thinking of tigers and racism while at work
co-worker: “we’re getting fucked by this weekend rush. go grab some extra dish-rags from the basement.”
me: “don’t you think it’s interesting how leopards, lions, tigers, caracals, and cheetahs actually all lived alongside each other - in Persia, the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Kurdish land, Mesopotamia, and the Indian subcontinent - for almost all of human history, all the way until the early 20th century? in fact, Caspian tigers still lived in Anatolia and the Caucasus up until the 1970s, even roaming as far west as the shores of the Black Sea in Eastern Europe during the medieval era. though popular consciousness might usually think of, say, the lion and cheetah as quote-unquote quintessential ‘African’ species or the tiger as a strictly ‘Asian’ icon, the wider recent historical distribution of these big cats is just one example of how ecology, especially as it was before the environmental degradation of European colonialism, helps demonstrate the arbitrary nature of political borders while helping to break down Orientalist and other xenophobic fantasies including the delineation of some kind of strict ‘West’ and ‘East’ boundary. i mean, to this day, cheetahs still live in Persia near the Caspian Sea, which i don’t see talked about a lot. and after all, if tigers naturally occurred in what we now call ‘Europe’ mere centuries ago, it’s harder to frame Africa or East/South Asia and their emblematic animals as somehow fundamentally exotic.”
(originally from elsewhere, August 2019)
