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ray l. BIrdwhIstell presented a sIlent fIlm showIng famIlIes vIs iting elephant exhibits at zoos around the world. This film, along with the audio of Birdwhistell’s lecture and an epilogue, was then released in 1969 by the East Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute with the title Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos. Using his theory of kinesics (roughly, the study of “body language”), a “context control method,” and “purposive” filming of families viewing elephant exhibits, Birdwhistell hoped to demonstrate that physical gestures are not universal but are rather culturally specific and only comprehensible in carefully described contexts (fig. 1). Microcultural Incidents positions the ethnographer as a detached observer dissecting scenes for his audience, translating the language of gestures with the use of a slowmotion projector he calls a “perceptiscope.” Even with his many hours of raw footage and the subsequent analysis with the perceptiscope, however, Birdwhistell’s conclusions are remarkably small. Among the gems we learn, for example, are that on trips to the zoo En glish fathers are the keepers of food and knowledge and unselfconsciously teach their children to speak to elephants and that when the French stick their kids’ hands into elephant trunks, the children look at their hands with a mixture of surprise and horror before wiping them off on their clothes. Still, for Birdwhistell kinesics held the promise of revealing hidden truths about people and cultures. And what about the elephants? For Birdwhistell, the elephants— most often seen as just an extended trunk—are irrelevant; the animals simply provide a reproducible and, he would argue, neutral backdrop. Indeed, Birdwhistell could presumably have chosen any number of other settings for his film, such as a museum, a market, a park, or a sporting venue; Microcultural Incidents, he would insist, is not about elephants, nor even about animals or zoos, but about people. For a growing number of researchers interested in the history, importance, and meaning of cultural institutions like museums and zoos, however, and for many others interested in the place of animals in human nIgel rothfels is the author of a his

Through analysis of the contending ways elephants have been imagined in a mid twentieth-century circus performance and in a mid nineteenth-century hunting narrative, this essay offers a critique of several basic assumptions behind John Berger's "Why Look at Animals?" The paper argues that studying how elephants have been described and used reveals particularly well the often quickly evolving nature of our understanding of animals and their significance in our lives, and concludes that our historical comprehension of the very terms of "animal" and "human" is often surprisingly complex.