Articulating the Animal
Participants in Articulating the Animal addressed the deceptively simple question, "What is an animal?" Researchers examined how each of their particular disciplinary definitions, associations, assumptions, distinctions, uses, fears, and fantasies about animals produce elaborate systems of meaning about individual animals, species, and human-animal relationships.
In Iowa, it is widely assumed that, with an occasional exception such as biology, studies of the animal should be stabled at Iowa State, the University with programs in agriculture and veterinary medicine. However, the sudden explosion of cultural studies of animals, beginning in the late 1990s, challenges this long-held assumption. With the support of the Obermann Seminar, the six participants explored the roles animals play in art, literature, theatre, gender construction, and psychological research of animals and humans.
Collectively, the seminar addressed issues of representation, symbolic uses of animals, attachment to animals, animal intelligence and training, businesses dependent upon animals, the status of animals as commodities, tourist attractions, therapy, and food, among other significant animal roles and associations. In addition, we shared our research through outreach by participating in public discussions of animals in venues such as Café Scientifique, Talk of Iowa, and Know the Score. Media articles, like the profile in the UI’s Illumine Magazine will extend our impact.
Our broader objectives, in addition to developing our individual research projects, are:
- to initiate interdisciplinary studies of issues linked to animals,
- to emphasize contributions to animal studies of humanities and social sciences,
- to promote discussion of what animals mean to Iowans and beyond,
- to highlight the great variety of animals and the roles they play in societies,
- to document the powerful economic contributions animals make,
- to raise awareness of animals’ contributions to health and human services,
- to study the impact of wild and domestic animals on environmental issues,
- to explore roles animals play within diverse human cultures.
Left to right: Pam Trimpe, Ed Wasserman, Mary Trachsel, Kim Marra, Teresa Mangum, Jane Desmond
Articulating the Animal: Extended Outcomes
Five-Year Plan: The faculty work group formed at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies will build on the energy and interest generated by the seminar to develop several future projects over a five-year trajectory. To date these plans include:
- Statewide Traveling Photo/Essay Exhibits: Engaging
the Iowa Public
The group has applied for a Year of Public Engagement grant to lead two state-wide photographic competitions (one for children and one for professionals and adults) entitled The Animals Among Us. Submissions include a photograph of an animal with an accompanying one-page essay reflecting on the significance of the animal, whether to the individual, community, or economy. Twenty-five photos will be selected for each competition. The children’s photos will be exhibited in a public venue (such as a library or children’s museum). The adult photos will be exhibited in the Old Capital Mall Museum and launched with a panel discussion on the significance of animals in different disciplines and public venues.
Both exhibits will travel across the state, and all entries will be featured on a website, along with teaching materials for future use by elementary and high school teachers. If successful, we will expand the programming and outreach further by applying for a Humanities Iowa grant.
- Interdisciplinary Academic Symposium with Resulting Book
With funds from our current Obermann Center award serving as a seed grant, we will organize an event highlighting interdisciplinary perspectives on animals and human-animal relationships. Ideally, the symposium will bring together scholars and researchers with individuals who work with animals in a public capacity such as directors of zoos, aquaria, and animal conservation programs. We will leverage this seed grant by applying for an Arts and Humanities Initiative award. Together these grants will allow us to put on a world-class symposium on the topic, The Animals Among Us, tentatively planned for fall 2007. Our goal will be to open this event to the public and also to publish a collection of the symposium lectures.
Major International Art Exhibition and Catalogue
Under participant Pam Trimpe’s leadership we will build upon the state-wide discussion and the transnational symposium by applying for NEH and NEA grants to organize a major international exhibition of farm animal portraits for presentation in several museums in the United States for 2007-08. We will extend the exhibition’s reach by producing a museum catalogue to keep the exhibit alive for years to come.
Participants and Projects
Jane Desmond, faculty seminar co-director, associate professor of American Studies and associate dean of International Programs, will complete "Extending our Senses: Robotics and Rover," a chapter of her book Displaying Death/Animating Life: Fictions of Liveness from Taxidermy to Animatronics. The chapter explores the use of animals as ways of extending human bodily capabilities (for example search and rescue, seeing eye, and hearing dogs) and the relationship between the conceptualization of sensory perception and the development of robotic prostheses.
Teresa Mangum, faculty seminar co-director, associate professor of English and International Programs, is writing a book on Victorian theories of emotional connections between animals and humans, which inspired both novels like Black Beauty and organizations like the Society for the Protection of Animals. She will write an article, "The Melancholy Mammal: Victorian Theories of Animal Emotions."
Kim Marra, associate professor of Theatre Arts and American Studies, plans a study of women and horses on the American stage. Focused on the nation’s cultural capital, New York City, during the Golden Age of U.S. theatre (before its eclipse by talking cinema) and of the horse (before its eclipse by the automobile), the study examines female and equine performance in three highly influential arenas that shared audiences—Broadway theatre, the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden, and the Belmont Park Racetrack.
Mary Trachsel, associate professor and DEO of Rhetoric will explore the ethical dimensions of apes and language instruction. Her project examines human anxieties, hopes and desires in response to the suggestion that humans are not alone in "personhood," that is, having intellectual powers superior to other animals.
Pamela Trimpe, administrative head of the Pentacrest Museums and faculty coordinator of the Museum Studies Program, is planning an exhibition of 18th- and 19th-century paintings of animals. The exhibition, "Bovine Portraits: Victorian Big Beasts and the Origins of Biogenetics," will be the first survey of the genre of large animal portrait painting that flourished in Britain between the 1760s and the early-1900s. It will offer a look back on the British hope of the future of selective breeding and forward to the logical extension of genetic engineering to feed an expanding world population.
Ed Wasserman, Stuit professor of Experimental Psychology, will continue his work on animal intelligence, investigating the intelligence of great apes at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. He will focus on the ability of apes to learn abstract same-different concepts by giving them tasks in which they must respond to general relations between or among stimuli, rather than specific attributes of each stimulus. Because some of the apes are highly skilled in a symbolic communication system and others are not, he will be able to determine whether their same-different behavior is affected by language.