The BBC Natural History Unit: Instituting Natural History Film-Making in Britain

Abstract

Cameras have revealed how elephants are able to get a drink of fresh water when faced with a stagnant waterhole.A BBC team discovered that the tusked giants use their trunks to delicately siphon off clean liquid that has settled at the top of the dirty pool.The footage shows how the elephants move incredibly slowly to avoid stirring up any sediment.The Natural History Unit team said this was the first time that they had seen this resourceful behaviour.1INTRODUCTIONThe epigraph above, a 2009 press release from the BBC, draws the attention towards the process through which the British Broadcasting Corporation's Natural History Unit (NHU) came to be able to present its natural history film-makers as discoverers and natural history footage as discoveries, thus implicitly presenting itself as a producer of genuine knowledge of the natural world, without making any mention of the activities and works of scientific practitioners. Referring to the production of knowledge the field, Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler note: [c]ultural appropriation and ambiguous identity go with the territory, so to speak, of the field sciences.2 In the specific case of the relationship between field sciences and natural history film-making, Gregg Mitman for example demonstrates the transformative power of the latter, whose conventions and constraints have been defined outside the sphere of science, on the ways biological knowledge gets produced and consumed. In his study of the work of Iain Douglas-Hamilton on elephants, he suggests that adopting the narrative conventions of natural history film-making, most notably the emphasis on individual animals, lead the field biologist to create new systems of patronage and research3 alien to the culture of the twentieth-century life sciences.The historical study proposed this paper is informed by the constructivist approach to the public understanding of science. This approach underlines the fluidity, porosity and constructedness of the boundaries4 between the scientific endeavour and other modes of the production of knowledge of the natural world, and invites one, specifically, to examine how these boundaries are negotiated, displaced and maintained, according to the needs of social actors engaged fashioning their identity as trustworthy spokespersons for the natural world, with relation to the received source of such knowledge, science.5Two notions enable us to make sense of the way cultures of knowledge production are constituted, and claims to cognitive credibility are made and sustained; the notion of instrument and that of institution. Instruments can be seen as a material nucleus around which bearers of a given material culture can congregate and define a social space based on the expert use of the instrument question, and from which outsiders can be excluded. In this view the notion of instrument points towards the idea that matters of fact are socially constituted on the basis of a consensus in an acceptance of certain 'technologies' of fact creation.6 In the same vein, institutions can be thought about as social constructs and as rhetorical devices providing social groups with resources to assert their moral authority. In particular, they can be conceived of as means to naturalize beliefs, norms and values.7 This focus on two supra-individual categories, which directs the attention to the notion of group, should not, however, obscure the fact that the story told this paper is first and foremost about individuals engaged fashioning their personal identity.Before the First World War and during the interwar period, early natural history film-makers, the person, especially, of Cherry Kearton, successfully took possession of the ground left vacant by a vanishing imperial hunting elite, and established the practice of natural history film-making as a socially and morally legitimate conduct to appropriate, control, and enjoy the Empire's wilderness. …