Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy

"It’s about Dolly, the cloned sheep, but, like Primate Visions. it’s a combination of ethnography and history and history of science. Sarah Franklin, an anthropologist at Cambridge, gives a full and clear account of how Dolly came to be. Why a sheep and not another animal? The reason is that there are a lot of sheep in Scotland. But she also puts it in the context of the history of sheep breeding. “It remains worth examining why we ever saw Dolly as so novel” Dolly is old hat now; she’s stuffed in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. But genetic engineering has advanced amazingly since Dolly was cloned in 1996. It remains worth examining why we ever saw Dolly as so novel, as so different to what came before. The history of selective breeding goes back more than a couple of hundred years. Dolly was part of a continuum. With regard to breeding, as with many other things, it’s worth keeping in mind that the present is both very different from the past, but also, in some important respects, the same. Well, the contributions to animal studies — which is different from animal history — do. Animal studies is closer to literary studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. It often considers animals in the abstract. In many ways, history is closer to the raw material."