MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History
Mark V. Barrow, Jr.
Departments of History and Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech
"Alligator Tales: The Cultural and Environmental History of a Charismatic
Carnivore"
This paper explores the tangled layers of perception associated with the
American alligator, a multivalent carnivore that Euroamericans have struggled
to get a conceptual handle on since arriving in the New World. An analysis of
travel accounts, souvenir postcards, advertising brochures, natural history
narratives, magazine articles, and numerous other written and visual sources
reveals that Americans have thought about the species in multiple, sometimes
contradictory, ways: as a fearsome predator, a symbol of the landscape it
inhabits, a valuable commodity, an endangered species, and (most recently) a
dangerous nuisance. With increasingly intense management, the alligator has
been transformed into a semi-domesticated species, an example of “nature on a
leash,” to use the filmmaker John Sayles’s suggestive phrase.
Friday March 18, 2011
2:30 to 4:30 pm
Building E51 Room 095
Corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Streets, Cambridge
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