This is a much sketchier course idea, but I feel like the scholarship on different aspects of animal history: human-animal interactions, cultural and religious ideas about animals, histories of domestication, the intellectual history of different taxonomic or knowledge systems applied to animals, the natural history of various animal species in relationship to human societies, the history of zoonotic diseases, and so on has become very rich and rewarding, including in my own field.
It’s hard to know exactly how to structure it. I don’t think my usual strategy for thematic classes where I start with a few premodern weeks and then jump to the 18th Century to argue that the theme is profoundly affected by modernity quite works here. It shouldn’t really be a chronological class in a strict sense either, though I can see putting some current problems/issues (Anthropocene extinctions, zoonotic pandemics, new thinking about animal minds, etc.) near to the end.
I don’t quite think organizing by species works either, though dogs and other domesticated animals deserve their own focus.
The literature here is so richly diverse in terms of eras covered and places that geographical and temporal background might be hard to supply consistently; in many ways I feel as if this class would be best as “historical anthropology”—a comparative examination of a set of common themes and of major differences or divergences between societies. But another way I could do it is entirely focused on African history—I think the scholarship is at a point of density that would support that.
A third possible structure might simply to be to focus each week on a single animal (or closely similar animals) where there’s a rich enough literature to hold it up. I’m not sure whether that ought to have some kind of hidden taxonomic logic to it—I just think that each week needs to showcase some very different kind of issues/questions.
One rough sketch of structure might be:
Week 1-3: What Is an Animal? Human ideas and representations of animals in general and specific species in particular; theories of animal agency and animal minds
Week 4-8: Ecosystems in Motion: Dynamic relationships between human societies and animals in the wild under various historical pressures (migration, resource exploitation, new modes of environmental management, etc.)
Week 9-12 Domestication and incorporation: animals in human societies (pets, zoos, livestock, military animals)
Week 13-14 Animals and humans in the present moment (extinction, zoonosis, bioethics, diet, etc.)
On the “particular animals” approach, I think I’d do something like:
Week 1-2 Theories of animals (in general and in particular)
Animals I’m sure could sustain a week of historical readings (primary and secondary), it would be so hard to figure out how to choose:
Lions
Horses
Beavers
Cod
Wolves
Cattle
Bison
Whales
Bats
Snakes
Cats
Dogs
Tsetse Flies and Mosquitoes
Falcons/Hunting Raptors
Pigs
Pollinators
Silkworms
Elephants
Rats
Camels
Gorillas/Chimps
Dodo Birds and Passenger Pigeons
Some of these are relatively narrow human/animal assemblages (falconry or silkworm cultivation, for example), others are very broad and diverse. In some cases, all the historiographical action is around colonial encounters (bison). In some weeks, we’d be looking at a really wide range of histories—lions or cattle, for example.
On balance, I sort of like the one-animal-a-week approach, though it might end up lacking analytic depth—we’d have to work hard towards a synthesis of the overall issues/questions in the historiography.
There are so many articles and books I’d like to teach in this course.
Even in a comparative version of the class, I’d likely teach a lot of scholarship about animals in African history. For example, no matter what, I’d like to teach Clapperton Mahvunga’s The Mobile Workshop and Saheed Aderinto’s new book Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa. There’s also some terrific imperial primary texts to use on colonial hunting and naturalism (Durrell’s The Bafut Beagles, Roosevelt’s hunting expedition, etc.) but also some really rich primary sources from African societies.
There are books in other fields that I’ve wanted to teach ever since I came across them—Jon Coleman’s Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, for example.
To give some sense of what the animal-of-the-week syllabus might look like, I could imagine the Lions week as being assembled from citations like the following, along with primary materials like the Roosevelt hunting diary or Frederick Selous’ The Lion in South Africa.
Rangarajan, Mahesh. “Animals With Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat India.” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 109–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542961.
Zhenhuan, Zou. “The Kangxi Court’s ‘Tribute Lion’ and Lodovico Buglio’s On Lions.” Chinese Studies in History, vol. 54, no. 2, 2021, pp. 88–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/00094633.2021.1926154.
Wintjes, Justine. “A Lion’s Life: Tracking the Biography of an Archaeological Artefact.” Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History, edited by Cynthia Kros et al., Wits University Press, 2022, pp. 217–26. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.18772/22022027274.22. Accessed 25 Jul. 2022.
Harris, Nigel. “The Lion in Medieval Western Europe: Toward an Interpretative History.” Traditio, vol. 76, 2021, pp. 185–213, https://doi.org/10.1017/tdo.2021.5.
Sevenzo, Farai. “What Cecil the Lion Means to Zimbabwe”. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33722688
Selected scenes from films where lions are prominent: The Lion King, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wizard of Oz, Born Free.
I taught a humans and animals course (stupidly as a lecture) and did so far too early in my teaching career-to do this well requires (I think) a more expansive understanding of the various sub fields this material touches on and more time to structure than I had allotted. I organized it chronologically but kept it early modern/19thc-for no reason other than that was the areas of coverage I knew the most about. If I had to redo it I would use your division along the lines of different animals. My course centered on questions of rival taxonomies of animals (both vernacular and formal) and the role of animals in the development of scientific cultures of the period. It was a bit narrow. One text that I centered was Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan-it’s essentially about the convergence of different systems of knowing (public, scientists, whalemen, merchants) on the question of whether whales were a mammal or fish. Juxtaposing his chapter on what whalemen knew from hunting them vs what scientists knew from the perspective of deep anatomy was one of the more productive moments in the course. For Lions, elephants, crocodiles I used Pliny, lit on Medici Florence and cabinets of curiosity. You could also do the Jefferson-Buffon debate over the mammoth. There are some great primary sources in the Philosophical Transactions on bone collecting expeditions along the Mississippi in the 1760s that predate the Jefferson debate and involve a far more diverse set of actors. Marcy Norton’s two articles on the Indigenous (rather than European) origins of “pet keeping” via predation and birds were helpful too. In a much smaller version of the course you could have them do pet owner and pet neighbor interviews or an analysis of a pet store. Anyway if you do teach this I hope you will post about it.
Yes, what do animals mean—to us, since it’s harder to get at what we might mean to them (Koko excepted, maybe).