Wild at Heart
Harriet Ritvo, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wildness (or wilderness) is a notion that has been elaborately critiqued with regard to environments, but it is often taken for granted in discussions of animals, perhaps with less reason. I plan to discuss what people are doing (or think they are doing) when they conflate the categories of wild and domesticated, whether physically (by high-tech means, or the old fashioned way) or figuratively.
From wilderness to farmland: changing conceptions of nature in South African travel writing and narrative fiction of the nineteenth century
Dirk Klopper, University of Stellenbosch
With the rapid expansion of white farmers into the interior of South Africain the nineteenth century, much of what had formerly been described as wilderness was settled, fenced in and converted into farmland. This paper examines the changing conceptions of nature from early nineteenth century travel and hunting narratives to late nineteenth century narrative fiction.It focuses specificallyon the relationship between the wild and the domestic in Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of South Africa (1824),R. Gordon Cumming’s A Hunter's Life in South Africa (1850),William Charles Scully's Between Sun and Sand (1898) and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883).
The Resurrection of Cod: From wild species to industrialized biomass
Dean Bavington, Nipissing University and Sajay Samuel, Penn State University
The Grand Banks off the island of Newfoundland on Canada’s east coast once teemed with such an abundance of codfish that they reportedly choked the passage of vessels. About 500 years later, in 1992, fishing trawlers could find no cod and officials declared a moratorium on the fishery. Little has changed since that disappearance of wild cod from the seas off Newfoundland and Labrador: both the fish and those who relied on hunting them as a way of life, are hard to find.
From the mid 19th century on, wild codfish, fishermen, and ocean spaces have been objects of techno-scientific management. Scientific representations of fish as populations or biomass; of fishermen as labor or rational economic actors; of oceans as private or public property, were harnessed to increasingly potent fishing technologies such as gillnets and bottom draggers. After more than a century within the technoscientific crucible into which they disappeared, a once wild codfish has been resurrected as industrial biomass. In parallel, fishermen have been transformed into professionalized harvesters and the seas transmogrified into watery farmlands.
The effort to domesticate wild cod was and continues to be bitterly fought. Constant through this contested history, is the speech of fishermen that once gave voice to the fish. Attending to that now fading and almost muted sound, it is possible to rediscover the nature of codfish and the culture of fishing.
the pennsylvania state university