Human-Animal
Growing out of my interests in early modern environmental history and in collaboration with an extremely creative and stimulating group of scholars, I have recently embarked on a new book project to chart how changes to the human-animal relationship in Ottoman Egypt were fundamental to the enormous transitions Egypt and the Ottoman Empire experienced in the eighteenth century. My interest in this topic has so far resulted in the workshop “Dogs, Humans, and Other Animals” that I organized with Thomas W. Laqueur at the University of California, Berkeley, in the summer of 2010 on the intersections of ethology and the humanistic study of the animal.
Below is an early picture of the Cairo Zoo, founded in the heyday of zoo openings in the late nineteenth century.
Like all zoos, the one in Cairo was the end of a long history of human-animal interactions. In the words of the art critic John Berger, “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.” Part of my work is to tell the story of this relationship and of why it came to an end.
Labor was a key realm in which humans and domesticated animals were intimately connected in the early modern Egyptian countryside.
The work of the urban institution of the zoo is of a very different sort. A few pictures of today’s zoo.
A map of the modern human-animal zoo relationship.
Directions.
Formerly a primary means of transport and engine of the early modern economy, the camel today.
Like the camel, the hippo as well has a long–now mostly forgotten–history in Egypt.
And the dog.
The final place for many in the zoo.
