Listening after the animals: sound and pastoral care in the zoo
Bibliography
Rice, T., Badman‐King, A., Hurn, S., Rose, P., & Reed, A. (2021). Listening after the animals: Sound and pastoral care in the zoo. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27(4), 850–869. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13608
Notes
Listening after the animals: sound and pastoral care in the zoo
- Go to annotation“Unconscious listening” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 854)
- Go to annotation“Listening as a mode of care” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 856)
- Go to annotation“Listening after visitors” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 857)
- Go to annotation“Animals as participants in ‘listening after’” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 861)
- Go to annotation“Visitor listening and the pastoral” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 863)
- Go to annotation“Conclusion” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 865)
Notes
An anthropocentric critique of the zoo configurates them as places of spectacle, where human-over-animal dominance is fixated. It’s nonetheless a place of encounter and gazing each other.
The article starts with, that there is critical analysis of the zoo, but doesn’t state how this research or article relates to that.
- Go to annotation“surveillance as an instance of the power of care’” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 852), as a reference to Foucault
This kind of surveillance is gaze-based, but can be equally applied through sound. An example would be beekeeping.
The absence of any criticality is striking. I’d be more then interested to know how listening practices relate to questions of power.
The zoo-keepers engage in monitory listening, which is a type of listening in, to check and know if everything is alright. It’s part of their habitus as keepers.
- Absence of sound is also a sound
- Go to annotation“Drawing on Latourian notions of agency (e.g. Latour 1999: 180), animals can therefore be understood to participate in the mobilization and enactment of pastoral care, a point we explore in more detail below.” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 856)
I am in favor of acknowledging the agency of the zoos animals.
- It is often humans, who are the most noisy animals
Go to annotation“Zoostaff,then,seemtobetryingtoinstilinvisitorsanappropriatesonic‘interspecies etiquette’, and to make them more responsible and considerate ‘sonic citizens’ in the multispecies community that the zoo represents” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 859)
- Animals do also listen in, as such having their own ecoustemology
Go to annotation“She can perhaps be said to have internalized the pastoral mission of the zoo and is, knowingly or not, at the edge of the production of a further disciplined subject.” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 864)
Go to annotation“In some contexts where humans are responsible for ensuring the well-being of nonhuman charges, care can be regarded as a mutual or even symbiotic practice” (Rice et al., 2021, p. 865)
is a pretty fucked up thing to state without considering the power dynamics at play