In her article, Katarzyna Szalewska offers a reading of the idea of the zoo in the context of Michel Foucault’s concept of the spatialization of discourse. Lars Berge’s book A Good Wolf. The Tragedy in a Swedish Zoo was an inspiration for Szalewska’s reflection. Szalewska refers to the history of the zoo and places this facility against the history of ideas, especially the nineteenth-century concepts of economization, scientism, collections and taxonomy. She then considers the zoo in the context of visual practices, especially the role of the gaze in the dialectic of power and knowledge. She shows that the zoo, functioning as it does in relation to the political and hierarchizing view, will always remain the domain of the cultural and the anthropocentric. Szalewska also addresses the perception and role of zoos as modern Noah’s arcs in the Anthropocene era and the ethical dimension of the “socialization” of animals.
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