Animals, Society and Culture

1. Animals, Society and Culture Lecture 2: What is an animal? 2012-13

2. Significant encounters • Dogs, cats, guinea pigs • Horses, cows, sheep • Sharks, snakes, squirrels, elephants • Domestic animals • Wild animals

3. Plant or animal – or both? • Euglena

4. Lecture outline • How animals are defined in relation to human • The dualistic mode of thinking about humans and animals which characterises western thought • How animals and humans are understood in other cultures in a non-dualistic way.

5. Defining animals in western culture • Human-animal distinction • Humanity – personhood, agency, intentions, social values, moral conscience • Animality – swayed by primordial passions

6. Historical instability – Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe • Human-animal boundary permeable • Border creatures • Hierarchy of creation • Blurring of boundaries punished • Animals were put on trial

7. Changing ideas about animals • Richard Tapper (1994) ‘Animality, humanity, morality, society’ in T Ingold (ed) What is an animal? Routledge • Classic typology of production systems: • Hunting and gathering • Pastoralism • Agriculture • Urban-industrial production

8. Animals are ‘good to think with’ • Hunter-gatherers – Totemism, agency, personhood • Pastoralism – herds replicas of human society • Agriculturalism – taming of the wild, macho • Urban-industrial – animals marginalised, anthropomorphised

9. Dualism • Aristotle – animals don’t have souls • Enlightenment – animals not capable of reason • Descartes – animals are like machines, unable to feel pain • Currently – animals don’t have language

10. Language • Tim Ingold (1994) ‘The animal in the study of humanity’ in T Ingold (ed) What is an animal? Routledge • Lewis Henry Morgan and the beaver • Marx, architects, spiders and bees • Imaginary blueprint

11. Habitual action • Distinction between: • Novel products of intentional design • Habitual replication of traditional forms • Distinction between: • Conversation • Communication

12. Thinking • Language is an ‘instrument of thought’ (Ingold) • Animals communicate without thinking • The signals they transmit correspond to bodily states not concepts • Most action is habitual

13. Difference • ‘the differences between our species and others are probably of a comparable order, neither much greater nor much less, than those that separate non-human species from one another. Humans are unique, but not with any unique sort of uniqueness’ (Fernandez-Armesto, 2004:36 in Anderson 2007:6).

14. Jaques Derrida • French philosopher http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry49Jr0TFjk

15. Non-dualistic ontology • Ingold key reading (wk 2) • Critiques idea that ‘nature’ is culturally constructed • Hunter-gatherer ontology of dwelling • Immersed in ‘dwelt in world’ not detached from it as ‘mind’ • Entire persons vs disembodied minds

16. Personhood • Western thought – animals are not persons • For the Cree (northern hunters) personhood applies to human, non-human animals, non-animal kinds • ‘Human persons are not set over and against a material context of inert nature, but rather are one species of person in a network of reciprocating persons’ (Scott cited in Ingold, 2012:43)

17. Unity of life • Human is one of many outward forms of personhood • Unity underpins differentiation • Humans and non-humans are alive • World is meaningful, meaning not given to the world by human mind

18. Summary • Answer to question of what is an animal varies across time and cultures –it relates to the question what is it to be human – the one defines the other. • This is a dualistic way of understanding humans and animals. Defining animals as ‘other’ means they’re not ‘like us’ so are outside the moral universe. • We don’t have to look at animals in terms of their ‘otherness’ to humans. All species are unique, not just the human species.