[E&E seminars] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, FRIDAY, 3-18-2011

[Margo Collett]

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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