ABSTRACT

Despite its growing popularity and continuous improvement since the nineteenth century, the aquarium—officially invented by Robert Warrington in 1850—is still little discussed in the field of animal studies. Regardless of its scale, the aquarium puts us in contact with the exhibited fauna while keeping us away from it. Either more or less visible, this boundary quickly became a major concern of wildlife park designers hoping to minimize its presence. This chapter analyses the irreducible tension between the different apparatuses and technical devices aimed at bringing man and fauna closer in public aquariums since the nineteenth century, and the enduring divide that separates human viewers and enclosed animals (while bars or wire fences can be replaced by ditches, the aquarium cannot avoid its glass or, today, acrylic screen). Through numbers of historical and contemporary examples—from L’Aquarium de Paris (1900) to the OdySea Aquarium in Scottsdale, Arizona, to mention but a few—this chapter explores the animal-human relations constructed and implied by ancient and modern aquariums and takes into account various innovations seeking to blur the frontiers between humans and animals.