Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations (review)

After a trip to Japan in 1959, Alexandre Kojève wrote about a society that did not appear to forecast human decline into animality in a period when the human condition had attained the pinnacle of historical development. A situation where further evolution would appear was not possible. He called this "post-historical" life. Kojève argued, "Snobbery in its pure state created disciplines negating the 'natural' or 'animal'" which were stronger than cultural patterns shaped by "warlike and revolutionary Struggles or from forced Work."¹ One wonders if Kojève would have been less optimistic about Japanese snobbery and its abilities to prevent the decline of human civility had he been exposed to the pervasive war idiom that John Knight discusses in his accounts of how villagers, storytellers, planners, and conservationists recount people-wildlife relations in the mountain villages of Japan.

Kojève's somewhat tongue-in-cheek reflections on his visit to Japan do, however, provoke more basic considerations about how dualistic ways of thinking about humans and animals are produced and become the basis for both anthropological theories and public policies. A lot is at stake here. Humanism itself can be investigated, for its limits are exposed in the separation of both human from divine and human from animal. At the highest level, as Giorgio Agamben suggests, the issue probably is one of understanding the formation of human life as a category. To inquire into this issue, Agamben suggests that we not wonder at the conjunctions of the natural and the supernatural, but ponder, in fact, "the political and practical mysteries of separation. What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions?"²

John Knight's study, based on extended ethnographic research in mountain villages of the Kii Peninsula in western Japan, provokes renewed reflection on this question. As he notes,

anthropological analyses of natural symbolism are typically predicated on an a priori nature-culture or nature-society opposition. . . .But in present-day Japan, as a result of what I have called double encroachment, wild animals and mountain villagers cannot be placed into separate "natural" and "social" domains with the former representing a "mirror" to change in the latter.

(p. 245)

The wealth of evidence and analysis that Knight painstakingly assembles, however, takes Agamben's philosophical question into an empirical analysis of historical environmental change and its relation to social change. His study questions "ceaseless divisions" and reminds us that within the human individual, and society, the boundary between animal and nonanimal is constantly under construction, but in terms that are historically determined.

In his thoughtful examination of human fear of, and respect for, wild animals, Knight adds ably to a very small literature on human-wildlife relations in anthropology and history. Fear feeds both the desire to control, and possibly eradicate, the source of fear as well as processes of self-questioning and self-criticism. This double process is clearly evident in human relations with charismatic wild animals such as wolves, tigers, bears, and elephants. Writing of Malay responses to tigers that often regarded those animals as the embodiments of souls of ancestors, Peter Boomgard notes "there need not be a contradiction between the notion of the tiger as family and the feelings of fear inspired by these animals."³ The ambivalence of fear, though, does not operate free of other emotions and influences on human action on wild animals. Commerce and conservation have become major pressures on human-animal relations along the forest-edges, to use Knight's term, all over Asia. In India, for instance, protected tigers have paid a heavy price for their entanglements in human lives in the forests and beyond, as they are slaughtered in large numbers to supply body parts all over Asia and the United States.⁴

John Knight provides a well-illustrated study, admirable for the clarity of exposition, with effective use of aggregate statistics...