CSU's The Audit

SHOW INTRO: Welcome to Colorado State University's podcast, The Audit, where host Stacy Nick talks with CSU faculty about topics ranging from their latest research to current events.

HOST INTRO: When you think of Africa, what image comes to mind first? Is it lions and elephants? Maybe grass huts. In the West, it's a common mindset.

It's so common that when a Johns-Hopkins researcher typed the phrase "Black African doctors providing care for white sick children" into an artificial intelligence program to see what photos it would generate, the program — which draws from a database of existing images — either only showed images of white doctors treating Black children or Black doctors surrounded by things like giraffes.

Jessie Luna is an associate professor of sociology at Colorado State University. Her research investigates how cultural politics intersect with processes of capitalism to produce and naturalize social inequalities.

Today, I'm speaking with Luna about how these kinds of stereotypes impact our everyday lives. Even during a simple trip to the zoo.

HOST: Your recent work has had a real impact on how some organizations depict certain cultures, people and countries. And it all started with a trip to the Denver Zoo. So let's start there. What happened that day?

LUNA: Yeah. So it was 2020 during the pandemic. I have two young kids. At that time, they were very young, one and four. And their daycare was closed. And so I decided to take them down to the Denver Zoo for the day. And we were in the middle of the Denver Zoo and they needed to go to the bathroom. So we moved down this pathway toward the direction of the bathrooms. And we walked under this big arching sign that said Primate Panorama. And it was on these big wooden pillars. And there was a bunch of geometric carving in the wood that immediately evoke Africa. And right behind that big Primate Panorama sign were the bathrooms. And they were inside of these circular mud brick huts with thatched roofs. And so I'm sending my kids to the bathroom and immediately my brain is going, alarm bells are going off. So I'm a scholar. I've worked for many years in West Africa. I work on interactions between race, racialization, the history of colonialism and the environment. So there were a bunch of things that were suddenly kind of entering my brain in terms of why are there African huts at the zoo and why are they right here behind the sign, the Primate Panorama, this exhibit that is about primates, we're imagining monkeys and gorillas. And yet immediately I'm seeing visual imagery of the stereotypical rural, sort of primitive Africa. And as somebody who studied the history of race for a very long time, the history of the construction of racial hierarchies, which we know is historically rooted in this portrayal of African people as closer to nature, as less evolved, as closer to being monkeys, right, than to white Europeans. That is the history of the construction of racial difference. And here I am seeing this in the Denver Zoo in 2020. And so that was like the spark of my interest of saying something's going on here and I want to think more about this.

HOST: And then so what was there specific, you mentioned the Primate Panorama. Was there any other exhibits that kind of struck you?

LUNA: Yeah. So after our bathroom break, we went on into the rest of the exhibit and there was a lot that struck me. One in particular was an exhibit for a mandrill, but it had a bunch of signage about the Congo in particular. And I, you know, studied some on the history of the Congo. And it's very, very complicated and gruesome colonial history. And yet the signage here, there were two signs right next to each other. And one of them said, "the natural riches of the Congo." And it had a bunch of different animals portrayed like a toucan and a gorilla and a snake. And then it had a photograph of the pygmy people, and it had this sort of like photograph that was kind of grainy from the forest. And it had these sort of semi-clothed people. So putting African people into the same sort of categorization as these other natural riches.

HOST: Almost like they're an exhibit.

LUNA: Exactly. And there's as somebody, you know, the history of world fairs and ethnographic exhibits and what are what are sometimes called human zoos is a history of putting these so-called native primitive people on display directly next to animals. This was done in the 1800s in traveling menageries, and then it was done later in the 20th century in world fairs around the world. And there were actually even at the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s, there was a the story of Ota Benga, who was a man from the Congo, who was put on display next to the animals in the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s. And so again, here, this is not a living person, but representational. The story is still putting these people on display next to animals. And so that was one that really immediately stood out to me. I took pictures of these signs and then the other sign right next door to that one was a story about like what is causing wildlife decline? What are the threats to animals in the Congo. And it was a long list and it was things like war and political instability and deforestation and land clearing and logging and poaching. And if one was to read that sign and have no broader knowledge of the history of the Congo, the history of King Leopold and Belgium and the extraction of resources from the Congo by Europe in particular, one would simply read that sign and think, "Wow, it's these sort of like greedy, overpopulating Africans who are having too many children who are causing the decline of these animals." And that's a story that I find a concerning story. And so these exhibits were what launched my interest in studying the zoo and understanding the broader stories that the zoo was telling.

HOST: So how did it go from that simple trip to the zoo to a research project?

LUNA: So I wanted to, you know, beyond just sort of an observation of I found this one particular sign concerning. I wanted to understand, does this play out across the zoo? What are the broader stories that the zoo was telling? So I decided to do a project on it, and I went down to the zoo, over and over. I decided to look at the entire zoo. So I walked through the zoo many, many, many times, taking pictures of all of the architecture, the exhibits, the small signs, even things like the bathroom signs, the pathway signs. And I also had this giant spreadsheet that I created to sort of quantitatively look at the zoo signage. So I had a sort of row for every single sign at the Denver Zoo. And I asked questions on my little spreadsheet, sort of what animal is being talked about, what continents is being represented. And then I looked at some questions. In particular, I looked at whether there were cultural markers. So whether there were things like cowry shells and beadwork, artwork, drawings that sort of evoke a particular kind of culture, whether that was present on the sign or not. And then I also looked at what kinds of stories were being told about the causes of wildlife decline. So I tabulated all of that up to sort of think about on the whole, what kind of story is the zoo telling.

HOST: So what did you find through all of this research?

LUNA: So I found two main stories, and they certainly corresponded with my initial hunches in terms of my initial reaction in the zoo. And so I found two big stories that I was concerned about. And the first one was the ways in which the African and Asian exhibits at the zoo were portrayed differently than the parts of the zoo that portrayed like North American or European animals. And so these parts of the zoo, you have these sort of stylized or very stereotypical portrayals of a rural, traditional, what we might call primitive people who are living in closer relationship to nature. And some scholars have studied other zoos have talked about this as sort of conflating nature and people in a way that renders both sort of wild and exotic. So I found a lot of examples of this, of just sort of the artwork, the thatched roofs, the bamboo lashing signs. And in contrast, the signs that were for the North American animals, they don't have any cultural markers on them. It's just about an animal.

HOST: The polar bear is just the polar bear.

LUNA: Yeah, well, there are no polar bears. But, yeah, if there was, it would just be the polar bear.

HOST: The grizzly bear is just the grizzly.

LUNA: Yeah. And so, like, the bald eagle, for example, or the sea lions and the mountain goat. It's just a mountain goat. And there's an exhibit and there's a sign about the mountain goat. But there's no broader sort of effort to put this animal into a sort of exoticized local culture or place. An example that I find useful is thinking about what if that mountain goat exhibit, what if you went up to that and there was Swiss mountain chalets kind of built up around the rocks and the entire exhibit was built in like a Swiss classic sort of mountain Swiss architecture, and there's yodeling playing on the loudspeakers.

HOST: That sounds awful.

LUNA: Well, you know, I mean, there's music. Like the Asian portion of the zoo actually has like sitar music playing, for example. Right? So you have yodeling music going on or yodeling, and then you have signs that show, like they're bordered in Swiss embroidery or whatever. Right? And then there's pictures of poorly clothed Swiss children up in the mountains holding up dead animals that they've just poached from the forest. Right. And a whole sign talking about how traditionally these people have been you know, they haven't necessarily valued the local species, and the zoo is engaged in lots of efforts to try to educate them to better protect their local environment. Right. That would be an example of like flipping the script. And we don't see that, right. We would just see a mountain goat or we just see the sea lions. And so that was my initial finding of sort of this the concern about just the cultural portrayal, the reproduction of these stereotypes of Africa and also to some extent of Asia, that these places where people are closer to nature and more rural, primitive. There's no representation of modernity, there's no representation of urban spaces, in particular in the African portion of the zoo. And so that was the first story that I found, and that really played out in my findings. The vast majority of signs for Africa and Asia also had cultural indicators. And the vast majority of those for Europe and North America did not. And so then the second story that I was looking at that also was supported by my findings was the story about the narratives that we tell about wildlife decline. And again, I found that the signage in the African portion of the zoo and also the Asian portion of the zoo was really the story of overpopulation, of deforestation, of like these local people who sort of pressures on the on the land are causing species decline. And again, I find this sort of casting of blame on these people. And certainly it's a very common narrative in environmental narratives, but it's one that that many scholars have been critiquing for quite a number of years.

HOST: And probably it's a lot more complicated than a sign could explain.

LUNA: Yeah. Well, there's a well, there were a few signs that I did find particularly better than the sort of main narrative. There was actually a sign in the Congo exhibit that did include discussion of cell phone use. Our use of cell phones requires mining of minerals in the Congo. Right. So connecting global commodity chains, connecting our consumption here in the global north with the kinds of environmental impacts that we see in what some people call the majority world in the global South. These places where we know where it's like deforestation and logging. Well, what's causing that deforestation and logging? Is it these greedy local people who are having too many children? Or is this being driven by, for example, corporate demand for wood to supply furniture for the global north? Right. So I think there is a way to include some of those stories in more complex ways.

HOST: When you brought this to the zoo's attention, what was their reaction?

LUNA: So I was initially nervous to reach out to the zoo. And when I did, I was actually pleasantly surprised. They were excited to talk to me. We ended up having several conversations. I went down and met with a group of folks at the zoo. And one thing I learned was that they were actually already in the process of thinking about a lot of these things. They had been involved in reconsidering exhibit design for a number of years. They had had an advisory council of a bunch of different people from the communities being represented in the Asian exhibit in the Toyota Elephant Passage. So that had been a part of their planning process for that part of the zoo. And they had already begun thinking about some of their signage. And so when I came and talked to them about my work, I think they were also nervous. I was nervous. And then we ended up having a very productive conversation and they were beginning to redo a bunch of the signage at the zoo. And then as I presented my work and my findings to them, they continued that work and they basically removed all of the signage that I was pointing out as being particularly concerning, particularly the ones about sort of traditional Africans and the poaching and those kinds of stories. And they've redone a large portion of their signage at the zoo. And so it was very exciting last fall, I met with them. And they said, "Jessie, we really want you to go walk around the zoo and see the changes that we've made." So they've redone a bunch of their signs. But they're also involved in a lot of different efforts. And one of those is moving away from trying to tell sort of a broad story about like this culture or these people, and this is their relationship with animals. So recognizing that that can be tokenizing, it can be inaccurate or simplifying. And there's a lot of concerns and complicated ways to try to deal with that problem. But one approach they're taking is to try to focus on individual stories. So highlighting a specific person, an individual and their particular story. And so they've been doing that with some of the new designs for upcoming exhibits and recent exhibit design. They also had already begun rethinking some of their new exhibits. One of those is the South African Penguin exhibit that's at the very like the first thing you see when you enter the zoo. And that's one of the few African exhibits at the zoo that isn't saturated with like mud and geometric carvings and cowry shells. It's a much more modern styling of the exhibit. And so they told me that they had done that very intentionally. They're also rethinking how they portray their conservation efforts and their actual conservation efforts. So I didn't I don't talk about this in my paper, which is the whole question of how does the zoo actually engage in conservation efforts. But the zoo is also involved in that broader dialog of the longer history of concerns about conservation and how conservation historically has been a very white, Western-imposed project that can often dispossess local peoples. They're rethinking those strategies, and they're also rethinking how they tell stories about conservation at the zoo.

HOST: And this isn't just an issue that's relegated to zoos. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science also closed their North American Indian Cultures Hall due to similar concerns.

LUNA: Yeah, it's certainly not at all restricted to zoos. This is a much bigger question about how institutions in particular have historically told stories, what kinds of stories they tell, and questions of who is in charge of representation, and also the materiality of some of these exhibits, in particular with questions of repatriation of objects and art that were taken historically through colonialism. In a sense, my work is part of a much broader conversation. There's movements for repatriation. The British Museum has been under a lot of pressure to repatriate objects taken during colonialism. There's pushes to remove monuments to slavery and colonialism. And I see all of this as part of a much bigger conversation of reckoning with the histories of colonialism and racism that live on in our institutions and live on in the ways that we tell stories. And so these are much needed efforts to try to rethink those things and also to have much greater power given to people who are being, you know, historically those who are being represented to be able to tell their own stories rather than have other people telling their stories.

HOST: And this does really open up that bigger conversation regarding, as you said, who tells these stories and how they tell them. Especially organizations like zoos and museums. And they target very broad audiences, including really young children. That can get really complicated when you're trying to explain colonialism to a four-year-old.

LUNA: Yeah, absolutely right. And this was something I was really shocked by when I first started studying zoos. There's 2 million annual visitors to the Denver Zoo, but there's 700 million annual visitors to zoos worldwide. That's a lot of people going to zoos. And one thing I'll point out here is this is not a story about the Denver Zoo. This is a story about zoos more generally. Many zoos worldwide are actually, their exhibits are designed by a small handful of landscape architecture firms that then design these exhibits. And so what I was looking at at the Denver Zoo has its parallel in the Houston Zoo and the Seattle Zoo. I went to the Atlanta Zoo just last year. Same story. There's zoos in Germany. These zoos are all being designed by the same sort of underlying framework and angle of representation. And so what stories the zoos tell are really important. They're reaching a lot of people. And I think on one level, yes, it's hard to tell four year olds about the history of colonialism and resource extraction and King Leopold's Belgium. Certainly, yes, that's true. But I think there are ways that we need to begin to include those stories. I would also point out there's a lot of adults going to zoos. There's a lot of adults who are taking their children to zoos. As a mom of two toddlers, I kept joking about how the zoo is basically like a bunch of parents with toddlers at the zoo. I mean, not uniquely. There's a lot of school field trips to zoos and elsewhere. But, you know, there's also adults who are reading those signs. And so I think there's ways to include messaging to different groups all at the same time and to try to begin telling more complicated stories.

HOST: What is it like now when you when you take your kids back to the zoo? What is that experience like now?

LUNA: That's a great question. So I actually a lot of my fieldwork trips I ended up taking when one of my kids was home from daycare. So I would take one of my kids with me to the zoo. So they've been to the zoo a lot, and I haven't gone with the two of them in a while now. But it was very exciting this past fall when I went and I went and saw how many of the signs have changed. That was very exciting. And again, it's incremental change, but it's exciting to see. Any amount of change I think is important. There's still limits. The zoo, they're funded by corporations. For example, the Toyota Elephant Passage. It's sponsored by Toyota. And I do wonder, to what degree is the zoo going to be able to, like, put up signs of like the role of global capitalism and the mass consumption of things like vehicles and the role of fossil fuel burning in climate change and how that affects species worldwide. Right. So I do wonder, because of the limits of some of those institutional constraints, to what degree are those narratives going to show up in the zoo. It seems unlikely to me, but I do see positive changes happening. I presented this research a little while ago and it was a really great group of people who came with the geography department and a number of graduate students from Africa who were studying there. And they came up to me after the talk and they said, This work is so important. We came here to the US and we've encountered all kinds of bizarre stereotypes. And people ask us like, you know, did you come from, you know, did you live in mud huts? And, you know, are there tons of elephants and zebras where you're from? The kinds of stereotypes that like "The Lion King"-type Africa stereotypes that they've encountered since they've been here. And they said this is important work to create more nuanced portrayals of places like Africa that begin getting seeded in in Americans even at the age of two and three. Like they begin to have like when you think of Africa, you think of "The Lion King," you think of the Maasai people and their beadwork and you think of safari. And it's that seeding of those portrayals I think is important to change. And so, yeah, it is exciting to think that maybe my kids aren't going to be consuming that message when we go to the zoo again in the future.

HOST: Jessie, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

LUNA: Yeah, thank you. Stacy. Thanks for talking to me.

HOST:Jessie Luna is an associate professor of sociology at CSU. Luna is currently researching the ethical representation of people and cultures in zoo exhibitions. I'm your host, Stacy Nick, and you're listening to the CSU podcast, The Audit.