Megafauna Among Us: Humans and other Charismatic Animals
Instructed by Dr. Zoë Eddy at Harvard University
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What makes an animal ‘charismatic’, exactly? And for that matter, what makes a person charismatic? The English language is full of idiomatic phrases making reference to animals: wiley like a fox. As strong as an ox. Wise like an owl. When did mankind begin to imbue creatures with human traits?
Harvard instructor Zoë Eddy explores how interspecies exchange affects environmental and wildlife policy through a variety of lenses in her interdisciplinary course, Megafauna Among Us: Humans and other Charismatic Animals.
School: Harvard University
Course: Megafauna Among Us: Humans and other Charismatic Animals
Instructor: Zoë Eddy
Course Description:
Whales, wolves, great apes, big cats, buffalo, bears — these animals populate human cultural imaginations. From animal advocacy groups to zoos to movies, so-called “charismatic megafauna” and/or “flagship species” dominate a wide swath of debates.
By focusing on a selection of animals, this course explores a) how people interpret these animals, and b) how human interactions impact these animals and their natural environments. Organized around different animals and the controversies, questions, and events surrounding them, this course will emphasize how animals reflect human understandings of morality, culture, and history. Course themes focus heavily on environmental activism, public and environmental policy, Indigeneity, and animals in tourism markets. While this class centers on North American case studies, international examples will help create a cross-comparative global context.
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Ask the Instructor: Zoë Eddy
What is your official title at Harvard?
I’m a lecturer working within the Anthropology Department, where I also assist in directing the undergraduate program. I’m a faculty member affiliated with the Harvard University Native American program and Division of Continuing Education, and I teach within the Harvard Extension School as well.
Tell me about your class, ‘Megafauna Among Us: Humans and Other Charismatic Animals’.
I’m Huron-Wendat, Ojibwe, and French-Canadian on my mom’s side, and then Russian-Polish on my dad’s, so indigenous practices and theories are a central element of my work. A part of that is interspecies work.
Anthropology is nominally the study of human culture, but how do we interact with different landscapes? With nonhuman animals? I wanted to bring a more holistic approach to how my students observe the world around them.
The class originated because we don’t have a lot of people within the Anthropology department doing that interspecies work. I wanted to bring forward non-human animals in a way that was dynamic and that could encourage other people to get excited about these issues. Part of looking at charismatic animals is understanding the connection between migration patterns and climate change — environmental justice comes into the class at multiple points.
How long does it take for you to design a course like Megafauna?
I’m a person who takes on a lot of projects at once, and I really consider myself to be an activist first and an academic second. In undertaking my activism work, I’m constantly thinking about these topics. I started thinking about, ‘what’s our relationship with non-human animals?’ Or, ‘how do specific animal-focused films reflect our cultural practices, and how can our understanding of these cultural practices be improved by better policy?’
I was thinking a lot about these ideas, and I said to Nick Harkness — the wonderful Social Anthropology Program Director — that I’d like to teach a class on animals. He was like, “go for it.” So yeah, I had this random enthusiasm bubble up at some point in the 2019 fall semester, then spent about two weeks getting super excited and cobbling together the syllabus for the class. It was about two weeks of planning, and then a lot of collaboration with different colleagues and friends to try to make the course more dynamic and anthropologically informed.
When you say “charismatic animals”, the animals that come to my mind are dolphins and chimps — animals who engage in play for pleasure, and who live in groups which practice some kind of social hierarchy. What charismatic animals do you teach about in your class?
My use of the term ‘charismatic animals’ comes specifically from conservation policy’s definition of flagship species and charismatic species. These are the types of animals that really attract human attention and become mascots for all sorts of different organizations, from the World Wildlife Foundation to Coca-Cola. I did my dissertation on bears and national branding, so I’m interested in why certain large animals take on these brand personifications. One of the things we discuss in class is that we love these animals because they remind us of us.
If you look at elephants, they engage in reciprocal altruism and interspecies cooperation and collaboration. We know that they grieve. We know that whales are way smarter than we can possibly conceive of. Our class talked a lot about the polar bear, how it became an icon for climate change and global warming. Why the polar bear, and not another animal more integral to our ecosystem? We looked at the history of conservation work: why did the movie Free Willy cause an explosion of animal rights activism, of protests against zoos and aquariums, when it was released in the 1990s? How has that activism persisted until today?
One of my favorite parts of the course happened right after COVID hit and we moved to remote instruction — that was, of course, the release of Tiger King. I originally had planned to show Lion King when it came time to discuss big cats but then Tiger King came out, and it was such a sensation. I used it to talk about Said’s Theory of Orientalism: how we build this exoticized ‘other’ that is grounded in racist tropes, and how our understanding of animals plays into that.
We looked at a lot of Orientalist art which show these kind of lush, sexual, violent depictions of the Middle and Far East. Then when the show came out, we watched it as a class and discussed how we can understand Orientalism within the American media through tiger sanctuaries. Orientalism is a pretty difficult topic to teach because it’s so nuanced, so it was nice to kind of have this look at how non-human animals are treated by the media in a way that expresses these strange, human stereotypes and prejudices. There’s a sort of glamour associated with keeping a tiger, but also some underlying insinuations about their exoticism.
We also examined how nonwhite persons are mapped to the animal. In Nazi Germany, there were a lot of comparisons between the Jewish community and non-human animals. We talked about how in the U.S., African Americans have historically been compared to primates in this really disgusting, racist way. So, there’s this way in which charismatic animals are used to quite literally dehumanize populations of people, that I believe is worth examining.
Have you read the book, ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman? It’s a graphic novel that depicts the events of WWII using animals as the characters — Germans are cats and the Jewish community is shown as being mice, for example.
Yes, we actually did talk about the book briefly in class. My research focus is in critical examination of zoos, aquariums, and museums, however, so we did mainly focus on those areas. I’d love to teach a class on smaller animals, like rats.
I had a pet rat — I’m a big fan.
My husband loves rats. I have just about a billion animals and, because we were conducting class remotely, I could bring them into my Zoom sessions. That was a fun addition.
One of the reasons that I really liked this class was because it was so interdisciplinary. We studied Wolf Hollow, a sanctuary in Ipswich which houses wolves who have been injured and can’t be released into the wild. We talked about the reintroduction of wolves to the United States, how they’ve become a sort of a mascot in a very problematic way.
This term I had Molly Segal, an NPR reporter, audit my class. She’s so cool — she’d done all of this work for NPR and her podcast examining bears as a charismatic species. She’s also a Canadian; in Canada, bears are used to bring in tourism, so they’re very prominent. But because of industrialization and human migration, we’re encroaching on the habitats in which bears reside — so that urban spread has created a lot of interspecies tension.
Was Megafauna an undergraduate-level course?
All of my classes are open to graduate and undergraduate students, and I’m always happy to take auditors. In this class, I had a combination of graduates, undergraduates, and auditors. My undergraduates ranged from undeclared freshmen to seniors in conservation biology, and my auditors were like lawyers and journalists and doctors. It was a really smart, really intimidating group.
I kind of expected the class to function as a standard lecture, and I wasn’t sure quite where to begin — how much previous exposure would my students have had? Then I got into the classroom and saw who I was working with. By the second or third class, we really changed the class structure to have multiple students share their expertise.
So it turned from a traditional lecture format into more of Socratic Seminar.
Yes, exactly. I always started class with a 20-to-35 minute lecture, just to ground people. Then we would move into a conversation where people would bring in their own critical expertise. And it really became a very collaborative class where conversations and the syllabus would shift based on my students’ interests.
The second half of the semester was supposed to be really interactive — we had plans to go to the wolf sanctuary, the Boston Aquarium, plans to have all of these experts come in…. So if COVID hadn’t hit, it would have been an even more dynamic class. Instead, we watched a lot of media — the best-know controversial animal films and documentaries. I mentioned Free Willy, which jump-started this interest in Orca and dolphin captivity. We looked at Blackfish as a comparison, because it was so controversial. We watched The Cove. Then we compared the tones and messages of each film, like, how was Blackfish set up versus The Cove? What implicit tropes are they mobilizing? The Cove pushes a number of anti-Japanese tropes.
We read a lot of legislation connected to American Indian, Alaskan, and other Native populations’ hunting rights. There are many connections between law, culture, the perceptions of indigeneity, and the general public’s love for marine mammals. We talked about how indigenous communities practice sustainability in their culture through subsistence hunting, but how these same practices bar them from competing within contemporary industries.
What is the one thing you want students to leave your class having learned?
Our actions and decisions have consequences which stretch far beyond us. We are not the only species existing within mankind’s impact. •
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