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SUMMARY:The palace of cats and falcons: 21st-century fauna in a 20th-centu
 ry skyscraper - Michal Murawski (Department of Social Anthropology)
DTSTART:20111101T130000Z
DTEND:20111101T143000Z
UID:TALK33308@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Leon Rocha
DESCRIPTION:The Palace of Culture and Science - a Stalinist skyscraper whi
 ch dominates the city centre of Warsaw - has always been full of animals. 
 Cats have lived in the cellars since 1952 (the year construction work bega
 n) and the Palace chronicles mention peregrine falcons nesting high in the
  tower during the spring and summer of 1981. In the course of the last dec
 ade or so\, however\, as the 'wild' capitalism of the post-socialist trans
 formation raged all over town\, a systematic but unplanned 'taming' of (so
 me) Palace \nbeasts has taken place. The sixteen (more or less) resident c
 ats have been toilet-trained and placed on the municipal payroll\, while t
 he three-or-so \nfalcons have been tagged\, named and webcammed. Moreover\
 , this handful of glamorous felines and avians have become media celebriti
 es\, better known \nand loved than the tens of thousands of human beings w
 ho work and spend time in the building every day - not to mention the skyl
 arks\, quails and redwings who die in their hundreds here each year\, crus
 hed by the Palace's walls (Rejt 2000) or gorged with impunity by its birds
  of prey.\n\nThis paper argues that these newly glamorous cats' and falcon
 s' fame should not be explained by reference to their elemental cuteness o
 r any other \nautonomous faunal intensity. Rather\, the Palace's nonhuman 
 inhabitants are agentively inert beneficiaries/symptoms of an epochal shif
 t in the \nrelationship between society and nature: from the 20th century 
 drive to 'mastery' towards 21st century 'political economies of cuteness'.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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