ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that inscribes various human strategies for domesticating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide, South Australia, the chapter draws the mutable discursive frames and practices through which animals were fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public by the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. Nature, for all its apparent remoteness and distance from humans is, in some senses at least, socially constructed. At the zoo, the raw material of nature is crafted into an iconic representation of human capacity for order and control. The argument concerning the mutual construction of culture and nature at the zoo has a further component. Adelaide Zoo was incorporated into a well-coordinated imperial network of animal trading, itself an arm of the regime of extractive capitalism that was beginning to straddle the globe.
