Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2013, 280 pages, $24.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8047-8358-3.

On 9 February 2014 a young giraffe named Marius was killed by bolt gun in Copenhagen Zoo. Marius’ body was dissected in front of a crowd comprised of young children, parents, and an international media throng - a public lesson in giraffe anatomy. His carcass was then fed to the lions. The zoo had deemed Marius surplus to requirements, since any of his future offspring would diminish, rather than enhance, the captive giraffe population’s genetic diversity. Like most Scandinavian zoos, Copenhagen holds that sexual reproduction is central to animal welfare and wellbeing, and prefers euthanasia of a few young animals to contraception for many (contraception having potentially debilitating side effects). Hence, a single giraffe was killed in the name of the genetic diversity of his worldwide kin, illustrating the inseparability of ‘good’ biopolitics (the power to make valued life live) and "bad" biopolitics (the power to kill or let die in the name of other valued life) in the more-than-human world of the zoo.

The central task of Irus Braverman’s Zooland is to understand how biopolitics take form within a relation of pastoral care in the zoo. Across nine empirical chapters, each devoted to a particular technology of governance, from naming to naturalizing to reproducing, Braverman sets out to examine North American zoos from the "inside out." In doing so she eschews the politically forceful but shrill and fundamentalist discourse of animal rights: this is a welcome maneuver.

There is much in Zooland about the mechanics of caring for bodies, about the supremacy of the gaze (which works both ways, as animals are supposed to socialize visitors into a vaguely articulated ethic of "caring for nature"), and about the practices required to maintain the zoo as a conservation habitat. Indeed, Braverman sets the centrality of "care" in the context of the zoo’s shifting political economy and its reinvention, since the 1970s, as an important node for conservation biology. The novelty in this book is to stress the productive aspects of biopower, rather than panoptic techniques of enclosure, display, and discipline with which we are familiar in zoo studies. Braverman shows quite convincingly how much work goes into maintaining zoo animals as "wild," so that they can continue to represent their cousins outside the zoo world. This involves zookeepers ‘freezing’ evolution: selecting animals for maximum genetic diversity of the population rather than fitness. Zookeepers and zoo bureaucrats alike cleave to the dream, or perhaps the myth, of a return to the wild for their nonhuman charges; their ethic of care demands that the sacrifice these animals make be tempered by a future epiphany, no matter how deferred.

The book’s most striking chapters go beyond animal bodies to consider zoo databases, regulations, and the new technologies that bring animal bodies into being. Braverman’s exploration of the backstage practices of zooland makes for fascinating reading. Several chapters examine the move from localized systems of naming animals (decipherable only by the local institution), through ARKS (a database in which animals were given a name and accession number linked to the particular zoo), to ZIMS, a new database where animals receive a randomized nine-digit global accession number. ZIMS enables the bureaucratic oversight of animal circulation through a global zoo network, one in which weighs the wellbeing of the individual against the good of its species. Moreover, ZIMS helps zoos to move beyond merely managing their collections towards the goal of making genetically pre-determined populations-to-order. This capability to make life may well be decisive for the future zoo, since the zoo network is increasingly a closed ecosystem with less and less traffic between captive and wild populations. There are parallels with the way genetic, epigenetic, and other forms of data are mined by firms to produce new forms of bio-capital in the way that zoo life becomes part accumulation strategy (ensuring the zoo’s financial survival), part theological-genetic mission (ensuring the future genetic integrity of a species elevates the preservation of mere animal bodies into something much grander).

That said, I think the book suffers from a couple of shortcomings which prevent it from being as really excellent as it could have been. First, there isn’t a lot of theoretical heavy lifting. While that makes Zooland empirically nimble, and more palatable to a general readership, at a mere four pages in length the conceptual framework remains simply too slight to do justice to the wealth of material amassed (over 70 interviews). Despite an avowedly Foucauldian theoretical line, concepts are not applied consistently, nor do we get much engagement with biopolitics. "Human nature" is regularly invoked: for example, the "human desire to thoroughly know and order all animal species" drives naming strategies (page 55), while chapter five concludes that the figure of the zoo registrar demonstrates "the human urge for classification" (page 126). This jars, and employing the transhistorical human as an explanatory device way takes us away from the Foucauldian task of exploring how particular practices, techniques, and ideologies produce not just animal natures, but human natures too. Second, the geography of Zooland is rather restricted, focusing only on North American affiliates of the Association of Zoos and Aquaria (AZA). As the author herself points out, zoos in say, Scandinavia, have rather different regimes of care (as the opening anecdote to this review demonstrates), as do animal parks, aquaria, and safari parks not affiliated to the AZA. So while Zooland gives us an excellent understanding of the production and circulation of animal lives in the "good" zoo network (those institutions signed up to conservation), we don’t get much sense of how such processes work elsewhere. Attention to these other zoo geographies would show how animals become different kinds of animals through different biopolitical apparatus.

These minor complaints aside, Zooland stands as an admirable achievement and a welcome addition to the literature on zoos, as well as showing how biopolitics encompass more than human life. Braverman’s research really gets to the heart of the paradox that the institution of captivity is an expression of care, even if that care justifies death and suffering. The zoo’s love is the kind of perverse love that painlessly smashes an infant mammal’s brain with a steel rod and dissects its carcass for public spectacle in the name of a wider scientific conservation mission. Nowhere demonstrates how spaces of care and killing, life and death, overlap quite like the zoo.