TY - JOUR
T1 - The Economy of Rarity
T2 - Animal-Catching, Cryptozoology, and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Zoo
AU - De Bont, Raf
N1 - Funding Information:
This article was written as part of the Vici project “Moving Animals” (VI.C.181.010), funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. I’d like to thank various archivists (and in particular Clemens Maier-Wolthaus) for helping me dig up Cordier-related material. Thanks also go to the participants of the workshop “Colonial Dimensions of the Global Wildlife Trade” (Göttingen, November 2022) and the panel “Genes, Ghosts and Icons” at the meeting of the European Society for the History of Science (Brussels, September 2022) for their comments on earlier versions of this argument.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.
PY - 2024/1
Y1 - 2024/1
N2 - From the mid-twentieth century onward, zoological gardens across the world gradually developed an agenda of ex situ conservation. An obvious prerequisite for such an agenda to succeed was that the zoos in question obtained endangered animals from the wild. This article analyzes the “economy of rarity” created by this demand by focusing on the career of the Swiss couple Emy and Charles Cordier, who made a business of catching, acclimatizing, and transporting rare wildlife for some of the oldest and most prestigious zoos in the world. Beyond trading elusive animals, the Cordiers acted as producers and mediators of knowledge about these creatures, and they set up expeditions to find completely unknown and legendary ones—thus engaging in the (pseudo) science of cryptozoology. The success of their business drew on the broad cultural fascination for the rare, the elusive, and the unknown that characterized the mid-twentieth-century international zoo world. While the trade of the Cordiers— supported by a rhetoric of Western discovery—produced new types of knowledge, it also created and perpetuated ignorance. Moreover, the work of Emy and Charles Cordier highlights the ambiguities of the movement of animals associated with early ex situ conservation. Despite being presented as acts of “rescue” and “care,” their trade inherently involved violence, practices of extraction, and power imbalances between the Global South and the Global North.
AB - From the mid-twentieth century onward, zoological gardens across the world gradually developed an agenda of ex situ conservation. An obvious prerequisite for such an agenda to succeed was that the zoos in question obtained endangered animals from the wild. This article analyzes the “economy of rarity” created by this demand by focusing on the career of the Swiss couple Emy and Charles Cordier, who made a business of catching, acclimatizing, and transporting rare wildlife for some of the oldest and most prestigious zoos in the world. Beyond trading elusive animals, the Cordiers acted as producers and mediators of knowledge about these creatures, and they set up expeditions to find completely unknown and legendary ones—thus engaging in the (pseudo) science of cryptozoology. The success of their business drew on the broad cultural fascination for the rare, the elusive, and the unknown that characterized the mid-twentieth-century international zoo world. While the trade of the Cordiers— supported by a rhetoric of Western discovery—produced new types of knowledge, it also created and perpetuated ignorance. Moreover, the work of Emy and Charles Cordier highlights the ambiguities of the movement of animals associated with early ex situ conservation. Despite being presented as acts of “rescue” and “care,” their trade inherently involved violence, practices of extraction, and power imbalances between the Global South and the Global North.
U2 - 10.1086/727791
DO - 10.1086/727791
M3 - Article
SN - 1084-5453
VL - 29
SP - 29
EP - 55
JO - Environmental History
JF - Environmental History
IS - 1
ER -