Burkhardt, Richard W. (Author)
When the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris learned in 1836 that ithad the chance to buy a live, young orangutan, it was excited by the prospect.Specimens were the focus of the Museum’s activities, and this particular specimenseemed especially promising, not only because the Museum had very few orangutanspecimens in its collection, but also because of what was perceived to be theorangutan’s unique place in the natural order of things, namely, at the veryboundary between the animal kingdom and humans. Frédéric Cuvier, the superintendentof the Museum’s menagerie, urged that studying the orangutan’s mental facultieswould help resolve fundamental questions regarding the similarities and differencesbetween animals and humans. Archival and printed sources allow one to reconstructthe orangutan’s capture, acquisition, and subsequent career at the menagerie ingreater detail than has generally been possible for animals of nineteenth-centuryzoos. Scientists, artists, the public, the press, and even musicians (Franz Lisztincluded) sought to engage with the orangutan, seeing in it not just another ape ormonkey but a special creature unto itself at the animal/human boundary. Key to theirfascination with the orangutan was the question of proximity—just how close was the orangutan to humans? The orangutan’s storyilluminates not only how the animal-human boundary was conceived at the time butalso the problematic status of the zoo as a site for scientific research and theroles of scientific and non-scientific actors alike in constructing how theorangutan was understood.
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