Humans and Other Animals - Cross Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions - Samantha Hurn

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

The previous chapter was concerned with pet keeping and all of the ‘explanations’ given focussed almost exclusively on the human perspectives. It is obviously much easier to ascertain what humans gain from these interactions and relationships because researchers can ask them, or draw on their own experiences. However, the move towards ‘bringing in the animal’, which is gaining momentum across social sciences, necessitates the recognition of animals as active subjects in (but also frequently victims of) relationships with humans, and the attempt to give these muted individuals a voice. 120

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 21^st 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

UPFEST 2017-2018 (LIVE PAINTING EVENTS)

I was pleased to be accepted to paint at this years Upfest, Europe's biggest live art and muralism festival in 2017. Since its first year in 2008, the festival has played host to a massive selection of international big-name artists, and it's popularity has only continued to grow!

Although this year I was unsuccessful, I have attended not only UPFEST but also other live painting events previously and have always found them to be a unique experience which always makes me feel more interconnected with my audience than ever before. (See me painting at UPFEST, left)

Live painting events are a great opportunity to create some outdoor artwork without any of the risks associated with illegal art installation. As well as this they are a massive technical challenge, as creating any indepth artwork under pressure and out in the environmental conditions is always a bit of a luck based achievement. However they have a heightened atmosphere and vibe not found at many other art events.

As well as this, live painting is a great technical skills excersize which encourages you to paint quicker and with greater accuracy, as well as work efficiently and tidily. With members of the public wandering all around, there is no room to leave paints lying about and exposed which forces you to be extremely efficient with workspace and mess. (See right, myself painting at 'The Big Doodle', Norwich, 2015)


It also has a unique feeling of a performance piece, which requires thorough planning and preperation to allow the artist to 'bring their all' on the day and really own the space. They are always something I have enjoyed particularly because you always go away feeling really personally recconnected with the media and right there on the front lines of your practice. (See left, myself painting at Art In My Mouth 3, Moosey Art, Norwich)

Surface Encounters; Thinking with Animals and Art

QUOTES AND REFLECTIONS ON BOOK BY RON BROGLIO

Traditionally, animals have been viewed as having limited faculties. Their poverty of caulties is supposedly evident in their 'lesser' ability to reason, in their language, and in their use of tools. Their skills are lessened by measuring them against every standard in which we consider ourselves superior, and by this superiority, we differentiate ourselves from them. In each case, the animals are measured by our yardstick and come out wanting. I characterize the supposed inferiority of their abilities by a shorthand called "living on the surface". According to a long cultural and philosophical tradition, animals do not engage in the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with individual and cultural depth of being; instead, animals are said to live on the surface of things. Surfaces are seen as as fleeting appearances, mere shadows lacking the substantiality found in the 'depth' of human interiority. xvi

At stake is the ability to think about the Other, those agents and being radically different from ourselves. How are we to understand that which differs from our capacity to comprehend? The conjecture of this book is that such thinking is possible within particular parameters. Foremost, it is a thinking that arises from the event, action and encounters with the animal others. xvii

The artists considered in this book are not concerned with mimesis or representing animals according to natural history tradition or a kitsch assimilation of animals into our world as tamed or cute or defeated; rather, these artists have unmoored themselves, even ever so slightly, from the cultural grounds of meaning and the solidification of being over becoming. They have become unmoored in order to take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In other words, these artists take seriously the problem of animal phenomenology. xx

Engaging in the even that is this question itself is an invitation to a becoming, to a crossing over that restructures what it means to think and what it means to be human, in particular to be human alongside other animals.
By recognizing the impossibility of knowing from the fur of the Other, animal phenomenology asks us to think of our own fragility. The problem announces in advance that our worldview has limits that prevent our pursuits (and our claims arising from them) from being all-encompassing. Instead, in what could be a profound ecological gesture, this question that inscribes within itself its own failure or impossibility allows us to think of human fragility. xxii

Perhaps to ask what is an animal phenomenology concedes too much to humanism. It grants too much to the arguement that there is a divide between humans and all other animals. yet in making this concession, the question as lure proves useful by drawing us into an abyss where 'all other animals' become a wide array of different ways of being. Such a variety - being manifest in so many ways - wears thin the walls of a human / animal divide. Eventually one might ask what are animal's phenomenologies, and the misnomer of a singular animal phenomenology could be put aside. I have maintained the singular question of an animal phenomenology as an opening gambit in what culture calls 'the animal'; it is a play of stakes that eventually open onto more complex questions involving the plurality of animals lurking within the pages of this book. xxiii

Damien Hirst's best-known works grapple with the seemingly alchemical, violent transformation of life to death and opaque to knowable as animals become meat. To understand the significance of such alchemy, the chapter traces meat as the metaphysical moment when the animal is killed for raw material, and human meaning; nature is laid bare, made lifeless and exposed in order to be subsumed within cultural intelligibility. At the same time, the notion that nature can be made fully present to us is worth reconsidering: how do metaphors of nature hiding and nature revealed ground our understanding of animals, and how might we begin to think outside of this predominant approach to nature? xxviii

In as much as the animal world is unknown to us, it remains as what Rainer Maria Rilke calls a "nowhere". Yet as explored and recovered from the artists' works nanoq: flat out and bluesome and (a)fly, their artworks reveal a "nowhere without the no." We cannot know this 'no' through direct investigation and interrogation of the animal or its dwellings; indeed, only by upending the groundedness of home and recalling the stray (animals) in our own dwelling we can obliquely glimpse another's abode. Rilke claims that '[w]e know what is outside us from the animal's face alone. Following Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson a they track the animal world, we can begin to understand an "outside us" that is in our very midst.
The 'outside' or animal's perspective has been strikingly described by the early twentieth-century scientist Jakob von Uexkull, a founding figure in ethnology and biosemiotics. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans,  Uexkull moves beyond mechanistic biology to develop a line of inquiry into the animal's sense of its surroundings - something close to an animal phenomenology. Uexkull presents an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that are as different as the animals themselves. Each animal species holds its own point of view and its own point of view and its own distortions of the actual earth. These perspectives reflect how the body of the animal has evolved over ages to adapt to the earth and to meet the animal's needs. We are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world and no unified space or time; instead time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently. The work of Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson illustrates the heterogeneity of animal worlds put forth by Uexkull. xxx

In meat there is a transformation from living to dead, from hidden to revealed, and from indigestible to edible. As the maker of this change, meat has a visceral materiality. The material form of dead animal flesh is haunted by the trace of a life transformed into an object through the violence of death. The willful life on an animal becomes an object that shows little ability to resist human understanding, manipulation and consumption. 1

It is a double reaction often provoked by Hirst's work: a repulsion at the materiality of the piece, and an intellectual curiosity about the animal and the making of the work. Hirst succinctly describes this: "Animals become meat. That's abstract." 3

Thus God gave the nature to his creatures, Adam must give the name: to shew they were made for him, they shall be what hee will unto him. If Adam had onely called them by the names which God imposed, this had been the praise of his memory: but now to denominate them himselfe, was the approval of his judgement. At first sight he percieved their dispositions, and so named them as God had made them. He first saw all their insides, we his posterity ever since, with all our experience, can see but their skinnes.

As Erica Fudge notes in Perceiving Animals, Adam's ability to name the beasts is equated with his ability to see deeply. Such a gift was given to him by God. Through naming animals, the whole of the animal is made present to Adam and is knowable. Adam knows animals thrugh and through. For Bacon and his contemporaries, banishment from Eden resulted in our inability to perceive animals and thus through perception, understand them. 7

The shark decomposed because it was not adequately preserved. Getting the formaldehyde solution to penetrate through the skin of the animal and into its insides proved a difficult task that was never fully accomplished. Consequently, the animal began to decay from the inside out; its skin wrinkled, and the tank became murky. [...] After its initial display in 1992, the tank became increasingly clouded with decayed flesh, and the shark seemed to sag a bit. So in 1993, the gallery had the shark opened up and its flesh cut out. In place of the inner flesh, the gallery put a fiberglass form and molded the shark skin around it. Hirst was not satisfied with the results: "It didn't look as frightening. You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight." Interesting here is Hirst's investment in the animal interior as that which was never meant to be seen. His investment in an unseen interior is contrary to his other natural history works in which the insides are intended to be viewed. Vistors to the Saatchi Gallery were not told about the change, and most thought they were looking at an entire shark. Because the audience saw what they believed was a shark, and not a hollowed-out shark, Hirst's comments are curious. Others apparently did not see a massive animal corpse with no weight, so why was it an issue for him? And why would the lack of innards prevent the animal from appearing just as frightening?
Contrary to his work with dissected animals, opening up the shark to insert an artificial form violates the integrity of The Physical Impossibility of Death. In this particular piece, Hirst seems interested in preserving a place for the animal interior as something seperate from the human world, something not to be opened. In this instance, because nature loves to hide, it is allowed to hide. Perhaps it does not hide fully- the shark's death was comissioned after all. However the work can be seen to pivot around the idea that the dead shark "knows" something that is "physically impossible" for the "mind" of the human viewer. 16-7

More striking is he claim by the German Romantic philosopher and natural scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For Goethe, nature is visible, but we do not have a mind that can see her. As Valentine warns the wayward Faust:

We snatch in vein at Nature's veil,
She is mysterious in broad daylight,
No screws or levers can compel her to reveal
The secrets she has hidden from our sight.

Hadot notes that "her real veil consists in having no veil; in other words, she hides because we do not know how to see her, although she is right before our eyes. Visibility and knowability are turned upside down. While dissection opens the invisible to make it visible and intelligible, Goethe claims that nature is already in the light of day through it remains obscure to us: it is visible - already opened up- but never knowable. Following Goethe's claim, opening up an animal does not equate to knowing the animal. Light does not equal knowledge in this case, and prescence is still sort of absence or mystery. If dissection is meant to open a space for full presence and knowledge - by which we knows / consume the animal flesh - then Goethe has created a different sort of architecture of knowing. Here nature is open but remains invisible, unintelligable. 20-1

Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson examine moments of friction between the animal and human worlds and frictions evident within cultural perception of how to negotiate the nonhuman, including hunting, urban development, and conservation. By examining moments of friction between us and animals, these artists make visible space of the Other that resides as an open secret. We have seen this secret in chapter 1, where nature's "veil consists in having no veil; in other words, she hides because we do not know how to see her, although she is right before our eyes." 58

Animals look back at us, and in this look, the centre and periphery as well as the interiority (of the human) and exterior (of the animal) gets misplaced. Traditionally, sight is possession at a distance: we take in to human interiorit and reason the object of our gaze. When the animal looks back, the hegemony of human vision becomes confounded. The implication is that there is an "interior exterior" to the human, and that we are the subject now made object of an alien look. 58

The animal scrutinizes him [man] across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can suprise the animal. Yet the animal - even if domesticated - can also surprise the man. The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension. And this is so wherever he looks. He is always looking across ignorance and fear. And so, when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him.

Animals look at us, and we are confounded by their radical otherness as well as the fact that we may be objects in their world as much as they are objects in ours. When animals look back at us, we must grant that there may be something of the animal's "self" we do not know. 59

Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson work in the margin between the animal world and the human world. They do not provide a perspective from the animal's point of view, nor solely from the human's. In this they differ from artists such as Per Maning, whose black-and-white video Breather (2000) depicts cattle in a field seemingly videoed from a grazing cow's point of view. With photographs from (a)fly, we are suspended and left to wonder, to question what it means to dwell and just who is dwelling with whom? To appreciate the liminal in their work, it is worth considering how this art opens up the world of the animal but refuses to represent, to speak for, other species.
The diligent reader of Uexkull's work and the attentive viewer of (a)fly perceive the loss of unitary space and time and come to see that our own human world is yet another bubble with distortions and ommisions. Uexkull presents an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that are "manifold and varied as the animals themselves"; each animal species holds its own point of view and its own distortions of the actual earth. These perspectives reflect how the body of the animal has evolved over ages to adapt to the earth and meet the animal's needs. We are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world, and no unified space or time; instead, time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently. For our 'pets', how long is the time between our going to work and our coming home? How are corners and ledges shaped for a cat, and shaped by it?  Here in our most intimate place - our home - we find that our bubble and our world overlaps with anothers. 70

Heidegger's most discussed topography of the animal's world appears in his 1929-30 seminar published as The Fundemental Concepts of Metaphysics: "the stone is wordless; the animal is poor in world; man is world-forming." Animals certainly have environments (Umwelt), but they are not aware of their environments in the same way that humans are. Derrida summarizes Heidegger's position by explaining: "As for the animal, it has access to entities, but, and this is what distinguishes it from man, it had no access to entities as such." Heidegger's lizard, for example, sits on a rock and enjoys the sun, but it does not know the rock as rock, nor sun as sun. Heidegger goes so far as to explain that "[w]hen we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word 'rock' in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock." The animal is caught up  in a series of relations to other entities without an ability to remove itself from the "captivation" that such a series presents.  86

For Uexkull, the animal's environment is constitution by the "carriers of significance", or "marks", which captivate the animal. All other elements in the world drop off and have no place in the animal world, or what Uexkull calls Umwelt. Thus Heidegger's lizard may know a warm surface though he does not register the rock as rock nor the sun as sun; instead, the animal functions within a world that has carriers or marks of significance. Caught within the series of relations that is their Umwelt, animals simply cannot get outside their surroundings to look around. 86

It is human uprightness - verticality - that sufficiently dis-places us from our surroundings so that we can see the rock at a distance - a rock as rock. Animals do not have this distance: "Their whole being is in the living flesh," as J. M. Coetzee explains. As Derrida has explicated in Of Spirit, "world" is for Heideffer only possible for humans - those beings who have spirit. As much as they are poor in spirirt, animals are left "poor in world." The "uprightedness" of humans is both physical and metaphysical, while animal world is decidedly flat. Without heights and depths, the animals are left with marks on the surface; these marks are a "cross out" that re(marks) in our language the place of their relations. To consider animals and take seriously the roles of surfaces to thought and language means to reevaluate the physical and metaphysical uprightness of humans. 87

When Coetzee's protagonist Elizabeth Costello is asked if life means less to animals than to humans, she retorts that animals do not respond to us in words, but rather with gestures of the living flesh. Its argument from its flesh is the animal's "whole being." 88

The expert knows and follows the rules for correct thinking and production; because the nonexpert does not know the rules he or she is breaking, such an out-of-sorts person can create something new and different. Baker summarizes the power of the outsider by quoting Derrida on invention: "An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful order of things, it disregards the proprieties." Baker goes so far as to claim that such a nonexpert can blur the expert lines between "human completeness" and the unraveling or "opening up" of the human, the "self". In breaking common sense and the sensibility that holds us as a community in common, one already is an idiot - bete, a beast. 104

Dawn Chorus is a video installation with fourteen large screens in a gallery. Each screen shows a person going about mundane tasks while twitching and bobbing and singing like a bird in the wilds. The project began with Coates observing birds in a field in England's Northumberland countryside. With the assistance of wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample, Coates set up microphones in trees, bushes and brush frequented by various birds. As though an almost daily ritual, the birds seemed to return to the same spots to sing. With fourteen microphones recording from three to nine in the morning for six days, they logged some 576 hours of birdsongs, including songs of robins, whitethroats, wrens, blackbirds, song thrushes, yellowhammers and greenfinches.
Using audio equipment, Coates slowed down the songs so that they easily could be sung or whined or groaned by humans in their natural habitats: the bath, the kitchen, in a taxi, and work and so on. He recruited members of ameature choirs in Bristol to sing these songs and filmed the results. He then sped up this film to match that of the birds' singing in nature. It is then that the videos come to life, as if birds and humans sloughed off hierarchies and different worlds to cross attributes: "Blue Tit is a woman lying in bed, fluttering her eyes and whistling through a puckered mouth. Linnet is an osteopath nodding and blinking furiously and puffing up his chest in the consulting room. 122

In approaching animals and "becoming animal", Coates occasionally refers to a common ancestry we have with other beasts, a common remote past he is tapping into. He could easily have reffered to a common phenomenology, a shared sense of breathing, moving and sensing. There are dangers in such talk: it can overlook massive differences between humans and animals, which result in not giving animals their due in being different from us; it can evoke a physcological unconscious, which then moves the human subject as the animal with greatest depth of conscious and unconscious; it can lead from Sigmund Freud through Jacques Lacan to the privileging of language. 124

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/norwicharts/detail.action?docID=819531

Sir John Innes Research (Rewritten 10/04/2018)

When researching the work of the John Innes Centre I went in initally with a completely open mind, having only seen the collection in the archive and thoroughly enjoyed looking through all of the beautiful documents and books. Based on my introduction to the centre through its archival centre, I had expected the work they did to be some element of enviornmental swing, perhaps mapping geonomes for the plethora of species documented in their archive or exploring ways to protect natural biodiversity or somesuch documentative, sweeping practice in the aim of conservation.

Some areas of their practice definitely aligned with this, with their 'Germplasm Resource Unit' cataloguing, preserving and distributing a huge collection of seed and grain, and helping distribute these to plant breeders, ensuring high quality specimens. However as I read further into the other areas of their advertised research, it appeared like many of their studies seemed concerned with preparing and producing for a worst case scenario, instead of trying to work their way towards a better one.

In "Genes in the Environment" we are told that their research "will be critically important for improving the stability of crop yields" in apparently some unavoidable dystopia. By the next paragraph, we are already reffering to ourselves in the present tense as "under the influence of longer term climate change" in what is possibly one of the most defeatest forshortenings during what is currrently potentially the dawn of massive global social to environmental and ecological issues. As a scientific website, this kind of persuasive and threatening writing was a little disquieting, as it felt somewhat like salesmanship in their justification. The description couldve been much better written to suggest this was a necessary precaution in the event of a worst case scenario, whilst inspiring hope for it's ability to contribute more effectively to plant based diets and foods in hot countries, lessening the hunger crisis. Yet instead it felt quite sensationalised, and with an overt emphasis on the climate argument acting simultaneously as carrot and stick for the validity of the work.

If this section of their research had been on slightly uncertain territory for me, the next title made me shudder haha! "Designing Future Wheat". Again there was the same sense that this work was preparing for a worst case scenario. However in this area of their research, it was the vested interests which struck me most strongly. Making the repeated references to the commercial viability of the project throughout was the most obvious factor (even mentioning commercial crop breeders ahead of the actual plant science community when offering their "referenced and accessible" future wheat), as well as the fact I had defied the given order of the different research areas on the home screen and actually read into their Germplasm Resource Unit initially. Clearly in doing this the John Innes Centre could secure the viability of both projects and make them both as likely as possible to secure funding. Not necessarily a sneaky trick in itself if the rest of the work they were doing was on the whole ethical, and that was something only a little digging could discover. The last sentance definitely tickled me, careful usage of "address" the problems facing us in the future, instead of 'solve'. Because the John Innes Centre certainly had begun building their own best case scenario from the potential future worst case scenario of the entire planet!!

So now I had absorbed the formal depiction of the centre, and even that had left me a little disappointed with the way all of their projects seemed to be focussing on the worst possible outcome,  Next it was important I see what the internet had to say about the John Innes Centre. After a little searching I happened upon one of the umbrella partners of the centre, "The Ceres Partnership", and immediatly found food for thought in their manifesto, which confirmed a lot of the vested interests I had sensed in the voice of their research descriptions. "The most commercially viable"[...] "technologies that can be exploited through licences, start-up companies and partnerships with SMEs (small/medium enterprises) and large agritech corporations." Only by the very last feature in the very last descriptive paragraph (save for a conclusion about entomology and the institutions involved) was there a mention of environmental concerns, and even then it was only insofar as using less pesticide. I sensed I may have gotten to the bottom of the John Innes Centre with this latest find. I had smelled a rat in their research choices, and now found ample motive for the fact that this centre was principally seeking capital and commercial gain from it's work. All I felt I needed now were case studies of previous projects to just reassure me that this wasn't some new conservative austerity downturn which had forced the centre to turn its interests towards money-making instead of targetted responsible, conscientious research.

When googling "The John Innes Centre" an article published the very same day stated 'Region’s top brains creating new AgriTech ‘supercluster’; "The Ceres funding is part of an investment of £67m through Research England’s Connecting Capability Fund in new collaborative projects to drive forward the commercialisation of university research across the country. I mean should we really be driving the bright new minds of our next generation of researchers to only value those projects with commercial viability? In todays world? Surely all areas of research are essential, even those we cannot make profit from? Perhaps those are some of the most important of all?

Next an article about 'purple tomatoes' appeared in several news websites from 2014 and added additional weight to the new picture of the John Innes Centre I was begining to build. Grown to in a 5000sq glasshouse in Canada, where there is less regulation on the growing of GM crops, to "attract interest from private investors" and "to start the process of seeking the regulatory authorisation needed to bring a commercial juice to market." Reading between the lines on this statement it would be easy to take these purple tomatoes, with their alluded cancer curing and anti-inflammatory properties and friendly, non threatening appeal, as a safe and easy tester for bringing GM products to the public market in a highly saleable and careful way. "We want to explore a way for consumers to benefit from our discoveries", consumers, not people, of course. Consumers have pockets full of cash.

Another older still article from 2011 stated an anti GM protest had been held at the centre, suprisingly not from environmentalists or left-wing activists, but infact by 60 protestors who were for the most part farmers, even driving a tractor with 20kg of organic potatoes into the facility to leave at the entrance. This struck me, as farmers for the most part are quite practical people, particularly about matters of their land, and would not have the same immediate concerns some with an ecological interest such as myself, they would certainly understand the additional stresses put on food production by lacking land and high demand, and support potential solutions to this.

But their quarrel with the work to produce a new genetically modified blight resistant potato, was infact that six other natural varieties already existed. A quick google search also revealed many more pages boasting the effectiveness of the blight resistant varieties and questioning why these weren't utilized more effectively within food production.



http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/city-scientists-win-2-5m-to-make-super-wheat-1-1687956

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/16/uk-green-energy-investment-plunges-after-policy-changes

http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/health/anti-gm-protesters-descend-on-john-innes-centre-in-norwich-1-972864

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546276/PURPLE-tomato-juice-genetically-modified-fruit-engineered-health-benefits.html

https://www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk/mag/finance/lincoln-uni-advanced-agritech-innovation/

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-04/jic-wrd040618.php

Sir John Innes Piece Key Narrative Research

For the John Innes Centre artwork I wanted to create a work inspired by the inside cover etchings from the rare books archive. These were heavily laden with symbolism, which is something I also enjoy representing in my works, so it was the perfect opportunity to do some really indepth exploration ahead of my painting.

Anglia Square Redevelopment / Gentrification

Video on the community redevelopment of Magdalen Street wherein each business worked together to renovate their own shop fronts to a pre-agreed style. The ideo makes repeated mentions of uniformity of style throughout the town, with business owners given a selection of fonts and  styles to come from. It is funny that how, for the time in 1960, this uniformity was seen as a positive aesthetic choice, whereas in many modern highstreets uniformity and brand androgyny are seen as negative traits for shopping centres, with most businesses favouring iconic and induvidual shope styles and typefaces.

Click here to see video (flash player needed)

"What I have noticed is a different type of person come down and shop in the street."

This language is very leading and suggestive, and could be used in our PSA to suggest double-entendre and alternate enterpretations to the 'blue sky thinking' picture painted by cleverly worked business development schemes.

Now gentrification in Norwich is happening at a much faster rate, due to extensive new development, investments and involvement from the Business Improvement District

Norwich Business Improvement District

"Lobbying for positive change collectively is proven to benefit business communities.  We will respond with one strong voice, through lobbying, research and initiatives designed to give Norwich a competitive edge, secure investment and put additional resources into the hands of the business community. We will develop and lead initiatives to coordinate and drive the commercial sector in Norwich."

The plans on Anglia Square have been a long time in the development, since as early as 2011 with the first development plans tabled by an investment company named Threadneedle. 

Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation

QUOTES AND ANALYSIS ON BOOK BY STEVE BAKER