Violette Pouillard
My research integrates more-than-human perspectives within socio-environmental historical narratives. My current research programme concerns the history of (post)colonial wildlife conservation policies in Central Africa, carried out through a socio-environmental history of the management and taming of elephants and wildlife in both Congo and Uganda.
From 2015 to 2017, I was a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. I continued my research as a postdoctoral assistant at Ghent University (2017-2019), then as a research fellow of both the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University and the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the Free University of Brussels. Since 2020, I have been a permanent research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the LARHRA (UMR 5190). I am also a visiting professor at Ghent University.
Email address: Violette.Pouillard@cnrs.fr
From 2015 to 2017, I was a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. I continued my research as a postdoctoral assistant at Ghent University (2017-2019), then as a research fellow of both the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University and the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the Free University of Brussels. Since 2020, I have been a permanent research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the LARHRA (UMR 5190). I am also a visiting professor at Ghent University.
Email address: Violette.Pouillard@cnrs.fr
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Papers by Violette Pouillard
(English translation available)
The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The close examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions.
The article argues that zoos developed around an experimental paradigm that consisted of testing upon animals the (nutritional) variables of their survival within a highly constrained institutional framework. The empirical nature of the zoo feeding economy was marked by slow and uneven changes from the interwar, associated with the development of nutritional sciences as well as with internal hygiene, pathology, and veterinary programmes. Despite transfers and networks of people, methods, experiments, concepts, and animals between zoos and life sciences laboratories, the former remained too impure as a research site to act as an extension of the latter. Zoos, however, needed external laboratories to back themselves with the scientific legitimacy that their “biopolitical modernisation” (Chrulew) required. In addressing programmatic changes as well as their impact upon the animals, this paper argues that trial-and-error experiments are constitutive of the zoo, contributing towards the definition of the nature of both zoo management and zoo sciences.
(English translation available)
The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The close examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions.
The article argues that zoos developed around an experimental paradigm that consisted of testing upon animals the (nutritional) variables of their survival within a highly constrained institutional framework. The empirical nature of the zoo feeding economy was marked by slow and uneven changes from the interwar, associated with the development of nutritional sciences as well as with internal hygiene, pathology, and veterinary programmes. Despite transfers and networks of people, methods, experiments, concepts, and animals between zoos and life sciences laboratories, the former remained too impure as a research site to act as an extension of the latter. Zoos, however, needed external laboratories to back themselves with the scientific legitimacy that their “biopolitical modernisation” (Chrulew) required. In addressing programmatic changes as well as their impact upon the animals, this paper argues that trial-and-error experiments are constitutive of the zoo, contributing towards the definition of the nature of both zoo management and zoo sciences.
Throughout history, humans have formed a variety of relationships with elephants: worshipping them as deities and taming them as beasts of burden ; displaying them as exotic curiosities in zoological collections and training them to perform in circuses ; hunting them for sports and for ivory consumption and trade ; culling them due to human-wildlife conflicts and exhibiting their bodies in museums. Seminal academic works have demonstrated the central role Asian and African elephants played in shaping cultures, economies, and politics. Scholars in the humanities have also enriched social science narratives on multispecies relations by building on the wealth of ethological and life science research on elephants. Such multidisciplinary insights led to greater attention being paid to the subjectivities and agencies of elephants in (re)shaping human geographies and economies. All these works encourage developing further the reflexive perspectives on the construction of more-than-human narratives that integrate pachyderms as historical actors.
This workshop welcomes contributions from humanities and social sciences scholars, as well as from life scientists, with the aim to further develop multidisciplinary research perspectives on the histories of human-elephant relationships from the early modern era to the present day.