The genealogy of the zoo: Collection, park and carnival

Martin Parker

doi:10.1177/1350508420910573

Abstract

The zoo, like all organizations, is constituted by processes of collection and separation. This article provides a genealogical account of the conditions of possibility of the modern zoological gardens, beginning with the cabinet of curiosities, then the landscape park and the menagerie, and finally the carnival and fair. This leads to a discussion of the foundation of the bourgeois zoo in the 19th century, and its mutation into its contemporary combination of spectacle and civilizing institution. I conclude with some reflections on the dialectic between order and disorder that the zoo exemplifies, an organization which is constructed to civilize and contain, but which is always haunted by the financial need for spectacle and the production of the wild non-human.

Highlights

Classification and organization are co-produced.1 The beginnings of classification are the beginnings of organization, and when we attend to organization, we are in the presence of systems of classification
This article is part of a larger project which is an attempt to think about different forms of organizing and draw out their implications for organization studies which understands organizing as a cultural matter, and attends to unusual or understudied examples
It seems to me that the zoological garden was the product of the idea of the collection combined with the panoptic park, but both of these were emplaced cultural forms which were only available to the elites and the emerging bourgeois

Summary

Introduction

Classification and organization are co-produced. The beginnings of classification are the beginnings of organization, and when we attend to organization, we are in the presence of systems of classification. The bars, palisades, glass and moats which separate the paths and cafes for the visitors from the cages of the visited define the zoo, because the zoo is brought into being by bringing things together and keeping them just slightly apart Such matters might seem too obvious to remark, but for those interested in organizing, it is worth considering how a contemporary institution such as a zoo emerges from a series of antecedent institutions with slightly different forms of classification, both for people and animals. I am interested in the wild animal only insofar as it is produced by the zoo, as an effect of a particular form of organization

The cabinet of curiosities

Management and the menagerie

The fair

Animal capitalism and the spectacle

The zoo and the history of the present