IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB436064562

The Aurochs Through Time: A History of Integrating Timescales and Disciplines in the Study of the Ancestral Cow (2023)

Emma Leigh Kitchen (Author)
Richards, Robert John (Advisor)

The University of Chicago Press
Richards, Robert John
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

URI: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2856263015/abstract/BE2AC324D0B54541PQ/72?sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses

Publication Date: 2023
Physical Details: 347

Outside Links

This thesis provides a biographical account of the aurochs, the wild and extinct ancestor to cattle, through the lens of time. It argues that the aurochs, as a scientific object that spans multiple time scales and has been studied through various disciplinary lenses, is best understood by foregrounding its temporality as a processual entity – one that is in a state of constant change and transformation. Since the nineteenth century, the aurochs has been seen as a representative of different times: a signifier of a past wilderness, of a prehuman world, of a world that saw the evolution of humanity, of a future of unpredictable climates. By providing a biographical account of the aurochs and tracing its study across different historical and cultural contexts, the thesis demonstrates how objects like the aurochs can bridge disciplinary boundaries and bring together different approaches to knowledge. As episodes in this dissertation demonstrate, pursuit of holistic inquiry into an object of cultural and scientific salience can provide a helpful foil for historical expectations of how the object might otherwise have been cleaved. The scope of this thesis includes an informal network of aurochs interlocutors who pursued study of the aurochs from the nineteenth century to the present, and who integrated the different timescales of their fields of work to do so. It examines the aurochs through paleontology in nineteenth-century Europe, and in particular Britain and nineteenth-century Colonial India; turn-of-the-century British and American breeding and genetics institutions; Nazi Germany; and contemporary rewilding in the Netherlands. This thesis offers contributions to historical understanding of interdisciplinary research, and the challenges of studying systems with multiple time scales.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB436064562

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Deborah Bird Rose; Thom van Dooren; Matthew Chrulew; (2017)
Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (/p/isis/citation/CBB468617906/)

Book Stan Booth; Chris Mounsey; (2021)
Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics (/p/isis/citation/CBB298056889/)

Article Rebecca Woods; (2023)
Telling Time With Mammoths: Frozen Flesh and Temporal Arrangement in the Science of the North Since 1800 (/p/isis/citation/CBB784673383/)

Book Professor Catrin Rutland; (2021)
The Cow: A Natural and Cultural History (/p/isis/citation/CBB765541394/)

Article Karl Schulze-Hagen; Tim R. Birkhead; (2023)
“Der fluglose Alk”: Johann Friedrich Naumann’s 1844 account of Pinguinus impennis (great auk) (/p/isis/citation/CBB688828890/)

Book Lothar Frenz; (2017)
Nashörner: Ein Portrait (/p/isis/citation/CBB716263032/)

Thesis Francis, Kevin James; (2002)
“Death enveloped all nature in a shroud”: The extinction of Pleistocene mammals and the persistence of scientific generalists (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562150/)

Thesis Jeremy Robin Schneider; (2023)
Reawakening the Ammonites: A History of the Lost World, 1500-1900 (/p/isis/citation/CBB294977558/)

Article Pfennigwerth, S.; (2010)
“The Mighty Cassowary”: The Discovery and Demise of the King Island Emu (/p/isis/citation/CBB000933010/)

Article Beer, Gillian; (2009)
Darwin and the Uses of Extinction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030096/)

Article Hengst, Jan Den; (2009)
The Dodo and Scientific Fantasies: Durable Myths of a Tough Bird (/p/isis/citation/CBB000931236/)

Article Thode, Simon; (2009)
Bones and Words in 1870s New Zealand: The Moa-Hunter Debate through Actor Networks (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932111/)

Article Grouw, H. Van; Bloch, D.; (2015)
History of the Extant Museum Specimens of the Faroese White-Speckled Raven (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422132/)

Article Jansen, J. J. F. J.; Mije, S. D. van der; (2015)
Review of the Mounted Skins and Skulls of the Extinct Falkland Islands Wolf, Dusicyon australis, Held in Museum Collections (/p/isis/citation/CBB001500441/)

Article Grouw, H. Van; Bloch, D.; (2015)
History of the Extant Museum Specimens of the Faroese White-Speckled Raven (/p/isis/citation/CBB001500435/)

Article A. Urry; (2021)
Alfred Newton’s second-hand histories of extinction: Hearsay, gossip, misapprehension (/p/isis/citation/CBB385478624/)

Thesis Adrian Van Allen; (2016)
Crafting Nature: An Ethnography of Natural History Collecting in an Age of Genomics (/p/isis/citation/CBB344626435/)

Book Walker, Brett L.; (2005)
The Lost Wolves of Japan (/p/isis/citation/CBB000772604/)

Article Marshall, Nancy Rose; (2007)
“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell”: The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030105/)

Book Silke Förschler; (2017)
Akteure, Tiere, Dinge: Verfahrensweisen der Naturgeschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit (/p/isis/citation/CBB070362041/)