al-mofhariz

Paul Greenberg recently reviewed D. Graham Burnett's The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century in the New York Times . Greenberg traces the arc, as told by Burnett, of the cetacean scientist from standing knee-deep in whale innards at the turn of the century to being newly enlightened by whale-ish complexity in the interwar years to fighting alongside other frustrated technocrats at the dawn of an age of international conservation to expanding the human and Cete mind in groovy ways amidst a backdrop of Cold War science. He comes away fascinated by the experience, but also wonders if the reading public wouldn't benefit from something less that 793 pages, with footnotes for the footnotes (almost) ---or actually, he wonders if the public wouldn't benefit from more: a shortened version to accompany the encyclopedic one. Read the review. You'll encounter the characters who most capture Greenberg's imagination: A. Remington Kellogg (the P...

So far, our blog has been rather human-centric. Today, I want to change that by starting a discussion about the intersections of Animal Studies and the American Science. Since I just got back from a little trip to Florida, I'm calling this post "Hemingway's Cats" in honor of the polydactyl felines that have colonized the author's old estate in Key West. The image of exceptional, proliferating non-human bodies in human built-environments is evocative (at least to me) for thinking about the ways in which animals inspire, populate, and transmit technical knowledge. I'm particularly interested in animals that resist standardization (unlike Kohler's flies or Rader's mice), but which nonetheless become enrolled in scientific projects. One obvious area in which this has occurred is the realm of conservation biology. Here, the privileged animal body is one in danger of being manipulated or obliterated by unfettered human activity. The non-human animal t...