Theme Issue 52
Does History Need Animals?
Cover image: Duria Antiquior (1830) by Henry De la Beche, from National Museum Cardiff.
+ DAVID GARY SHAW, A Way with Animals, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013).
No abstract.
+ ERICA FUDGE, Milking Other Men’s Beasts, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 13-28.
This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also—and inseparably—asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so frequently goes without comment in historical (as in other humanities) scholarship. Using work from historiography, sensory history, social history, anthropology, and contemporary animal science, the article proposes that introducing animals as actors and not just as objects into historical work will not only broaden and deepen what we might know about the past, it will also challenge some assumptions as to what the focus of our discipline might be.
+ VINCIANE DESPRET, From Secret Agents to Interagency, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 29-44.
Some scientists who study animals have emphasized the need to focus on the “point of view” of the animals they are studying. This methodological shift has led to animals being credited with much more agency than is warranted. However, as critics suggest, on the one hand, the “perspective” of another being rests mostly upon “sympathetic projection,” and may be difficult to apply to unfamiliar beings, such as bees or even flowers. On the other hand, the very notion of agency still conveys its classic understanding as intentional, rational, and premeditated, and is still embedded in humanist and Christian conceptions of human exceptionalism. This paper seeks, in the first part, to investigate the practical link between these two notions and the problems they raise. In the second part, following the work of two historians of science who have revisited Darwin’s studies of orchids and their pollinators, it will observe a shift in the meaning of the concept of agency. Indeed, creatures may appear as “secret agents” as long as we adopt a conventional definition of agency based on subjective experience and autonomous intention. However, when reframed in the terms of “agencement”—an assemblage that produces “agentivity”—agency seems to be much more extensively shared in the living world. We will then explore some of the concrete situations in which these agencements are manifested, and through which creatures of different species become, one for another and one with another, companion-agents.
+ BRETT L. WALKER, Animals and the Intimacy of History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 45-67.
This article surveys recent historical writings on animals. Its principal concerns are the manner in which historians grant agency to animals and how that agency functions in historical narration. The article examines the histories of animals in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and North America in order to tease out the similarities and differences of human experiences with other animals. The foundational premise of the article is that humans are animals, sometimes even a meaty prey species, and that, as such, they are not external to nature or, ultimately, different from other animals in this regard. Humans can have violently intimate relationships with other creatures, an intimacy that defines much of global human history. Animals permeate our history and we theirs: tug at the threads and our stories, woven as they are into the same tightly knit tapestry, will not disentwine. The debate regarding whether humans are anomalous and outside nature or separate from other animals is complicated when the stomach enzymes from an animal, whether wolf or crocodile, digest a human being. Therefore, the cultural-constructionist arguments regarding “the animal”—that our understanding of nonhuman animals is entirely culturally generated—need to be viewed as overly simplistic. My contention is that our reluctance to join the rest of the animal kingdom on its terms, on more natural terms, exposes a lingering devotion to human “exceptionalism,” one that is inherent in the humanities and social sciences.
+ THIERRY HOQUET, Animal Individuals: A Plea for a Nominalistic Turn in Animal Studies? History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 68-90.
This paper focuses on the concept of “animal individuals” and puts forward a nominalistic approach. Nominalism is an ontological thesis (only individuals exist), but also an epistemological claim: that our “nouns” are practical tools for a quick dispatch of things, but do not correspond to anything real. Hence for a consistent nominalist, “animals” do not exist, except as a powerful fiction. First, we show that the word “animal” commits what we call (after Plato) the “fallacy of the crane”: it encompasses a huge range of living entities that have only one thing in common: they are not humans. Differences between our term “animal” and the ancient Greek “zoon” also show the fluctuating boundaries of “animality.” Besides, our ways of speaking systematically deny individuality to nonhuman animals. The philosophical meaning of the term “individual” implies a genuine dimension of artistic singularity and a political claim for emancipation. Portraits of apes are striking instances of such individuality, captured by photography, as is art produced by particular animals. Methodologically, this leads also to the collection of anecdotes and a focus on animal biographies. The eighteenth-century controversy between Buffon and Condillac helps us understand what is at stake in the tension between species and individuals. Buffon claims that each nonhuman animal species can be represented by a “specimen,” whereas Condillac shows that animal individuals feel like us and that their nature is impenetrable to us. Finally, a focus on individuals is not only a way to renew or extend historical methods. Biologists are also increasingly concerned with individuals. They develop tools to distinguish individuals from one another: “animal bertillonage” for morphology. They question standard norms of behavior and preferences. This emphasis on animal individuality has not only theoretical but also ethical and legal consequences.
+ SUSAN PEARSON, Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 91-108.
This essay explores a nineteenth-century debate over the linguistic capacity of animals in order to consider the links among language, reason, and history. Taking the American animal-protection movement as a point of departure, I show how protectionists, linguists, anthropologists, and advocates of deaf education were divided about the origins and nature of language. Was language a product of the soul and thus unique to humans, or was it a function of the body, a complex form of the corporeal expressions that humans and animals shared? Was language divine or natural? The answers that different activists and intellectuals gave to such questions shaped their view of the relationship of humans to animals and the inclusion of the latter in the moral and political community. I suggest that such debates are helpful to historians since the possession of language—and its traces in the written word—has traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history from history proper. If we are to include animals in “history,” we must rethink the relationship of the discipline to language.
+ MAHESH RANGARAJAN, Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 109-127.
This article explores how far animals are or are not endowed with a sense of history. The century-long history of lion–human interaction in the lions’ last habitat in Asia—in India’s Gir Forest, Gujarat State—is the focal point of analysis. In turn, there have been longer-term shifts since ancient and medieval times. Aside from two specific phases of breakdown, Gir’s lions rarely attack people. To comprehend why this is so, both the lions and humans need to be seen as products of history. Although it is going too far to endow the lions with historical consciousness, Gir’s lions clearly do have memory of memories. Over a half-century since hunting ceased, living on a mix of domestic livestock and wild prey, they now co-inhabit not only the forest but a much larger territory in close proximity to resident people. Their case calls for rethinking both animal and human histories to allow for associate species that adapt to human presence, and are capable of memory.
+ CHRIS PEARSON, Dogs, History, and Agency, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 128-145.
Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS), this article argues that agency is shared unevenly between humans and nonhumans. It proposes that conceptualizing animals as agents allows them to enter history as active beings rather than static objects. Agency has become a key concept within history, especially since the rise of the “new” social history. But many historians treat agency as a uniquely human attribute, arguing that animals lack the cognitive abilities, self-awareness, and intentionality to be agents. This article argues that human levels of intentionality are not a precondition of agency. Furthermore, it draws on research into canine psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intentionality and self-directed action. The aim is not to turn dogs, or any other animals, into human-style agents nor to suggest that they display the same levels of skill, intentionality, and intelligence as humans. Instead, the objective is to show how dogs are purposeful and capable agents in their own way and to explore how they interact with human agents. The article particularly considers the agency of militarized dogs, especially those on the Western Front (1914–1918), to suggest how historians can use primary sources to uncover how individuals in the past have treated dogs as capable creatures and to capture some sense of dogs’ embodied and purposeful agency.
+ DAVID GARY SHAW, The Torturer’s Horse: Agency and Animals in History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 146-167.
Historians need to understand the nature of historical agency and how animals relate to this central if contested historiographical concern. Focusing on the specific context of the Napoleonic Wars and in particular the Duke of Wellington and his horse Copenhagen, I show why agency is a continuum, not limited to the complex and intentional acts of a rational man, for instance a field marshal, but extending to basic actions, group actions, and less self-conscious actors, for instance a horse. Therefore, agency can include animals. Any action, however, must be placed into a context of reasons or understandings, the “pertinent context.” The place of animals as agents will naturally vary across historical time in great part depending on prevalent contemporary cultural assumptions. In some periods animals have operated as difficult-to-discern “secret agents.” I stress the variable and fluid notions of agency that have emerged in posthumanistic and actor network theoretical contexts. And I develop the idea of special associations—what I call unities—in which especially close, disciplined actors are produced, such as the skilled horse-and-rider of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, historical agency is likely always to involve human beings, but there is also space for animals to act with people.