Résumés > Bears, roosters, pheasants: The making of the emblematic animal.

Vendredi 7 novembre 2025 - 11h30-12h15

Gersande PASQUINI, PhD Student, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Enjeux Contemporains, Université Lumière Lyon 2.

The zoo has long been a space where the colonial imaginary can be conjured up through displays of non-human animals. From the beginning of the 20th century, in Germany and then in France, zoos were designed to imitate the natural environments in which captive animals supposedly lived in the wild (Roustan, 2025 : 7). These animals evolved in their “papier-mache” settings for many years. Successive legislative reforms and a societal shift regarding animal welfare, sentience, vegetarianism, veganism, and animal experimentation, have all impacted the treatment of animals. At the zoo in Lyon’s Parc de la Tête d’Or, this change is reflected in the institutional discourse, which focuses on the protection of biodiversity. Each information panel includes the IUCN classification, indicating the species’ extinction risk and its causes to justify the animal’s confinement. Non-humans thus are drafted to represent their own disappearance without ever having known their native territory. In the heart of the Asian forest exhibit at the zoo, you can find the Vietnamese pheasant, a symbol of France’s former colonial empire and also a political and nationalist issue that simultaneously is used to highlight the fragility of ecosystems.

This paper will examine the concept of ‘emblematic animals’ by considering three examples: the Vietnamese pheasant, the Taiwanese black bear, and the Gallic rooster. First, we’ll examine how these images are constructed and the discourses associated with them. Then we’ll consider the practical implications of these emblematic species’ heritage status.