Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
102
As my eyes adjust to the shade, the most stunning rabbits come into view. I did not
know that rabbits could reach the size of large household cats. I dutifully read each label, and
then stare to my heart’s content. The names of some rabbit breeds — Sachsengold,
Mecklenburger Schecken and Thüringer — invoke specific regions in Germany. Anticipating
the public’s curiosity concerning the names of breeds which do not contain a geographic
reference, the organizers included the rabbits’ place of origins on the labels, matching specific
breeds of rabbit to different parts of Germany, much like cheese or wine. I speculate that
participation in the rabbit exhibit could lead some breeders to consider their breed in relations
to other breeds. More generally, the exhibit could serve as a place where people would
consider their regional identity and the meanings that others attribute to it. Some visitors
might discover gaps between their community’s self-conception and others’ perceptions of
their identity, gaps that are productive of additional layers of self-referential commentary.
The rabbits look at me sleepily; they do not mirror back surprise, delight or
astonishment. Some have eerie folds and strikingly colourful fur: blue, black, red and purple.
A few have long feet, while others are as small as hamsters. They are fantasies of uniqueness,
furry ambassadors whose pedigreed claim to purity suggests long-standing regional
peculiarities. Are the regional differences as dramatic as the differences between the breeds of
rabbit? At what point do breeds that have their origins in other parts of the world become
local, German, breeds? What does it mean to be German? As an anthropologist, I doubt that
the exhibit’s rhetoric of speciation has any purchase in geography. Saxony, Mecklenburg and
Thuringia are not isolated islands. The roads that crisscross these lands had ferried trade and
ideas since Roman times, bastardizing everything in their wake: ploughs, crops, lexicons,
coins and people.
Admittedly, my peripheral experience and reflections at the rabbit exhibit touch on the
main research focus of other scholars who have written about Potsdam and its history, the
anthropology of farming, agriculture, animal husbandry, animal exhibits, zoos, collections,
museums and tourism. My contribution calls for more extensive fieldwork and a thorough
familiarity with this scholarly literature. Nevertheless, I believe that urban anthropology has
much to gain from curating and publishing short descriptions of peripheral experiences from
the field.
Firstly, contributions to ‘Choice Notes’ might encourage the sharing of field notes.
Currently, the discipline does not incentivize us to make our field notes available to other
scholars. The proposed section is a step in the right direction: Setting an example of sharing
notes from the field. This example points to an alternative horizon in which there would be
more transparency with respect to the evidence that we collect in the field than there is today.
This, in turn, could bring anthropologists to collaborate with each other across skillsets,
giving rise to a division of labour, and perhaps careful succession planning with respect to
particular field sites.
Secondly, at the level of the individual scholar, innovation is often couched in moral
terms as an effort to document, and thus somehow liberate, marginalized people and
experiences. Peripheral observations that would focus on previously ignored categories of
people and or spheres of activity would help this effort.
