The gorilla remains: What can a dead gorilla tell us about the pursuit of prestige, profit, and the production of knowledge in the 1920s and 30s?

This study examines the relationships between a live and then dead gorilla, Cam.1.99, and the people who handled his remains. It presents the prestige, profits, and production of knowledge created through these relationships. It traces the interactions across a web of interrelating physical and theoretical spaces. After an outline of the social, scientific, and cultural history of gorillas, it follows Cam.1.99's journey from 1929 with his capture on film, encircled by hunters just before his death, to conclude with a photograph of his skull featured in a textbook last printed in 2011. Keeping close to the subject gorilla and on occasions his wider kin the study pursues the activities and exchanges surrounding his remains across many boundaries. The most obvious movements are the geographical ones between tropical rainforest, coast, ocean and temperate zones. Next come the human social projections onto these spaces. Imperial domains were the largest expression of these, filled with countries and colonies. Next, are the tracts of land taken by industrial capitalists looking to exploit the resources on or beneath the ground. Then there are the communities and individuals grouped together in and around the edges of these organised 'Western' spaces. Political and commercial boundaries were accompanied by cultural boundaries in which peoples' understanding of the world was expressed and passed on between generations. The differences between people and between people and other living organisms were expressed in knowledge systems within these spaces. Some of that knowledge was called science and it too had boundaries that marked its disciplines and determined what was and what wasn't scientific knowledge. All these boundaries are crossed by the gorilla at the centre of this investigation. Crossing them today involves crossing disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries within academia. To stay close to the subject, Cam.1.99 and his remains, this thesis necessarily touches on subjects that are often considered discrete areas of study using their own methodologies and their own historiography. Cam.1.99's journey across landscapes and disciplinary boundaries is the subject of this thesis. How he informed those he met along the way is his legacy.