonstrate that zoos tell us as much about humans as they do about animals and suggest that while animals may not need zoos, urban societies seem to. A new introduction takes note of dramatic changes in the perceived role of zoos that have occurred since the book's original publication. "Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin delve into the assumptions about animals that are embedded in our culture. . . . A thought-provoking glimpse of our own ideas about the exotic, the foreign." -- Tess Lemmon, BBC Wildlife Magazine "A thoughtful and entertaining guided tour." -- David White, New Society "[An] unusual and intriguing combination of historical survey, psychological enquiry, and compendium of fascinating facts." -- Evening Standard
Download or read book Zooland written by Irus Braverman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a unique stance on a controversial topic: zoos. Zoos have their ardent supporters and their vocal detractors. And while we all have opinions on what zoos do, few people consider how they do it. Irus Braverman draws on more than seventy interviews conducted with zoo managers and administrators, as well as animal activists, to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of zooland. Zooland begins and ends with the story of Timmy, the oldest male gorilla in North America, to illustrate the dramatic transformations of zoos since the 1970s. Over these decades, modern zoos have transformed themselves from places created largely for entertainment to globally connected institutions that emphasize care through conservation and education. Zoos naturalize their spaces, classify their animals, and produce spectacular experiences for their human visitors. Zoos name, register, track, and allocate their animals in global databases. Zoos both abide by and create laws and industry standards that govern their captive animals. Finally, zoos intensely govern the reproduction of captive animals, carefully calculating the life and death of these animals, deciding which of them will be sustained and which will expire. Zooland takes readers behind the exhibits into the world of zoo animals and their caretakers. And in so doing, it turns its gaze back on us to make surprising interconnections between our understandings of the human and the nonhuman.
Download or read book American Zoo written by David Grazian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close-up look at the contradictions and wonders of the modern zoo Orangutans swing from Kevlar-lined fire hoses. Giraffes feast on celebratory birthday cakes topped with carrots instead of candles. Hi-tech dinosaur robots growl among steel trees, while owls watch animated cartoons on old television sets. In American Zoo, sociologist David Grazian takes us on a safari through the contemporary zoo, alive with its many contradictions and strange wonders. Trading in his tweed jacket for a zoo uniform and a pair of muddy work boots, Grazian introduces us to zookeepers and animal rights activists, parents and toddlers, and the other human primates that make up the zoo's social world. He shows that in a major shift away from their unfortunate pasts, American zoos today emphasize naturalistic exhibits teeming with lush and immersive landscapes, breeding programs for endangered animals, and enrichment activities for their captive creatures. In doing so, zoos blur the imaginary boundaries we regularly use to separate culture from nature, humans from animals, and civilization from the wild. At the same time, zoos manage a wilderness of competing priorities—animal care, education, scientific research, and recreation—all while attempting to serve as centers for conservation in the wake of the current environmental and climate-change crisis. The world of the zoo reflects how we project our own prejudices and desires onto the animal kingdom, and invest nature with meaning and sentiment. A revealing portrayal of comic animals, delighted children, and feisty zookeepers, American Zoo is a remarkable close-up exploration of a classic cultural attraction.
Download or read book The Animal Game written by Daniel E. Bender and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spread of empires in the nineteenth century brought more than new territories and populations under Western sway. Animals were also swept up in the net of imperialism, as jungles and veldts became colonial ranches and plantations. A booming trade in animals turned many strange and dangerous species into prized commodities. Tigers from India, pythons from Malaya, and gorillas from the Congo found their way—sometimes by shady means—to the zoos of major U.S. cities, where they created a sensation. Zoos were among the most popular attractions in the United States for much of the twentieth century. Stoking the public’s fascination, savvy zookeepers, animal traders, and zoo directors regaled visitors with stories of the fierce behavior of these creatures in their native habitats, as well as daring tales of their capture. Yet as tropical animals became increasingly familiar to the American public, they became ever more rare in the wild. Tracing the history of U.S. zoos and the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied them, Daniel Bender examines how Americans learned to view faraway places and peoples through the lens of the exotic creatures on display. Over time, as the zoo’s mission shifted from offering entertainment to providing a refuge for endangered species, conservation parks replaced pens and cages. The Animal Game recounts Americans’ ongoing, often conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as anachronistic prisons by animal rights activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.
Download or read book Animal Attractions written by Elizabeth Hanson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed.
Download or read book Reading Zoos written by Randy Malamud and published by MacMillan. This book was released on 1998 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of modern depictions of zoos, Reading Zoos presents a paradigm of how these institutions, and a range of reactions to them, illuminate the workings of our cultural sensibilities. The book explores how the nature of zoos and their significance to cultural consumers is portrayed in over 100 works. It explores what animals' captivity signifies about the people who create, maintain, and patronize zoos; Malamud argues that zoos represent a cultural danger, a deadening of our sensibilities, because the institutions - rather than fostering an appreciation for animals' attributes - convince spectators that people are the imperial species.
Download or read book A Wild Day at the Zoo written by Victor Dias de Oliveira Santos and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Book 2 in the multi-award-winning Little Polyglot Adventures series and the sequel to Book 1 (Dylan's Birthday Present). The city zoo is holding a very special event. Today, guests can bring their own pets to the zoo! Of course, all city residents want to join in on the fun. Dylan and Isabella, the little polyglot siblings, see this as a great opportunity for Kiki, Dylan's pet chicken, to meet her animal friends. However, things get a bit out of control when Kiki is left unattended. In this fun and colorful story, children will learn about the importance of thinking outside the box and using their imagination and creativity to solve difficult problems. While reading this book, kids will learn six new words in different languages and feel like little polyglot themselves!This book is also available in a coloring-book version.
Download or read book Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo written by Daniel Vandersommers and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded amid the urban commotion of Washington, DC, before the dawn of the twentieth century, the National Zoological Park opened to “preserve, teach, and conduct research about the animal world.” Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo is a study of this important cultural landmark from 1887 to 1920. Centered on the animals themselves, each chapter looks from a different angle at the influential science of popular zoology in order to shed new light on the complex, entangled relationships between humans and animals. Daniel Vandersommers’s goal is twofold. First, through narrative, he shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. The author shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering. Second, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book London Zoo and the Victorians 1828 1859 written by Takashi Ito and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London Zoo examined in its nineteenth-century context, looking at its effect on cultural and social life At the dawn of the Victorian era, London Zoo became one of the metropolis's premier attractions. The crowds drawn to its bear pit included urban promenaders, gentlemen menagerists, Indian shipbuilders and Persian princes - CharlesDarwin himself. This book shows that the impact of the zoo's extensive collection of animals can only be understood in the context of a wide range of contemporary approaches to nature, and that it was not merely as a manifestation of British imperial culture. The author demonstrates how the early history of the zoo illuminates three important aspects of the history of nineteenth-century Britain: the politics of culture and leisure in a new public domain which included museums and art galleries; the professionalisation and popularisation of science in a consumer society; and the meanings of the animal world for a growing urban population. Weaving these threads altogether, hepresents a flexible frame of analysis to explain how the zoo was established, how it pursued its policies of animal collection, and how it responded to changing social conditions. Dr Takashi Ito is Associate Professor in Modern British History, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Download or read book Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage written by Mia Ridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ’crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.
Download or read book Turtle Back Zoo written by Brint Spencer and Caitlin A. Sharp and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 140 animals of 40 species, the Turtle Back Zoo opened in 1963 as a seasonal children's zoo. The community and county government brought the zoo to life, while the Essex County Park Commission administered its daily functions. With funds generated from the sale of land for highway development, architects and builders selected a fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen aesthetic for their theme. Once opened, Turtle Back Zoo was an instant success, and its popularity led to it becoming a year-round attraction that appealed to all ages. The family recreation experience came to include wildlife conservation education as well. In the early 2000s, the zoo was renovated, and a first-class animal hospital was built to serve the growing animal collection. The site is now recognized as a first-rate, modern zoo and is accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.
Download or read book Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World written by Christoph Wulf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume develops a unique framework to understand India through indigenous and European perspectives, and examines how it copes with the larger challenges of a globalized world. Through a discussion of religious and philosophical traditions, cultural developments as well as contemporary theatre, films and media, it explores the manner in which India negotiates the trials of globalization. It also focuses upon India’s school and education system, its limitations and successes, and how it prepares to achieve social inclusion. The work further shows how contemporary societies in both India and Europe deal with cultural diversity and engage with the tensions between tendencies towards homogenization and diversity. This eclectic collection on what it is to be a part of global network will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, philosophy, sociology, culture studies, and religion.
Download or read book Dictionary of Zoo Biology and Animal Management written by Paul A. Rees and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary is intended as a guide to the terminology used in a wide range of animal-related programmes of study including agriculture, animal care, animal management, animal production, animal welfare, veterinary nursing, wildlife conservation and zoo biology. In total it contains over 5,300 entries. It contains a wide range of terms used in the fields of veterinary science, physiology and zoology, as students whose primary interests are animal welfare or zoo biology also need to have some understanding of disease, how animal bodies function and how animals are classified. It also contains some legal terms, and reference to some legal cases, to help students understand how the protection, use and conservation of animals is regulated by the law. Some people, famous animals, literature and films have influenced the way we think about, and behave towards, animals. For this reason, the book includes references to important books about animals, famous animals who have starred in films or been the subject of scientific studies, along with short biographies of famous scientists and others who have studied animals or established conservation or animal welfare organisations.
Download or read book Zoo and Aquarium History written by Vernon N. Kisling, Jr and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild animals have been housed in zoos and aquariums for 5,000 years, fascinating people living in virtually every society. Today, these institutions are at a new milestone in their history. This second edition of Zoo and Aquarium History takes the reader on a journey through the transition of private collections to menageries, to zoos, then zoological gardens, and more recently conservation centers and sanctuaries. Under the direction of Vernon N. Kisling, an expert in zoo history, an international team of authors has thoroughly updated the only comprehensive, global history of animal collections, menageries, zoos, and aquariums. The resulting book documents the continuum of efforts in maintaining wild animal collections from ancient civilizations through today, explaining how modern zoos have developed their mission statements around the core aims of conservation, education, research and recreation. This new edition pulls together regional information, including new chapters on zoological gardens of Canada, Latin America, China, Israel, the Middle East, and New Zealand, along with the cultural aspects of each region to provide a foundation upon which further research can be based. It presents a chronological listing of the world's zoos and aquariums and features many never-before published photographs. Sidebars present supplementary information on pertinent personalities, events, and wildlife conservation issues. The original Appendix has been expanded to include over 1,200 zoos and aquariums, providing an invaluable resource. This is an extensive, chronological introduction to the subject, highlighting the published and archival resources for those who want to know more.