*STS Circle at Harvard* *[image: line.gif] * * * *Ian Jared Miller * *History, Harvard * * * on
*Pandas in the Anthropocene: Japan’s “Panda Boom” and the End of Nature * Monday, November 15th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: line.gif] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to [email protected] by Thursday, November 11th. *Abstract: *Two giant pandas arrived at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoological Gardens in October 1972 in celebration of diplomatic normalization between Japan and the People’s Republic of China. Former foes in a brutal fifteen-year colonial war that cost tens of millions of lives, the two nations were formally estranged for twenty-seven years following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. The arrival of Ran Ran and Kan Kan (as the pair were called) marked both a geopolitical watershed and an explosion in post- imperial fascination with all things Chinese. The resulting “panda boom” was the apex of animal commodification in postwar Japan. Fueled by a culture industry eager to extract maximum profit from the alluring Ailuropoda melanoleuca, Ueno Zoo attendance hit world-historical highs for over a decade. This hyper-consumerism coincided with a shift in environmental consciousness in the 1970s. In wider society the contradictions between consumerism and conservationism often remain hidden, but the surprisingly complicated histories of Tokyo’s pandas—among the first in the world to bear artificially-conceived cubs and perhaps the most-viewed animals on the planet—throw modernity’s troubled relationship with nature (particularly endangered and exotic megafauna) into sharp relief. This talk uses the history of this mass-culture phenomenon to ask what it means to write the cultural history in an age of mass extinction and environmental crisis. *Biography: *Ian Jared Miller is an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. His research is primarily concerned with imperialism and the cultural dimensions of scientific, medical, and especially environmental change in modern Japan. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005, arriving at Harvard in 2007. He has been a postdoctoral fellow postdoctoral fellow in the Expanding East Asian Studies Program (ExEAS) at Columbia's Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. Professor Miller's first book manuscript, *The Nature **of the Beast: Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens and the Making of Modern **Japan, 1882-1982*, introduces readers to the cultural and environmental history of East Asia’s first zoo, opened in 1882. Other projects include *Japan at Nature’s Horizon*, a co-edited collection of essays on Japan’s environmental history and *After the Quake*, an exploration of ecological modernism and modernization in twentieth-century Tokyo. He is also interested in the global history of tsunami and other natural disasters and the history of natural history in Asia. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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