Participants:
John Attridge (Sydney)
Katie Jones (Nottingham)
Yuko Matsumuro (Paris IV)
Sarah McMahon (Arizona)
Andrew Ross (Michigan)
Vicky Smith (Nottingham)
Jennifer Solheim (Michigan)
Jane Weston (Bristol)
Gina Zupsich (Berkeley)
For our third seminar of the series, we were delighted to welcome a visiting speaker. Dr Chris Pearson from the University of Bristol gave a paper on ‘Researching Nature in L.A., Bristol and Paris’, in which he situated his research within the context of environmental history before introducing his new project ‘Dog City: A Canine History of Paris’, which will consider the history of the city through the study of dog-human interaction.
Environmental history is a relatively new field of study which was developed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Initially inspired by concerns about threats to the natural environment and conservationist goals, the discipline goes beyond such concerns to consider (1) the way that concepts of nature have changed over time, and (2) the meaning and materiality of nature and the way that human beings have interacted with it over time. Chris’s main focus is on the second of these aspects and his approach is influenced by the work of Jenny Price, a nature writer from Los Angeles. In her 2006 article ‘Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA’ Price argues that ‘nature writers have given us endless paeans to the wonders of wildness since Thoreau fled to Walden Pond, but need to tell us far more about our everyday lives in the places we actually live’. Her key example of interaction between human urban development and nature is the LA river, which was covered in the 1930s to reduce the risk of flooding, but which is to be redeveloped with parks and walkways over the next twenty-five to fifty years as part of a project to reduce pollution and link communities. Chris pointed out parallels with Bristol and the Free the Frome campaign to uncover the river under the M32 motorway. More importantly, though, this approach to environmental history, by considering nature within cities leads to questions about what counts as nature since humans and, by extension, their activities can also be seen as nature. A key question for Chris is therefore what, if anything, is distinctive about urban natures?
Chris’s new project on the history of dogs in Paris arises from this context, considering domesticated nature rather than wildlife (as presented, for example, in recent work such as Atlas de la Nature: Paris (2008)). As traditionally domesticated animals, it would be hard to imagine a history of dogs which did not take into account their interactions with humans. Chris draws on the work of Donna Haraway, perhaps best known for her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), in her recent book on human-animal relations based, in part, on her experience in the world of dog agility sports, When Species Meet (Minnesota UP, 2008). Haraway writes about the way species shape each other and introduces the notion of ‘contact zones’, where interactions between species take place. In this framework, humans and dogs are not fixed as subjects with pre-established identities, but can, rather, influence each other. Chris gave some examples of how dogs and their owners have shaped aspects of the city, including spaces where dogs can and cannot go, the canisettes designed to combat the problem of fouling the streets, the dog bakery ‘Mon bon chien’ in the 15th arrondissement and the dog cemetery opened at Asnières-sur-Seine in 1899. He then discussed logistical problems of this type of research, posing the question of how we can capture the liveliness of nature in the city, as well as other work being done on dogs in cities, notably Seattle, St Petersburg and Istanbul.
The discussion following the paper revisited some of these questions and also touched on comparable work on other animals, notably Robert Sullivan’s Rats (2004).
