[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, November 15th - Ian Jared Miller - (please RSVP)

[Harvard STS]

*STS Circle at Harvard*
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*Ian Jared Miller
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*History, Harvard
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*Pandas in the Anthropocene: Japan’s “Panda Boom” and the End of Nature
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Monday, November 15th
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts at hks.harvard.edu 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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