French Thinking about Animals
232
French Thinking about Animals
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628950465 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Series: | The Animal Turn |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Stephanie Posthumus is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montreal.
Read an Excerpt
French Thinking about Animals
By Louisa Mackenzie, Stephanie Posthumus
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-046-5
CHAPTER 1
Building an Animal History
ÉRIC BARATAY
Translated by STEPHANIE POSTHUMUS
Since the field of animal studies has opened up, the human and social sciences, in North America and in Europe, have developed an almost exclusive interest in the human side of this subject, examining human uses, practices, and most particularly human representations of animals, in part because of a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s. Having used these approaches myself many times, I now feel they are insufficient because they have created and maintained a blind spot at their center—that of animals as feeling, acting, responding beings, who have their own initiatives and reactions. Scholars have had much to say about humans and very little to say about animals, who remain absent or are transformed into simple pretexts, pure objects on which human representations, knowledge, practices are exercised without consequence. In this sense, the history of animals that has developed over the last thirty years is in reality a human history of animals, where these latter have very little place as real beings.
LOOKING AT REAL ANIMALS
We must move away from this approach rooted in a Western cultural worldview that has impoverished the dialectical theme of humans and animals, reducing it to a field with one magnetic pole (humans) and a single directional pull (humans towards animals), thus forgetting or dismissing much of its reality and complexity. We must look more closely at the influence of animals in their relationships with humans, at their role as actual actors, in light of ethology's growing insistence—at least for certain species and an increasing number of them—on the behaviors of each animal as actor, individual, and even person; on the cognitive capacities of animal individuals; and on the sociability and cultures of animal groups—and thus revealing the inadequacies of purely human approaches. Similarly, historical documents show, when this information is not rejected as anecdotal, that humans have seen or foreseen and assessed animal interests and have reacted, acted, and imagined as a result.
We must leave the human side, moving to the animal side, in order to better understand human/animal relationships, but also in order to better know these living actor-beings who deserve to be studied in and of themselves. This means that the definition of history must be broadened, abandoning the too restricted definition of "a science of humans in time," in which many historians have become entrenched. This definition is not inviolable; it has been historically constructed, from Fustel de Coulanges to Bloch, with two events of particular importance: first, the formation of the human sciences as a means to study the human independently of the natural sciences that previously had had a certain monopoly on knowledge; and second, the broadening of the human sciences, during the first third of the twentieth century, to include the study of all aspects of the human and not just those related to the political. It is now time to expand this definition of history to mean the "science of all living beings in time" and to take into account these living beings' evolutions, at the very least those that have been recorded in diverse historical documents and that could be appropriately studied by a historian versed in the field.
At the same time, we must not so much abandon as go beyond the cultural approach that tends to reduce the human and social sciences to an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses, and thus consider representations to be the only observable reality. This work is necessary; but the success of cultural approaches has transformed an essential preliminary step into an ultimate finality. We must once again be searching for realities using the concept of "situated knowledges" to build knowledge that is neither ignorant of, nor taken in by its context of elaboration. We need to apply this to the diverse human actors who have used, become close to, and observed animals, and who have become witnesses to animals in varying degrees using observation and representation. We need to take into account the conditions under which these discourses were produced so that when we gather, test, and critique information that is partial—in both senses, incomplete and biased—we arrive at some sense of that reality.
We must also abandon the culturally constructed Western notion of animals as passive beings and see them instead as feeling, responding, adapting, and suffering. In other words, we need to start with the hypothesis that animals are not only actors that influence humans, but that they are also individuals with their own specific set of characteristics; they are even people with their own behaviors; in short, they are subjects. These ideas are no longer taboo and should be tested in the field while leaving room for some flexibility in how the definitions are used. We must refrain from starting with (too-well) defined concepts whose reality we hope to prove, because then we simply configure these concepts according to the form we know best, that is, the human form, or more precisely the European human form at a given time, and once again we fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism. We must realize that our concepts are always situated: in time, as historians show us; in space, as ethnologists point out; and among living beings, as ethologists are beginning to demonstrate.
Western culture has defined the subject as thinking, self-conscious, and having recourse to conscious choices and strategies, all the while forgetting that this definition—which it takes as the definition—is in fact a situated, inferred version of the human. Moreover, this underlying portrait includes a set of philosophical implications that place humanity at the top as absolute reference, just as the Western world placed itself at the top in the past. When one clings to this definition while observing animals, one uses a discourse of domination as a tool of investigation, arriving at the already drawn conclusion that there are no subjects among animals. It is when more supple definitions are adopted that one can envisage the concept of animals as subjects, or come to a conclusion even if not all the parameters are met. We must remember that we have just barely begun to search for these parameters in the animal world; if we find that these parameters lack some consistency, it may be that we need to consider a greater plurality of meanings.
Experimenting with key concepts does not mean falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, just as attributing flexibility and suppleness to concepts under investigation does not mean slipping into vague impressionism. What such an approach entails is a form of critical anthropomorphism that watches with curiosity, asks difficult questions, tries out critical concepts, observes without prejudice, and avoids an already conclusive anthropomorphism that foists humanity on animalities and thus denies their specificities. It also entails being as open as possible to the potential capabilities of animals who we still do not know very well. Finally, this means seeing the diverse expressions of different faculties in order to adopt wider definitions of them. This is already being done for physical abilities (we know that many species do not see the world as we do, but we do not deduce from this that they cannot see), but we remain reticent when it comes to doing the same for mental abilities because these are what allow us to value ourselves over animals.
This is not a question of mixing up all living beings, but rather it is a question of appreciating the diversity of all and the richness of each one. This means abandoning the shallow, puerile, distorted dualism that opposes humans to animals and in which philosophies and religions have trapped us for the last 2,500 years. First, this dualism is shallow because it opposes a concrete species, the human, to a concept, the animal, that does not exist in the fields nor in the streets, and that is nothing more than a category masking the reality of a multiplicity of species that are each very different. Second, this dualism is puerile because it poses the question of a difference between a reality and a concept not in order to better know a diversity of animals, but rather to value humans over all other species. Third, this dualism is distorted because it has established differences on a set of ungrounded beliefs; we still understand animals very poorly (and we hardly seem to want to know them better, often preferring our own convenient stereotypes). We must abandon anthropocentrism that defines concepts using humanity as a yardstick, that refuses to see or accept the side of animals, and that thus forecloses discovery before even getting started.
To build an animal history, history needs the help of other sciences: (1) ecology, in order to reconstruct the milieus in question and determine their influence on behavior; and (2) ethology, in order to interpret these behaviors. This latter science raises the problem of choice because there is a large divergence between successive or concurrent schools of ethology, with each arriving at a slightly different picture of animals. Moreover, much ethological work is done at the level of species, and as such does not integrate social and individual dimensions. So we must draw on the most innovative work of cognitive ethology that grants the highest mental functions to animals, and in particular the functions of thinking on specific levels, social and individual. This dialogue with the so-called natural sciences should not be any more difficult for historians than conversations with the science of economics, demographics, sociology, etc., that have been happening since the middle of the twentieth century. It simply continues the tradition of opening history up to other sciences, and cannot be dismissed as less legitimate just because it moves away from the human and social sciences. Such an objection again restricts the definition of history to a human one, and echoes the attitude of historians in the early twentieth century who refused a social-science history on the grounds that history could only be political.
In the search for a complex animal history that includes individualized, personalized animals, actors, and subjects, in groups with greater sociability, it is clear that strictly biological interpretations do not suffice for understanding such complex behavior, even according to some ethologists. The historian thus needs the interdisciplinary experience of those who work at the crossroads of the natural sciences and the human and social sciences, those who already deploy concepts such as group, family, sociability, action, individual, person, subject, and who have developed appropriate methods for analysis. The development of transdisciplinary approaches, methodologies, and studies will give rise to an animal science that combines or even unifies the strengths of zoological science (which should be renamed as the biological sciences) with the strengths of the human and social sciences (which should be renamed as the cultural sciences), and that goes beyond merely animal objects for the first group and merely human for the second. But this cooperation, which should lead to a complete reconstruction of all the disciplines, is still in its beginning stages, with ethologists, ethnologists, psychologists, and historians trying out similar types of observation and analysis in different animal fields.
In the meantime, the history-ethology combination is essential for examining available archives, which are most often human-focused. It may seem paradoxical to use such archives to search for animal acts and gestures, especially since questions can be raised about their reliability and about their partial, biased, sporadic character. Humans tend to be interested in just a few species, breeds, or individuals, and in just a few aspects that they have noted only sporadically, according to what they see or want to see, often interpreting and misrepresenting according to the ideas, interests, and certainties of one species of one society at one time. But these problems arise even when doing human history, for which historians must often work through intermediaries. For example, the majority of historical sources about peasants are written by people with the social prestige of the ruling class, but this has not kept historians from using them to write about rural history. In the case of animal history, the difficulty is obviously greater but not radically different. In addition, it is always by way of humans, their writings, their photographs, their films, that animals today bear witness.
We must make do with what we have. This does not mean that we do not need to sort through and select, looking for those documents written by humans who were interested in real acts and gestures, who observed and recorded without making these acts and gestures disappear under the weight of their own subjectivity. Of course, these observations will not all be equally accurate, the records not all equally well written, which means it is necessary to bring these documents together with present-day ethology's most fruitful hypotheses or knowledge. This does not mean validating the former using the latter; the temptation would be to reject or misinterpret the historical documents because of the prejudices of a time period or a way of thinking. We need instead to bring together situated knowledges and ways of seeing: those of our contemporaries, who may be blind to certain details, just as they can see what others can no longer see, or do not want to see; and those of present-day naturalists, who understand more than in the past, but who may also neglect certain details. Observations from the past must not be rejected as unusable, and recorded acts and gestures should not be reduced to the level of unusable anecdotes (although laboratory ethology did just this for a long time). Instead, these records should be seen as usable anecdotes, data from a terrain of observation situated in the past, in the same way that contemporary psychologists and cognitive ethologists are now using present-day anecdotes.
In sum, moving to the animal side means standing next to animals, feeling empathy so as to contest nothing in advance, adopting their geographical point of view, understanding what they feel, undergo, how they act and respond; it means trying to take on their psychological viewpoint to see what they see and to feel what they feel. Given these objectives, all more or less attainable depending on the animal being studied, what animal history can we build?
HISTORY AS LIVED ANIMAL EXPERIENCE
The simplest animal history would start by inscribing animals in important human historical events, because relevant documents abound, and it is possible to see how animals lived these events in body and spirit. This is what I have tried to do for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during which animals have been fairly well observed, listened to, and written about. For example, it is possible to develop a history of the lived experience of horses in mines during the industrial "revolution" by using the accounts of engineers, veterinarians, and miners to reconstitute itineraries and develop the individual animal's adaptations and resistances. We can thus demonstrate that these are truly animals who act and react, compelling humans to consider them (see figure 1).
A similar approach could be used to arrive at a history of dairy cows, who have been at the center of the agricultural "revolution." Documents written by veterinarians and those involved in zootechnics can be used to trace the animals' initial resistance around the eighteenth century to the shifts in dairy farming that used brutal and traumatizing separation of cows from calves, and then to follow the animals' slow adaptation, through training and selection, as the relations between cows, and cows' relations with breeders, changed with the adoption of different modes of breeding. Another possible example would be the history of animals swept up in the First World War. The records of veterinarians and soldiers can be used to understand the distress of conscripted horses and dogs separated from their fellow creatures, owners, and milieus; their fright during long trips; the tensions between these animals and unfamiliar riders and trainers during training exercises; the fear felt at the front when faced with new sounds and smells and the violence suffered by soldiers; the complicity shared with other animals and humans; the fatigue and pain caused by the work; the suffering brought on by injury; the agony and finally the moment of death or discharge (see figure 2).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from French Thinking about Animals by Louisa Mackenzie, Stephanie Posthumus. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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