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• Vanessa Bateman, Maastricht University
• Maia Nichols, University of California San Diego

New approaches to researching and activating animal histories ask scholars to cross disciplinary boundaries or critically reflect on methods that have been used to document human-animal relations, notably, “Traces of the Animal Past” (Bonnell and Kheraj, 2022) and the exhibition “Animalia: Animals in the Archive” (2022). From wild to domestic, rodents to larvae, this panel invites scholars and artists who are finding, seeking, and telling animal histories through the visual archive. We hope to offer a global perspective from any period to illustrate how art and visual culture can inform a unique understanding of environments or species, human-animal relations, or social and political contexts often invisible in these representations. What can the visual archive and its methods of interpretation offer to the histories of human-animal relations and the environment?

keywords: animal history, archive, environment, multispecies, non-human animal agency

session type: panel

Locating Non-Human Animals in Moving Images of Leprosy in Colonial Nigeria

• Susan Iseyen, Princeton University

In the 1940s, Scottish doctor and missionary, Andrew Buchanan Macdonald, and film director, James A. Ballantyne, produced the silent documentary, In His Name: The Epic of Itu Leper Colony. This forty-seven-minute documentary visualizes the history of leprosy control through sufferers’ engagements in agriculture, craftwork, and building techniques to preserve their self-sufficient community. Yet the animal presence is largely explicit as moving images of farm animals take central stage within the leprosy settlement. In employing this visual evidence as a point of departure, my paper attempts to move beyond an anthropocentric analysis which might typically prioritize human actions and reduce animals to mere background objects or symbols of culture. Instead, I explore previously undocumented non-human animal history through the lens of leprosy settlements in colonial Nigeria. I frame healthy, industrious farm animals as pivotal to medicine and therapy through husbandry and improvement of human nourishment in most leprosy institutions in colonial southeastern Nigeria. Livestock’s two-fold distinctive roles as subjects of nutrition and agriculture offers evidence of non-human animals’ ability to shape medical knowledge and practice between the late 1920s and 1940s. In revealing the centrality of farm animals to the functionality and success of leprosy settlements, I emphasize the considerable influence they wielded over human health. The narrative power of this visual story bear witness to the active intervention of non-human animals as historical actors who provided the stage on which the human history of leprosy establishments played out in the era of colonization.

keywords: non-human animal agency, leprosy, medicine, health, husbandry

William Burges, Tree of Life (detail), ca. 1866-1881, Cardiff Castle, Wales

Monkeys in the Library: Pleasure in the Doorway

• Katrina-Eve N Manica, University of Toronto & University of York

There are monkeys in the library of Cardiff Castle. Wooden bodies snake up the arches of a north doorway frame. Multiple macaques ascend branches of a tree, holding or eating apples. Brows furrow in concentration; teeth are bared in defence of fruit; eyes widen in timidity; mouths open in forceful cries; there is an upward gaze with a smile—pleasure in eating. On either doorway, at the base of the arches, there are pairs of monkeys. These pairs hold a leather-bound book, as if naughtily stolen from the bookshelf. One monkey has their face curiously poked into the book either inspecting or eating the nonnutritive pages.

These monkeys are carved by humans hands, designed by a human art-architect, and paid for by a man whose inter generational propertied wealth allowed him to export Welsh coal en-masse. Produced in the 1870s, the iconography of the monkeys climbing a tree of life aligns with emerging Darwinian and evolutionary science, which linked humans to primate ancestors. The monkeys are a study in expressions—from the designer’s perspective they are an evaluation of Charles Darwin’s work on human and animal expressions. Some macaques even sport the contemporary male fashion voluminous side-burns, but who is imitating whom?

Although the monkeys might seem to tell us a lot about the human makers, in this paper, I use the library at Cardiff Castle as a visual archive of a moment when humans were bearing down into what they perceived as animal history in the context of the human—a white, bourgeois man. This contextualization offers an engagement with an aspect of human-animal relationships. However, this paper works to add to the monkeys’ histories and representations by using Sandra Swart’s (2022) “horsetory” methodology, which views animal-human relationships as evincing a codeveloped language of communication and modes of expression, including embodied pleasure. Indeed, I argue that these monkeys communicate even through their transmission by human hands.

keywords: animal studies, archive, environment, multispecies

The Photographic Archive of the "Elk Problem"

• Vanessa Bateman, Maastricht University

How can the photographic archive contribute to a better understanding of animal history? This paper discusses the intersections between animal photography, hunting, and wildlife conservation in Wyoming during the "elk problem"—that is, the mass starvation and death of thousands of elk due to Euro-American settlement between 1890 and 1912. This is a case study where the photography of animals has the power to change the lives of those represented, where photographic history meets animality and environmental ethics. It looks at the photography of hunting guide and rancher Stephen N. Leek of Jackson Hole, Wyoming who began documenting the demise of elk and community efforts to feed them—images that were widely circulated in publications and traveling slide lectures as a way to both advocate for their protection and promote his work and the region to sporting tourists. Due in part to Leek’s advocacy, the National Elk Refuge was established in 1912, annually home to one of the largest elk herds in the world each winter, where they have been supplementally fed for over a century. Leek’s images fostered a specific narrative about how elk should be understood, valued, and controlled—and by whom. Moving beyond human actors, however, this paper focuses on how the anthropocentric photographic archive can provide a glimpse of the animal experience of colonial-caused ecological change.