Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

Does “The Animal” Exist?: Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals

17 susa n j. pe a r son a n d m a ry w eism a n t e l Does “The Animal” Exist? Animals still elude us. As numerous conference panels, symposia, books, book series, and academic journals attest, the field of animal studies has become an extraordinarily rich and productive one; yet, despite all our efforts, the animals of our scholarship too often figure only as “objects in human culture ,” containers of human projections, and as useful tools for drawing social boundaries. When we try to imagine them otherwise, to see them in and of themselves—we fail; ultimately, we find ourselves strangely condemned to replicate, in slightly different terms, the long-standing opposition between nature and culture.1 Caught between the Scylla of anthropomorphism and the Charybdis of anthropocentrism, can scholars ever regard the animal as more than a symbol?2 We believe it to be possible, but the obstacles to doing so are numerous and formidable. The field of animal studies currently suffers from an inadequate theorization of animals as historical actors, as well as of the social world within which animals and humans live and interact. We seek not the replacement of imagined animals with edible ones, but rather a new theoretical formulation that incorporates symbolic approaches with social and material history. As an anthropologist and a historian, we seek an interdisciplinary approach in which insights from the fields of ethnography and geography can help to refocus attention on the spatiotemporal aspects of human-animal interactions. Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals s u s a n j. p e a r s on a n d m a r y w e i s m a n t e l 1 8 A Philosophical Question: Does “The Animal” Exist? Without a Trace; or, Are Animals Historical Beings? The challenge of writing animals into history is a multidimensional one. It is ontological, a question of imagining animal being. It is epistemological, a discursive dilemma constituted by the nonverbal nature of our communication with animals. But it is also methodological. Erica Fudge recounts her disappointment when, in the course of her research for a history of animals, she found that “they had no voices and left no textual traces.”3Ultimately, the problem and its solution are historical: limitations that appear to be intrinsic to the animal condition are in fact historically and culturally specific. These three dimensions are inextricably linked, for the methodological difficulty of documenting animal lives is taken as evidence of an ontological problem inherent in animals themselves, and hence as epistemological grounds for excluding animals from history. Language has long been used to distinguish humans as the sole possessors of culture, thereby relegating all other animals to the realm of nature. This point was famously articulated by that exemplar of metaphysical dualism René Descartes. For Descartes, animals’ lack of language demonstrated their lack of consciousness and thus of suffering and soul. In this circular logic, animals’ inability to express consciousness is offered as conclusive proof that they do not have any.4 That scholars studying animals regard their subjects as having “no voices and no traces” is, then, more than a methodological impediment :theinabilitytosignifyis aconditionofanimalityitself.This ontological defect writes animals out of history, for language—connected by Descartes and others to rationality, consciousness, and subjectivity—has been the established prerequisite for being a subject in and of history. The anthropologistsJackGoodyandIanWatt ,forinstance,considerhistoryitselftheproduct of linguistic development. “Man’s biological evolution shades into prehistory when he becomes a language-using animal; add writing, and history proper begins.” The scholarly study of these stages is, they contend, respectively divided among zoology, anthropology, and sociology. In this scheme, animals and the nonliterate cannot participate in history, for they are unable to objectify the world and the passage of time. Oral cultures have the absolute time of memory and myth; only the literate have “historical sensibility.”5 Instead of consciousness, animals have instinct; instead of history, animals have the “time” of genetic inheritance. Johannes Fabian, in his devastating critique of such logocentric schema, identifies their central flaw as the “denial of coevalness ” to those who, in fact, coexist with us within the same temporal frame. Does “The Animal” Exist? 19 His focus was on anthropology’s relationship to the primitive; his point, however , also illuminates history’s relationship to animals.6 Animals and Humans: Never Quite Themselves Just as animals have been denied...