Scientific Bestiarium: the Living, the Dead and the Normal

My aim is to analyse scientific literature and its representation of the animal body in relation to the disciplinary institutions of its time, namely zootechnics. I will focus on the nineteenth century as the moment of birth of a specific biological discourse and as the moment of deployment of the Industrial Revolution, which had a significant impact on animal breeding. This conjuncture produces a radical new image of the animal body and of animality in general, which plays an important role not only in science and zootechnics, but also in philosophy and the human sciences. I will frame the evolution of scientific discourses on the animal body from the Greeks to the Modern Age, in order to present their material history in relation to the concrete practices that involved animals in their time. I will finally focus on two of the most important scientific models of the nineteenth century – Pasteurism and Darwinism – as cutting-edge moments in the history of biology, precisely due to their innovative relation to the zootechnical institution and its related conceptualization of the body.