Article ID: CBB496913316

Tortoise Traffic: Zoo Animal Logistics in Twentieth-Century Berlin (2024)

unapi

The paper examines local and global logistics involved in the transfer of animals to and from zoos in the twentieth century. The key contexts discussed here are, on the one hand, the relationship between the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (Museum of Natural History) and Berlin Zoo, and on the other hand, trade in and the market of exotic animals, a market that both exceeds and constitutes the institutions of the museum and the zoo. Taking the accidental death of a giant tortoise in the zoo in 1969 as its starting point, the paper studies the movement of animals, dead and alive. It traces the acquisition history of two new Galápagos giant tortoises by following the animals’ trajectory from Ecuador to West Berlin during the Cold War. At the same time, it reconstructs the itineraries of the dead animals’ remains through different natural history institutions, leading into the shared history of trade and traffic between zoos and natural history museums and into the political geographies of the Cold War. To put these episodes into a broader historical context, the article looks back on the expansion of global networks in animal trade through the lens of transport infrastructures, trading networks, and the accompanying red tape, tracing this back to the period around 1900 in order to reveal genealogies, thereby historicizing current logistical practices, policies, and problems. Taking logistics as a critical analytical category for natural history and thus examining natural history as logistics allows us to gain new insights into how logistics not only enabled but also shaped and reshaped natural history’s material, economic, and epistemic frameworks.

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Article Tahani Nadim; Mareike Vennen; Ina Heumann; Filippo Bertoni (2024) Logistical Natures: Trade, Traffics, and Transformations in Natural History Collecting. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 125-134). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB496913316/

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Authors & Contributors
Plumb, Christopher
Courcy, Catherine De
Damaschun, Ferdinand
Dodd, Adam
Grigson, Caroline
Heumann, Ina
Journals
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Archives of Natural History
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Museum History Journal
Technikgeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technik und Industrie
Publishers
Pennsylvania State University Press
Cambridge University Press
Basilisken-Presse
Bloomsbury Academic
Collins
CRC Press
Concepts
Natural history
Zoos
Museums
Trade
Animals
Collectors and collecting
People
Haagner, Alwin Karl
Martin, Philipp Leopold
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
21st century
Modern
Places
Great Britain
Berlin (Germany)
United States
Australia
China
Europe
Institutions
Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin)
Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest)
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