Animal Scales series: Scale Temporal, with Éric Baratay

Online - Zoom (register to receive the link)

The topic of animals and temporal scales lies at the heart of three recently published works: Baratay, É. (2023) Animal biographies: Towards a history of individuals (Athens: University of Georgia Press); Baratay, É. (ed.) Les animaux historicisés: Pourquoi situer leurs comportements dans le temps et l’espace? (Éditions de la Sorbonne: Paris); and Baratay, É. (2021) Cultures félines (XVIIIe-XXIe): Les chats créent leur histoire (Éditions du Seuil: Paris). This paper will draw on this body of work and will address, first, some of the reasons for the long absence of temporality in the study of animals and, second, the necessity of thinking about time at different scales (at the scale of the individual, the generation, the group, and the species). The paper concludes with a discussion of the mechanisms of behavioural and cultural transmission from one generation to the next. 

Chair: John Sabapathy (UCL History)
Respondents: Sophie Page (UCL History) and Thom Rath (UCL History)

BIO

Éric Baratay is professor of contemporary history at the Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon. Baratay has long specialized in the relationships between humans and animals, whether this relationship takes the form of the bullfight, the domestication of animals, the representation of animals in art, the role of animals in religions, or the creation and maintenance of zoos. In Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (2003, London, Reaktion) Baratay and Elisabeth Hardounin-Fugier collaborated on a sociological study of how perceptions of wild animals have changed over time. Other books include Le point de vue animal: Une autre version de l’histoire (2012, Paris, Éditions du Seuil) and Bêtes des tranchées: Des vécus oubliés (2013, Paris, CNRS Editions).

This seminar is part of the Animal Scales series, co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Critical Global Change, Goldsmiths.

Here is the unedited version of Eric Baratay’s paper, in French. Mariam will read an edited version, in English, at the start of the seminar.

Seminar series: Animal Scales

From Aristotle’s scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves ‘scale-makers’ and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.

Full series dates:

SCALE: METABOLIC

Maan Barua; Department of Geography, Cambridge
5.00-7.00 pm, 20 February
Location: UCL, IAS Forum, South Wing, Wilkins Building.
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SCALE: GLOBAL

Dr. iur. Charlotte Blattner, LL.M. (Harvard); Institute of Public Law, University of Berne
5.00-7.00 pm, 21 March
Location: UCL, Room BO5, Darwin Building.
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SCALE: INDIVIDUAL

Screening of the documentary film Cow (2021, UK, MUBI & US IFC films), and discussion with Director, Andrea Arnold. Respondent and chair: Anat Pick, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, London.
3.30-7.00 pm, 23 April
Location: Goldsmiths, Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building
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SCALE: TEMPORAL

Éric Baratay; Department of History, Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon.
5.00-7.00pm, 24 May
Location TBA
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SCALE: POLITICAL

Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson; Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Canada
5.00-7.00pm, 19 June
On-line (Zoom)
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SCALE: MULTIPLE

Dinesh Wadiwel; School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
10.00-12.00a.m., 8 July
On-line (Zoom)
Register here

For more information, please contact Mariam Motamedi Fraser (m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk)

Image: “Stray Cat 03” by Sami Ucan (@sami_ucan)