I found this book by Samantha Hurn incredibly interesting, so much so that I ended up taking almost 9000 words of quotes in a cover to cover reading, as just so many of the areas she discussed were of the upmost interest and importance to my own work. I have also attached annotations to those which I feel need further discussion, analysis or interpretation, however much of it already links to other aspects of disucssion in similar literature I have already read. However Hurn collates much of the argument for 'bringing in the animal' into an eloquently worded, well referenced discussion.
As Eugenia Shanklin noted in her own reviews of
anthropological interest in animals up until the mid 1980s ‘the investigation
of human and animal interaction may well be one of the most fruitful endeavours
of anthropology’ (1985: 380) The reasons given by Shanklin include the diverse
ways in which ‘animals are used, how they function in various societies, and how
their many meanings are derived’ (1985: 379-80). To use (and adapt) the words
of the philosopher Donna Haraway: ‘we [anthropologists] polish an animal mirror
to look for ourselves [and what it means to be human]’ (1991: 21). 3
Indeed, regardless of our own individual perspectives on the
issue there persists, for many, especially those who hail from within a
mainstream Euro-American ‘scientific’ tradition, the assumption that nature
stands in binary opposition to culture, something ‘other’ and ‘out there’,
awaiting human action in order to acquire meaning. At the core of this premise
lies the human-animal dualism. Animals are the antithesis of humans. ‘Culture’,
we are often led to believe, elevates human above other animals and the natural
world. Such polarized thought becomes unsettled however, when confronted with
the increasingly widespread recognition that, in addition to biological
continuity between humans and animals, many of the defining characteristics of
‘being human’ (such as the possession of ‘culture’, language, conscious thought
and so on) are also found, in varying degrees, outside of the human species. 4
That anthropologists have tended to view the nonhuman
members of the societies they study in an objectified manner – as ‘things’ in
relation to human subjects, as opposed to active social agents in their own
right – reveals a great deal about the world views of the anthropologists in
question. So, while Haraway has a point, many scholars who comment on the use
of animals in human societies do not necessarily polish the animal mirror in a
conscious fashion. 4
Unfortunately it is necessary here for the sake of clarity
and because of constraints of space to focus the following discussion primarily
on human interactions with other mammals. This raises an important issue worthy
of further consideration because in prioritizing the class mammalia I am guilty
of promoting those ‘others’ who are most ‘like us’ at the expense of those whom
it is more difficult to engage. So, while what follows will be to all intents
and purposes, mammal-centric, the implications of this editorial design will be
revisited and discussed in relation to many of the themes covered in the book.
4
A great deal of variation and inconsistency occurs in
relation to the ways in which humans think about and interact with animals.
Given their comparative approach to the study of human culture and society,
anthropologists are particularly well positioned to be able to scrutinize these
human-animal relationships. Some humans eat animals, but only certain animals,
and the animals which are deemed edible vary to such an extent both within and
between cultures that dietary preferences and taboos have referred to as
riddles of culture. (Harris, 1973: 35) 6
Some scholars argue that, in addition to depicting the
obvious functional relationships between hunter and prey, these paintings also
represent spiritual connections which have united humans and animals in the
context of a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence since the Paleolithic. The animals
are depicted in great detail, in stark contrast to the accompanying
matchstick-style human hunters, and such contrast is suggestive of the
reverence with which humans once regarded the animals on whose lives and deaths
their own survival depended. 7
Almost every aspect of human existence in the post-domestic
world required input from animals at some stage in the proceedings, from the
food we eat and clothes we wear to the medicines upon which our lives depend.
It is often assumed that in contemporary post-domestic societies humans are
more ‘removed’ from ‘nature’ and ‘animals’ (a premise which subsequent chapters
will investigate and challenge), while in many of the ‘domestic’ (or
pre-domestic) societies which have traditionally been the focus of anthropological
attention, humans and animals live in much closer proximity. A consideration of
such subsistence arrangements is just one of numerous ways in which
anthropologists try to shed light on conflicting attitudes and relationships
between humans and animals. 8
Yes, a woman suckling a piglet might be ‘weird’ by some
standards, but is it any ‘weirder’ than the practice of shooting newborn calves
in the head and plugging their mother’s udders into industrial suction pumps to
provide milk for human children? Which is equally ‘shocking’ practice when
presented in such stark terms. What is so beneficial about an anthropological
approach to anthropological approach to anthrozoology is that, in the process
of looking at the ways in which others interact with animals, we are provided
with a lens through which we can evaluate animals, we are provided with a lens
through which we can evaluate our won taken-for-granted assumptions and maybe,
in the process, change the way we think about other humans and other animals. 10
The situation becomes even more confusing when the term
‘animality’ is considered and we are told that humans are, at least in part,
animals; ‘1. The animal side of man as opposed to the intellectual or
spiritual. 2. The characteristics of the animal.’
So ‘man’ has an animal side, the side which needs to be kept in check and overcome.
As the philosopher Mary Midgley notes (1994b: 192), human behaviours which are
regarded as socially undesirable are labelled animalistic and this label can be
applied to achieve both moral and political ends.
When human beings behave really
badly, they are said to behave ‘like animals’, however unlike their acts may be
to those that any other species could perform. This is a way of disowning the
motives concerned and distancing them from the rest of us. 14
Is it because I speak to you, that you judge I have feeling,
memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going to the desk where
I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You judge that I
have experienced the feelings of distress and that of pleasure, that I have
memory and understanding. Bring the same
judgement to bear on this dog which has lost its master, which has sought him
on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters the house agitated, uneasy,
which goes down the stairs, up the stairs, from room to room, which at last
finds in his study the master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its
cries of delight, bit its leaps, by its caresses. Barbarians seize this dog,
which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and
they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it
all the same organs of feeling that are arranged in yourself. Answer me,
machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that
it may not feel? Has it nerves in order to be impassable? Do not suppose this
impertinent contradiction in nature. (Voltaire, 2010 [1764]: ‘Animals’) 15
Because only free Greek men possessed the capacity for reason
it was thus ‘natural’ for those privileged few to be served by lower beings who
were ‘naturally’ subservient; women, non-Greeks (‘barbarians’) and, of course,
animals: ‘Now if nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vein, the
inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man’
(Aristotle, 2005, Book I, 11. 3 – 13: 7). 17
While there are, and always have been, individuals who
perceive animals as sentient beings, the widespread failure (or refusal?) to
perceive the sentience of other animals provided powerful justifications for
their treatment at human hands: “So far as animals are concerned we have no
duties. Animals are not self-conscious, and are there merely as a means to an
end. That end is man’ (Kant, 1930, 239). Given the innumerable ways in which
humans are reliant upon the exploitation of other animals, it is perhaps
unsurprising that these views have become so widely accepted. 18
While the land-hungry colonizers found animalistic savages
in the colonies, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution the European
bourgeoisie saw in the native people of newly discovered natural paradises an
attractive metaphor and comparison for all that was wrong with industrial
Europe – the ‘noble savage’ who lived in harmony with the environment. However,
this positive imagery was both condescending (in the sense that it was
influenced by an evolutionary perspective) and short-lived. With the advent of
Victorian colonialism, the idea of the ‘noble savage’ was once again usurped by
derogatory representations of, and attitudes towards native peoples, as
described above; imperialist expansion, missionary activity and the cultural
‘improvement’ of the ‘primitives’, predominantly against their will,
constituted the ‘white man’s burden’ (Kipling, 1899). 24
First, anthropology has had a not altogether unjust
reputation as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’. The link between anthropology
and colonialism has undeniably played a role in shaping the ways in which
practitioners of the discipline think (or thought) about their ethnographic
subjects. Prior to the reflexive turn, non -Western others were ‘primatives’,
but in the postcolonial period, when anthropologists are at pains to distance
themselves from the abuses of (some of) their disciplinary ancestors, many have
shied away from thinking about animal ‘others’ and human-animal continuity for
fear of re-opening old wounds. 25
One final point is to consider how all of this comes
together to make anthropologists particularly well placed to investigate human
relationships with other animals. Humans habitually engage in ‘othering’ in
their day-to-day interactions. This process of objectifying fellow humans in
instances of war, genocide, rape, slave labour or violence and abuse of any
kind is still regularly observed by anthropologists in a wide range of
ethnographic situations. In the process, these ‘others’ are relegated to the
status of lesser beings, typified in many contexts by animals. Thus the
objectification of ‘others’ – human or nonhuman – in the past and in the
contemporary world, justifies their treatment in the eyes and minds of the
‘abusers’. 26
Definitions vary enormously; however, there appears to be a
general consensus across cultural divides that a ‘person’ is an individual,
animate, self-conscious being who becomes a person in a social context in which
their individuality and intentionality is recognized and acknowledged by
another (de Castro, 1998: 476; Kohn, 2008; see also Fortis, 2010). Again, de
Waal makes a pertinent observation in relation to differences in approach
between Japanese and European or North American primatologists, where the
former happily recognize the personhood of their research subjects:
Being the product of a culture
that doesn’t set the human species apart as the only one with a soul, Imanishi
[Japanese primatologist and founder of the sub-discipline ‘cultural or
ethno-primatology’] had trouble with neither the idea of evolution nor that of
humans as descendants of apes. To the Buddhist … mind, both ideas are eminently
plausible, even likely, and there is nothing insulting about them. The smooth
reception of this part of evolutionary theory – the continuity among all life
forms – meant that questions about animal behaviour were from the start
uncontaminated by feelings of superiority and aversion to attribution of
emotions and intentions that paralyzed Western science. (2001: 116) 30
Anthropologists have long believed that ‘culture’ provides
the structure by which human thought is organised. It is through this process
of cultural construction that the personhood of others is either attributed or denied. So, for example,
if we are raised within a cultural context where ‘person’ equals ‘human’ we
will expect, or rather be expected, to see humans and only humans as persons,
regardless of whether or not our experience
of non-human others leads us to doubt this premise. In a post-Enlightenment
‘scientific’ context, to challenge the axiom of human exceptionalism is to
indulge in anthropomorphism, because while others we might think we see
manifestations of personhood in animal others, what we are really doing is
attributing human characteristics to animals. This is because only humans can
be persons. 31
Many anthropologists have been ‘forced’ to re-think
constructivism as a result of their contact with other peoples who do not attribute personhood, but rather perceive it, because in their
interactions with animals the personhood of these nonhuman others is revealed
in no uncertain terms (Milton, 2005; Willerslev, 2007: 20). So in cases where
humans are free from the constraints imposed by a particular world view which
sets humans apart from animals or where they make a decision – consciously or
otherwise – to reject it, the behaviours of other animals can be observed and
interpreted in much the same way that humans observe and interpret the
behaviours of members of their own species. Admittedly this is also a constructivism of
sorts, as within certain cultures the recognition of personhood is part of the
dominant world view! 31
Indeed, Willerslev makes a point of fundamental import when
he acknowledges that in animistic thought not all animals are accorded
personhood at all times (2007: 21). Neither, for that matter, are all humans.
De Castro for example observes that for many American peoples, strangers are
not necessarily persons (1998: 475). Nor are children (Fortis, 2010).
Personhood follows from embodied interactions, and the ways in which individual
humans experience individual ‘others’ will inform whether or not they perceive
in those ‘others’ the requisite characteristics of personhood. 32
There are countless examples of individual animals who, when
socialized with humans, can be taught all manner of complex behaviours. Koko, a
female Lowland Gorilla has been part of such a research programme for over 30
years. Koko, along with other gorillas at the Gorilla Foundation, has been
taught American Sign Language (ASL). Not only do they use ASL to communicate
with other (Patterson and Cohn, 1990). Moreover as a result of her long term
association with humans, Koko appears to have ’learnt’ how to communicate in
detail her thoughts and emotions on issues ranging from death and her grief at
losing her mate, Michael, her subsequent fear of her own mortality and her wish
to have a baby, in addition to detailed information about her particular likes
and dislikes. 34
Indeed what is refer to as the ‘Clever Hans effect’ (de Waal
et al,. 2008) is an issue among researchers concerned with understanding the
cultural and cognitive abilities of animals. 34
Humans stand apart from other animal species… because of the
way they create, use and live with a wide variety of material objects. This
world of man-made things modifies the natural world to provide a material
environment as the context in which social interaction takes place. Things,
both natural and man-made, are appropriated into human culture in such a way
that they re-present the social relations of the culture, standing in for other
human beings, carrying values, ideas and emotions. (1991:1) 36
This reveals a hierarchical way of thinking about culture
which, as already noted, is commonplace within the social sciences. However, as
with ‘culture’ more generally, there is ample evidence for animals
appropriating ‘natural’ and manipulated things into their cultures.
Stone-handling, also observed in Japanese Macaques (Huffman and Quiatt, 1986;
Leca et al., 2007) involves individual animals collecting stones and either
rubbing them together (in a matter reminiscent of the human use of worry beads)
or scattering them on the floor before collecting them up and repeating the
process again. This behaviour is one of the first to be learnt by infants
during socialization. 36
Perry claims this is ‘because anthropologists found it more
plausible to accept the notion of culture in the closest living relative to
humans’ (2006: 173). Yet primates are not the only animals to exhibit complex
behaviours which ethologists define as cultural. 37
Carrion crows in the city of Sendai in Japan have discovered
an ingenious way of cracking walnuts. They take the nuts and wait beside the
road until the light turns red. Then they descend, place the nuts in front of
the wheel of a car, and fly off. When the light turns green, they return and eat the pieces of the nuts
that the vehicle has crushed. (Sax, 2003: 20; see also Nihei and Higuchi, 2001)
37
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of this sort of
symbolism in animals, where ‘inanimate’ objects are imbued with value and
emotional significance is revealed in the practice of bone handling among
African elephants (Douglas-Hamilton et al., 2006).
Elephants have been repeatedly observed interacting with the remains of dead
conspecifics, and there is some evidence for elephants being particularly drawn
to the bones and tusks of relatives. […] These behaviours do not appear to have
any evolutionary advantage and on occasion actually put the bereaved in danger
of attack from scavengers who are feeding on the remains (Douglas-Hamilton et
al., 2006: 98)
The particular attention paid to tusks and skulls suggest
that the ‘mourners’ are confirming the identity of the deceased, as tusks and
faces are frequently touched during social interactions between herd members when
they are alive. This behaviour is suggestive of symbolic thought, as objects
replace other persons, but, perhaps more pertinently, there is an emotional
symbolism not observed in say, ‘symbolic’ honey bee behaviour. 38
It is a commonly held assumption in the ‘Western’ world that
there is a human realm, usually associated with ‘culture’, which is
diametrically opposed to the nonhuman or animal realm, the realm of ‘nature’.
This has been referred to as the ‘modernist’ perspective (or ‘Western paradigm’
[Palsson, 1996]) because it has been shaped by many of the defining features of
modernity which include, for example, the hegemonic influence of
Judaeo-Christian doctrine, the legacy of Cartesian metaphysical thought and
widespread participation (or rather inculcation) in a global capitalist system
(Bird-David, 1999; Franklin, 1999; 37
The ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’ opposition has been subjected
to considerable anthropological scrutiny following the reflexive turn of the
1960s. In relation to ‘hunter-gatherers’ in particular, generally held
assumptions about their mode of subsistence – which were arguably informed by
hierarchal perspectives of social evolutionism and the perception of
industrialization and a capitalist economy as the epitome of progress – were challenged
in the wake of Marshall Sahlins’ controversial paper at the 1966 ‘Man the
Hunter’ symposium and his subsequent treatise Stone age economics published in 1972. 42
Tracking involves intense concentration resulting in a
subjective experience of projecting oneself into the animal. The tracks
indicate when the animal is starting to get tired; its stride becomes shorter,
it kicks up more sand, and the distances between consecutive resting places
become shorter.
When tracking an animal, one attempts to think like an animal in order to
predict where it is going. Looking at its tracks, one visualizes the motion of
the animal and feels that motion in one’s own body. Karoha explained: ‘When the
kudu becomes tired you become strong. You take its energy. Your legs become
free and you can run fast like yesterday; you feel just as strong at the end of
the hunt as in the beginning.’ When the hunter finally runs the animal to
exhaustion, it loses its will to flee and either drops to the ground or just
stands looking at the approaching hunter with glazed eyes. Karoha explained
that when a kudu’s eyes glaze over, it is a sign that it feels that there is
noting it can do any more: ‘What you will see is that you are now controlling
its mind. You are getting its mind. The eyes are no longer wild. You have taken
the kudu into your own mind.’ The hunter will then finish off the animal with a
spear. (Liebenberg, 2006: 1024) 44
The ’respectful’, reciprocal relationship that obtains
between hunter and prey described above, has also led to some anthropologists
and environmental organizations to consider hunter-gatherers as indigenous
conservationists, with an innate ‘ecological wisdom’ gained from their close
proximity to the natural world (Ingold, 2000: 67-9) However, as Loretta Cormier
notes of the Amazonian hunter-foragers, ‘in Amazonian thought, personhood in no
ways suggests that animals are not legitimate prey. Arguably, Amazonian peoples
have had little need to be conservationists except in the contexts of
encroachment of Western society (2003: 155). 50
In recent years the notion of ‘primitive ecological wisdom’
has been refuted as a myth by anthropologists such as Roy Ellen (1986) and Kay
Milton (1996). While there are many indigenous peoples who show respect for the
natural world, anthropological criticism has been directed at the consumption
of ‘primitive ecological wisdom’ in the ‘West’ as another incarnation of the
‘noble savage’, to highlight all that is ‘wrong’ with modernity (Milton, 1996:
109; Thomas, 1983: 301-2). Perceiving ‘primitive ecological wisdom’ as dogma is
also problematic because it sets up indigenous hunter-gatherers for a fall when
they fail to live up to the ideal of an ecologically benign coexistence with
nature. 50
A more productive approach for all concerned is that
espoused by anthropologists such as Ingold and Milton, who recognize that
individuals perceive their environments directly as they go about their
day-to-day business and respond accordingly. 51
At the height of European colonialism, and in keeping with
the influence of social evolutionism during that period, many scholars (for
example, Childe, 1928; Engels, 1972 [1884]) subscribed to the view that
domestication was a ‘revolution’ which saw Neolithic humans ‘conquer’ the
‘wilderness’ and their own savagery and move a step closer to civilization (see
Anderson, 1997 for an interesting review from a geographer’s perspective). The
scholarship of many contemporary archaeologists however recognizes that such a
position presented a more accurate reflection of the colonial mindset than of
the prehistoric past. It is now widely accepted that the shift from hunting and
gathering to pastoralism and settled agriculture was not a sudden even, but rather
a gradual process (Wilson, 2007: 102)
Archaeologists and anthropologists have suggested that
delayed return hunter-gatherers would have been more likely to make the
transition to pastoralism than, for example, immediate return societies
because, as Juliet Clutton-Brock (1989) notes, the emergent hierarchies between
humans in delayed return systems made the subjugation of animals less of an
ideological leap (see also Ingold, 1994a [1988], 2000; Serpell, 1996 [1986],
2000). In addition to a recognition of continuity between species and of
personhood in nonhuman others, subsistence hunters have to engage in acts of
mimetic empathy, literally putting themselves in the place of their quarry
(Willerslev, 2004)
Clutton-Brock – The walking larder: patterns of
domestication, pastoralism and predation (1989)
One alternative to the ‘climate change’ model is the
‘overkill’ hypothesis most commonly associated with ecologist Paul Martin
(2007). Martin suggests that Paleolithic hunters were themselves responsible
for the megafaunal extinctions which occurred during the Pleistocene, hunting
once plentiful species such as the mammoth in a ruthless and unsustainable
manner. As a result, cave paintings might represent trophies, a means by which
hunters could document their hunting successes. Understandably this hypothesis
has come in for some criticism, especially from Quarternary scientists and
archaeologists who see interglacial climate change as a more likely explanation for mass extinctions
which may have acted as a catalyst for domestication (see Haynes, 2007). 61
In addition to the social impacts of domestication, the
archaeological record reveals some rather significant morphological,
pathological and nutritional changes which have come to be referred to as the
‘unforeseen consequences’ of domestication. This has led some academic
commentators to suggest that in the process of domesticating other species,
humans have ‘inadvertently’ domesticated themselves (Clark, 2007; Leach, 2003).
62
Diamond (1998) has been particularly vocal in asserting that
domestication was ‘the worst mistake in human history’. Indeed, archaeological
evidence suggests that there are numerous negative consequences of
domestication, including maladaptive morphological and behavioural changes in
humans themselves, and also radical changes to the standards of living for all
concerned (Diamond, 2002; Leach, 2007) 62
The mobile lifestyle and varied diet of hunter-gatherers
bestows numerous health benefits which are absent in many past and contemporary
settled agricultural societies Aside from a reduction in leisure time (as more
sustained effort is required to successfully raise livestock and crops) the
reduction in dietary variation (Katz, 1987) led to greater susceptibility to
disease (Hulsewe et al., 1999; Ulijaszek, 2000) and a restriction in childhood
development, both of which reduce life expectancy (Cohen and Armelagos, 1984).
The need to store surplus food also increased human exposure to pathogens such
as bacteria and moulds (Brothwell and Brothwell, 1998 [1968]) 62
Media coverage of public responses to global and national
zoonotic epidemics such as SARS, foot and mouth, BSE and salmonella suggest
that they are widely perceived as nature’s way of punishing humans for our
disrespect and exploitation. Franklin notes that, as a rule, these nagging doubts
are suppressed (a point also made by Bulliet, 2005), but intense media coverage
following the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK in 2001 made it impossible to
deny the fact that millions of animals would be slaughtered as a result of
human negligence; the cause of the outbreak was linked to poor standards of
hygiene. The all of these animals had been specifically bred to be slaughtered
was not the point. What affected popular consciousness was the fact that their
deaths were in vain, resulting in waste – something hunter-gatherers avoid at
all costs, or else risk the devastating consequences of spiritual retribution.
68
From a cultural materialist perspective, the milk-producing
capacity of cows means they are worth more alive than dead, while from a structuralist
perspective, cows represent life and are a symbolic surrogate mother of sorts.
Indeed, Gandhi commented that ‘the cow’ was revered because, in addition to
producing milk, ‘she made agriculture possible’. Cattle are important traction
animals and Harris also noted that it made no economic sense to kill animals
required in other aspects of food
production (such as the growing of crops). Yet cows also compete with humans
for scarce resources, so while ‘productive’ animals venerated the older generations
are not so fortunate. As Maya Warrier notes; ‘cows in modern India are usually
abandoned after their reproductive years and can be seen wandering the streets
of India’s towns and villages in conditions of malnourishment and neglect.’
(2009: 276 n. 14). Harris (1979) also noted the inherent contradictions between
atittudes and cations during his own fieldwork. In Kerala, southern India,
Harris’s farming informants would indirectly allow male calves to starve by
restricting their access to food, despite the prohibition on killing cattle. 89
As psychologists Knight and his
colleagues (2004) have noted, the experiences of individual animals can inform
their perceptions of animals and lead them to acquire what they term ‘Belief in
Animal Mind’ (BAM). BAM is one factor which can increase the likelihood of
individuals becoming vegetarian in a post-domestic context; they recognize the
‘personhood’ of other animals, and so do not want animals to suffer. BAM can be
compared with perspectivism of de Castro, and with Milton’s ‘ecology of
emotions’; as a result of experiencing the sociality of animals (de Castro,
1998) through interactions which trigger emotional responses (Milton, 2002),
individuals perceive in other animals qualities which they themselves can empathize
with (Milton, 2005). This is significant in relation to food choice, and
especially what might be termed ‘inverse incorporation’, that is, the decision
not to eat certain foods because of the qualities perceived in their living
forms. For many elective vegetarians for example, meat is taboo because the
personhood of other animals is recognized. It therefore becomes a moral issue –
why should other sentient, feeling, intelligent beings be killed to ensure the
survival of humans who can meet their nutritional requirements by a whole host
of other non-fatal means? 94
After the publication of the
Stern review of climate change, one of the main issues latched onto by the
media was Stern’s assertion that: ‘Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates
a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources.
A vegetarian diet is better.’ This example clearly shows that cultural
materialism cannot adequately explain contemporary food choices. If it could,
everyone in post-domestic societies would be vegetarian. Many are, but the
adherents to the various permutations of vegetarianism constitute a minority on
a global scale. Moreover, not every post-domestic consumer knows and fully
comprehends the negative environmental consequences of large-scale farming, or
cares about it enough to change their shopping and eating habits. 96
In medieval Europe, for example,
pet keeping was actively discouraged by religious authorities, at least among
the lower classes, for several reasons. First, pets were regarded as wasteful
because they diverted owners’ time and attention away from God (see Menache,
1998) and, second, because so many people were struggling to exist, pets were
thought to divert resources away from humans whose need, by virtue of their
species, was greater. As Serpell and Paul (1994) note, familiariy with animal
was regarded by the devout as proof of a dirty, beastly and unholy life. The
fact that many poor or elderly people took comfort in the companionship of
animals was seen as dehumanizing because it elevated animals to human status.
According to Serpell (1996 [1986]), this blurring of the distinction between
humans and animals challenged accepted socio-cultural norms and was therefore
viewed with suspicion. Indeed, pet ownership was often the only ‘evidence’ in
the trials of the alleged witches for example, so some pet owners literally
risked their lives by engaging in non-utilitarian cross-species relationships
(see Serpell, 2002a). Throughout the same period, however, pet keeping was also
an accepted preserve of social elites, and therefore demarcated status, wealth
and privilege. 100
First, structural functionalism
fails to acknowledge that some social elites may have chosen to keep pets for a
whole host of other reasons other than simply because they could, or because to
do so differentiated them from the hoi polio. Second, structural-functionalism
does not account for the numerous individuals from the lower echelons of
society who chose to keep pets despite the many difficulties such an activity
presented for them. Indeed, even in the contemporary world humans often opt to
keep pets where the relationship may appear to make their lives more
complicated. For example, large numbers of homeless individuals prefer to stay
on the streets than relinquish their canine companions (see for example,
Burley, 2008: 16; Singer et al., 1995). Elderly people are also less likely to
seek medical care when they need it for fear that they will be hospitalized and
forced to give up their pets (McNicholas et al., 2005). Such dogged
determination to maintain a relationship with a pet animal, even when it places
the human owner at risk, has traditionally been dismissed as irrational or
self-harming behaviour. However the therapeutic properties of pets, and the psychological
support which socially isolated people can obtain from the non-judgemental and
constant companionship of an animal, are increasingly being recognized. 101
Commodity fetishism is a state of
socio-economic relations characteristic of capitalist systems which predominate
in post-domestic societies. In the capitalist market the value of social
relations is influenced by the perceived values of commodities, but this value
often rests on the symbolic qualities that ‘things’ are thought to possess. Commodity
fetishism is typically engaged with by scholars looking at the impact of
capitalism outside of the developed world. 104
Taussig discussed the development
of a belief that workers who brought into the capitalist system had entered
pacts with the devil in a bid to increase production and therefore income.
However, Taussig observed that it was only when workers were proletarianized
(i.e. alienated from the actual products of their labour) that the devil
assumed importance. When working their own land or working for their own
subsistence they did not invoke the devil. Taussig noted the widespread belief
that, while it brought material wealth, the devil contract has undesirable
consequences and contracted workers would die a premature and painful death.
Animals imbued with symbolic value become commodities in contexts where
individuals are alienated from processes of production, because they can be
used for financial gain (to breed more animals to be sold, for example). But
what of the large numbers of pets who are viewed as commodities and status
symbols by their owners, but who do not actually yield any monetary profit?
Pets might also be regarded as commodities when they generate social profit for their owners (see for
example, Horst and Miller, 2006; Miller, 2001, 2008 for discussions of material
culture in relation to status, identity, and changing socio-economic
relations.) 105
Humans living and working
within the confines of other economic
systems pursue fetishes (such as fertility or cattle), but outside a capitalist
context these are not necessarily related to financial gain. The nature of the
relationship then bears some correlation to the dominant mode of subsistence, a
variation on the theme of Marshall Sahlins’ aphorism that ‘money [and commodities]
is to the West what kinship is to the rest’ (1979: 216). 105
The transient nature of some
human-pet relationships has been theorized by many scholars on the grounds of
control and dominance. Pets are dependent on their owners or carers for food,
water, exercise, companionship and so on. Philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan (1984) has
forcefully argued that pets fulfil the innate human desire to be needed and
this, coupled with the element of control that responsibility for a dependent
brings, accounts for the ubiquity of pet keeping in the modern world and the
high incidence of pets being abandoned or killed when that desire either wanes
or becomes difficult to enact in practice. 107
Anthropologists have prioritized
language as the dominant form of communication because of the widespread belief
that ‘language expresses cultural reality… language embodies cultural reality …
[and] language symbolizes cultural reality’ (Kramsch, 2008: 3). In other words,
humans use language, the meaning of which is shared by other humans, to convey
information. They use language to create and convey their experiences and
emotions to other humans and they imbue things with value, creating a symbolic
language of signs. So, ‘culture’, that marker of humanness and of intra-human
difference, is rooted in language. Language has also often been considered a
prerequisite for thought. 112
Biological archaeologist Robin
Dunbar has argued that human language and the capacity for symbolic thought had
particular evolutionary advantages, enabling our primate ancestors ‘to form
long-lasting, tightly bonded coalitions’ (1996: 68) through ‘a kind of vocal
grooming [gossip] to … bong larger groups than was possible using the
conventional primate mechanism of physical grooming’ (1996: 78). That may have been
the case, but grooming is just one of the many ways in which primates
communicate with each other. When discussing the suitability of baboons as
models for human evolution Cheney and Seyfarth (2007: 251) state that while
baboons communicate with each other and other species, they are incapable of
language per se. This is a
controversial point because baboons have perceptive and cognitive abilities
which show continuity with human
language. Moreover, baboons are capable of forming complex mental representations
(see for example, Noser and Byrne, 2007). As a result, when many other species
of animal are denied language, what they actually seem to lac is spoken
language and the ability to use abstract or symbolic signs (words) in almost
infinite combinations to convey meaning about things, events and experiences
which are not confined to the here and now.
114
Despite certain limitations, the
increasing popularity of NH is symptomatic of a paradigm shift in attitudes
towards animals, and domesticated animals in particular, within a post-domestic
setting. While it is often dismissed as anthropomorphism, the genuine desire to
read, understand and respond appropriately to the needs of the animals in their
care is a driving motivator for many humans. 117
As Levi-Strauss noted, animals
are convenient symbols for humans because they are ‘good to think’ (1963). In
other words, humans are able to communicate important messages about themselves
through animals, provided that the recipients of those messages share the same
semiotic understanding of system of classification. In the process of ‘standing
in’ for humans, animal ‘objects’ can also become active subjects with the
capacity to impact on the relationships between the humans involved, leading
some researchers to refer to these multi-species interactions as
‘intersubjective’. While such assertions are typically grounded in ethnographic
data, researchers seldom discuss the long-standing philosophical debates on
intersubjectivity, nor the implications of intersubjectivity for
anthropological studies of humans and animals. 125
Intersubjectivity is an integral
aspect of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology, which has a long
history within philosophy and the social sciences more generally. 126
However, as Cohen and Rapport
note, ‘Western social thought is built upon the Cartesian notion of
self-consciousness (as expressed in the cogito) as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity’ (1995: 1,
emphasis added). Such a view is received anthropological wisdom and yet many
researchers who work closely with other animals find the experience tells them
otherwise. 126
On the one hand, the recognition
that ‘any mind beyond the ethnographer’s own is other an requires to have
interpretive work done on it’ (Cohen, 1986) means that anthropologists can no
longer make sweeping generalizations about what it means to be a member of a
particular culture or society because all humans are unique. On the other, the
diversity of individual human
perception of the world means that anthropologists need now, more than ever, to
empathize, emphasis on the empathy, on accepting that we can never really know
what is going on inside the mind of anotherm but recognizing that sometimes we
can make a pretty good guess, should enable anthropologists to think seriously
about the possibility of human-animal intersubjectivity, an activity which, in
the past, would have been dismissed as mere anthropomorphic projection.
However, intersubjectivity still requires the acceptance of ‘mindedness’ in the
nonhuman other. 129
Perhaps the most conclusive
evidence for other animals having ‘self-consciousness’ and the ability to
empathize comes from research into ‘pointing’. An animal’s ability to recognize
the significance of a pointing gesture of another provides a pretty clear
indication that not only are they self-aware, but that they can recognize that
the ‘other’ who is doing the pointing is also self-aware (White, 2007: 68-9).
For example, if individuals look at what it is the other is pointing at rather than the tip of the pointing
finger, then they are showing what cognitive psychologists call ‘theory of
mind’. Some animals, such as certain primates, dogs and corvids (for example
crows and ravens), that this to another level and follow the eye gaze of
others. 131
Indeed, Duranti argues that, from
a Husserlian perspective, ‘intersubjectivity is more than a shared or mutual
understanding and is closer to the notion
of the possibility of being in the place where the Other is’ (2010: 1,
emphasis added). 136
There is an increasing body of
ethological material which convincingly argues for the ability of numerous
animals to empathize not just with members of their own species, but with
members of other species. While there is also plenty of evidence to suggest
that many animals do not demonstrate empathy, the same could be said of humans.
That they don’t always empathize or demonstrate empathetic engagement is a very
different issue to whether they are able to
empathize. 137
In India, 86-88 percent of the
Rhesus macaque (Mucaca mulatta) population lives in commensal or semi-commensal
settings with humans. Moreover this perceived need to separate humans from all
that is natural completely disregards our shared evolutionary history and is
based on the outdated misapprehension that humans, by dint of their ‘culture’,
are no longer part of nature. 145
‘Science’ is often presented in
public discourse as a marker of ‘progress’. In contemporary academia we are
currently experiencing the withdrawal of funding from the arts, humanities and
‘social sciences’ in favour of STEAM subjects (‘hard’ or ‘natural’ science
technology, engineering and maths). Driving these funding decision is the assumption
that science provides the key to solving the world’s problems. Yet, as
anthropologists were only too aware, ‘scientific knowledge’ is not absolute.
There are a myriad of ways of ‘knowing’ the world and ‘science’ is just one of
them. The prioritizing of one system of knowledge over others is, to some
extent, ethnocentric and can mean that important ‘folk’ knowledge is overlooked
because it is viewed as ‘inferior’. 151
The fact that scientists need to
overcome anthropomorphism suggests that identifying with other animals is
something which occurs to us as ‘natural’ or is ‘inbuilt’. This argument has
been advanced by numerous scholars who have written on anthropomorphism (for
example, Kennedy, 1992). The animistic beliefs of many people around the world have
been classified as anthropomorphic by anthropologists and there is a school of
thought in cognitive psychology (the Piagetian framework) which has suggested
that anthropomorphism is an innate human characteristic which is subdued within
certain cultural concepts. 154
In socio-cultural and
environmental contexts where humans recognize their ‘place’ within a complex
ecosystem, it is easier to see how the different elements of that ecosystem
work and interrelate. In post-domesticity, where connections between individuals
and the systems which sustain them are severed, some humans and human
institutions (such as allopathic medicine) have apparently lost that sense of
the bigger picture. 161
While some anthropologists are
now rightly critical of considering animals exclusively as metaphors, the
reality remains that for many anthropologists and their informants animals are
still good to think. 183
One theme which consistently
recurs through all of the literature however, is ‘belonging’. The participation
in a collective act provides comfort in a world of alienation (for example,
Bronner, 2004, 2008), while the ability to ‘outwit’ or out-perform a nonhuman
opponent provides some sense of control (as per the large body of
anthropological and sociological material on risk-taking more generally, see,
for example, Douglas and Wildavsky, 2983; Lupton, 2006; Lyng, 2005). 187
In the contemporary world,
animals are subjected to innumerable acts of culturally and legally sanctioned
violence. These ‘harms’ range from the enrolment of millions of animals in
intensive agricultural systems and vivisection, to mass extinctions and a
result of anthropogenic activities. Many animals (human and nonhuman alike) are
also harmed or become victims of violence illegally, as a result of neglect or
wanton cruelty of individuals or groups.
The root causes of cruelty towards animals in particular are difficult to
identify (although there is a recognized link between cruelty to animals and
cruelty to humans, for example, Arluke et al., 1999). However acts of abuse,
cruelty or violence are often the result of psychological dissonance. Acts of
violence towards animals are also recognized as responses of individuals who
have themselves been victims of abuse and/or alienation. 191
In his treatise In defence of dolphins, for example,
philosopher Thomas White (2007) synthesizes a range of published literature on
the behavioural characteristics of dolphins and concludes that dolphins are
inherently sexual beings to the extent that sex constitutes a ‘social glue’
(see also Norris, 1991). White also asserts that dolphins are ‘bi-sexual’.
While dolphins’ social idiom may well be sexual, classifying them as
‘bi-sexual’ is problematic because it is essentially anthropomorphic. In other
words, it attributes human categories to animal who do not share them.
Dolphins, like many other animals, do not have the same cultural baggage about
sex that many human groups have constructed; they are not ‘heterosexual’ or
‘homosexual’ or ‘bi-sexual’: they just ‘are’. In many respects, the recent
contributions in the field of ‘queer theory’ which argue for the plasticity of
human sexuality are moving our understanding of human sexuality away from
constructivist categorizing. 201
‘Bringing in’ animals to
ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory raises several complex
issues. If anthropologists consider both the human and nonhuman aspects of
human-animal interactions, interactions which are frequently based on
inequalities, whose ‘voice’ or experience should take priority? And what should
be done in situations where animals might be ‘suffering’ unduly as a result of
their enrolment in human social lives? Aside from these pressing questions of
loyalties and advocacy, there are other more practical issues concerning the appropriate
methodological and theoretical approaches to adopt when conducting what has
come to be reffered to as ‘multi-species ethnography’ (Kirksey and Helmreich,
2010a) 203
Primatologist Richard Wrangham
sums up the flaws of human exceptionalism by considering how the situation
might appear to a delegation of Martian biologists sent to assess the state of
human, but especially anthropological knowledge at the start of the 21st
century:
They might congratulate us on
recognizing our morphological and evolutionary proximity to apes, but wouldn’t
they wonder at the persisting anthropocentricity that so often causes a false
dichotomy between us and our cousins? As interplanetary biologists, they would
puzzle at the widespread notion that behaviour which varies across human
populations can’t have been influenced by genes, unlike other animals; or at
the fact that even through primatology’s raison deter is to shed light on
humanity, most comparative primate studies exclude data on humans. Looking at
the range of earth’s species and their many differences, they would surely be
startled that conventional anthropological wisdom often deems human social
structure infinitely variable, whereas all other species are granted their
typical social forms. Nothing the human pervasiveness of fission-fusion
grouping and male-bonded communities, patriarchy and war – a combination
strikingly similar to traits among chimpanzees – they would be surprised that
we don’t yet have a unified theory of ape and human social evolution. And surely,
they would lament a species that allows its nearest relatives to slide into
extinction without a determined howl at the tragedy of the loss. (1987: 445)
204
Humans are amazingly effective
adaptors and, as induviduals and as a species, we have made some truly
exceptional achievements. However, the sort of human exceptionalism on which
anthropology and many other human ontologies are based can no longer be
justified. It is, according to Haraway. ‘foolish’ to think otherwise (2008:
244). Just as postcolonialism forced anthropologists to see the error of their
(or rather their forebears) ethnocentricity, so post-humanism has enabled us to
see that humans are just one species among many whose lives are inextricably
linked and mutually dependent. Human exceptionalism or ‘species solipsism’
(Midgley, 1994a, 1994b) becomes exposed when we are confronted with the equally
exceptional, but exceptionally different lives of other animals. 205
Across India, vultures are dying
because cattle carcasses they consume are contaminated with high residual
levels of anti-inflammatory drugs. Anti-inflammatories are routinely
administered to cattle to ensure they remain as productive as they can be for
as long as possible. This makes treated cattle more comfortable, and ensures
that humans on the poverty line are able to get every last drop of milk or
labour out of their invaluable animals. For the vultures however, it means a
lingering and unpleasant death, and, as vulture numbers decline, there is a
proportionate increase in the population of feral dogs. Dogs are less efficient
at cleaning carcasses than vultures. While vultures strip a carcass clean, dogs
leave putrefying flesh behind where pathogens such as Anthrax can spore.
Growing dog populations also lead to higher incidence of attacks against humans
and domestic animals.
There are economic and cultural implications too. For example, fewer vultures
mean that Parsi communities, who practice a form of sky burial, are left with
extreme difficulty in disposing of the bodies of their dead, resulting in
considerable cognitive and social dissonance, not to mention public health
risks. In describing such an array of consequences arising from the death of
vultures van Dooren draws us into the holistic ‘biosocial world of entangled lives
and deaths’ of which we are all a part. 205
King’s point is an important one;
that human characteristics are what makes other animals ‘worthy’ of
consideration and conservation. This anthropooometric approach is not only
misguided however, but also harmful. Rather than recognizing nonhumans as
‘special’ in their own right, the emphasis on humans as the marker against
which other species are measured means that, more often than not, they are
found wanting. 206
Milton (2005: 266) suggests that
anthropomorphism is in fact a distancing device employed by people who believe
that the characteristics they attribute to animals are in fact the unique
preserve of humans. As an alternative, Milton proposes ‘egomorphism’, or the recognition of personhood in other
animals on the basis of our ability to understand
things by perceiving characteristics
in them. This perceptive ability is
contingent on our own experiences and world view. So, for example, farmers who
make their living raising large numbers of sheep for slaughter have no desire
to understand how an individual sheep ‘really’ feels, because the act of
perceiving emotions and consciousness in sheep would result in serious
cognitive dissonance for the farmer. Amazonian hunters on the other hand
recognize jaguars (Panthera onca) as intentional persons and seek to understand
them because they have a great deal to lose if they misjudge these physically
and spiritually powerful induviduals (Fausto, 1999, 2008; Kohn, 2007) 211
While well-meaning, such a
movement nonetheless resembles a return to the postcolonial critiques of
advocacy and it is here that the animal turn differs from preceding and
revisionist approaches to anthropological knowledge and practice While they
have been ‘muted’, alienated and oppressed in many respects, groups, including
women, children, the elderly, indigenous people, ‘gay’ people or people ‘of
colour’ can speak for themselves when given the chance. Notwithstanding the few
apes who have mastered human sign language (but who still rely on humans to
interpret what they are saying), there is always going to be a need for someone
to ‘speak for’ the animal persons on a political or legal stage. 213
For many years critics of
homosexuality have claimed that same-sex acts are ‘unnatural’ because
homosexuality does not exist in ‘nature’, that is, outside of the human species
(Corvino, 1997: 5, 141). Such assertions have been convincingly overturned
however by the vast body of recent material which same-sex sexual activity in numerous
animal species. Admittedly sexual activity does not equal sexuality,
nonetheless these empirical developments support the notion of human-animal
continuity; perhaps more importantly they highlight the importance of reflexive
inter- and multi-disciplinary theoretical exchange when considering
human-animal interactions. It is important to acknowledge these developments,
as well as to bear in mind that the essentialist rendering ‘that animals are
queer so then queerness is natural’ (Hayward, 2010) oversimplifies things.
What is perhaps more significant is the fact that ethological material about
the ‘polymorphous’ sexual lives of other species presents culturally rooted
ideas about ‘normality’ more generally. Given the ‘normative’ ideas about
humans and other animals in many post-domestic contexts revolve around the
humanist notion of human exceptionalism ‘queering’ the nonhuman as well as the
human allows for other ways of being to be acknowledged as exceptional in their
own right, as collective (species) and as individuals. 217
One final point to be made ties
together many of the themes raised in the preceding chapters. Koho uses the
term ‘cosmological autism’ to refer to the occasional loss of Runa ‘souls’
which otherwise enable them to see the subjectivity of other ‘persons’ in the
forest. Autism as a medical term ‘refers to a state of isolation that is a
result of cognitive difficulties in treating other people as intentional beings’
(Kohn, 2007: 9), and so following Kohn I would suggest that many
anthropologists and indeed post-domestic induviduals to date have exhibited ‘zoological
autism’ in their inability to recognize the ‘personhood’ of some nonhuman
others. ‘Bringing in’ the animal does not equate to ‘putting out’ the human
(Wolfe, 2009). On the contrary, post-humanism encapsulated in the emergent flow
of a holistic multi-species ethnography might present a way to ‘save the human’.
220
