The study of our animal cohabitants often provides valuable insight into the condition of humanity, but animals have also been a gateway to understanding the natural world. The latest volume of Osiris, entitled “Animal Mobilities,” collects articles on the subject of animal agency and the role of animals in human knowledge production. Studying the movements of animals as individuals, groups, and systems, write guest editors Tamar Novick, Lisa Onaga, and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “may permit a reexamination of the ethical commitments of both scientific and historical inquiry,” encouraging scholars to more keenly attend to the lives of the creatures that surround them. It may also invite “a reconsideration of how, where, and by whom science is done.”
The first section in the collection, “Individual Animals,” gathers articles on human-animal relationships. Featuring papers on such topics as an escaped circus elephant, the first ever white rhinos exhibited in a zoo, the use of guide dogs, and a chimpanzee adopted into human families, “Individual Animals” challenges the common association of mobility with liberation and examines the political valences of animal care.
“Animal Groupings and Aggregates,” the second section in the volume, investigates the role of animals in the formation of political regimes. Articles in this section study the instrumentalization of migratory sturgeon in the effort to produce more hydroelectric power for the state of Oregon, the effect of visual media on understandings of climate catastrophe, the importance of izcahuitli larvae to the Mexica people, and the significance of camel breeding in the Ottoman Empire. Managing the mobilities of animal aggregates has been foundational for the formation of political projects and structures.
"Animals in and as Technological Systems,” the third of the volume’s three sections, studies both the possibility of discrete animal bodies to act as “biological technologies” and the inclusion of animals in large-scale technological apparatuses. This section examines such subjects as the effect of European methods of taxonomy on cattle husbandry during the Japanese Tokugawa period, the use of ducks to control locust populations in late modern and imperial China, the attempts to manage bird movement around Frankfurt Airport in Germany, and the impact of capturing and moving coral on scientific studies of the sea. Large-scale systems are continuously preoccupied with sustaining their animal components.
Since animal habits and movement patterns often defy standard scientific classifications, their study presents an opportunity to expand the boundaries of the history of science. “This volume is mobilized,” the editors conclude, “by a hope that a study of mobility in the history of science combined with an ethics of radical empathy can show how all animals, human and nonhuman alike, struggle still to move and rest freely.” Ultimately, through and with animals, this volume illustrates the crucial role of historical mobilities in science.
Founded in 1936 by George Sarton, and relaunched by the History of Science Society in 1985, Osiris is an annual thematic journal that highlights research on significant themes in the history of science.
Founded in 1924, the History of Science Society is the world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in historical context.
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Osiris