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Multispecies Scholarship and Encounters:
Changing Assumptions at the Human-Animal Nexus
Rhoda Wilkie
School of Social Science (Sociology)
University of Aberdeen
[email protected]
Abstract
Changing attitudes towards animals in modern industrialised societies has triggered
new lines of scholarly enquiry. The emergence of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is
part of the turn towards animals within the social sciences. Although sociology is a
relative newcomer to multispecies scholarship, more than three decades ago a
sociologist anticipated that the discipline might benefit from attending to the
‘zoological connection’ (Bryant, 1979). Bringing to the fore what usually remains in
the shadowy background, i.e. our symbolic and material relations with nonhuman
animals, has started to unearth underexplored areas of social life. This is a noteworthy
retrieval, because it reminds us of the multifaceted and entangled nature of
interspecies interfaces, networks and encounters. This paper suggests that seeing life
through a multispecies lens not only affords scholars in cognate and non-cognate
disciplines to engage in innovative scholarship, it also lays the groundwork to
animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS.
Keywords
Animals and Sociology / Animal Turn / Human-Animal Studies/ Multispecies
Scholarship
‘Zoological Connections’: Changing Background and Disciplinary Assumptions
To truly understand human social behaviour in all its vagaries, and to be
completely sensitive to the full array of its nuisances [sic] and subtleties, we
must enhance our appreciation of its zoological dimension. Accordingly, we
might … come to perceive whole new vistas of behavioural linkages by taking
into account the “zoological connection”. Our behaviour, our lives and our
destiny are directed in part by the shadow of the beast. Let us, therefore, turn
our sociological attention to this neglected area of social causation (Bryant,
1979: 417).
Sociology is typically understood to be the study of human society; hence its
assumptions, concepts and theoretical frameworks are appositely suited to represent
and explain the human-centric nature of its focus. According to Gouldner (1970: 32)
‘the work of sociologists, as of others, is [also] influenced by a sub-theoretical set of
beliefs, for that is what background assumptions are’. Such assumptions, he explains,
‘are affectively-laden cognitive tools that are developed early in the course of our
socialization into a particular culture and are built deeply into our character structure’.
This partly explains why scholars may regard some theories as more ‘intuitively
convincing’ than others (Gouldner, 1970: 30). Given this, if scholars have been
brought up in an anthropocentric culture that generally legitimates, objectifies, and
normalises the use of animals for human purposes (i.e. dominionism) then this may
foster a depiction of animals as necessary but tacit resources (Franklin, 1999). Just as
non-animate resources such as water and petrol do not usually feature in lay or
sociological accounts of daily life, unless there is a drought or fuel shortage, likewise,
animated resources are barely discernable unless there is a problem. Thus, scholars
who are exposed to and influenced by anthropocentric norms and beliefs are perhaps
more likely to perpetuate and relate to human-centred accounts of social life, because
such accounts just feel right and make intuitive sense.
Although sociologists have paid minimal attention to what Bryant (1979) refers to as
the ‘zoological connection’, i.e. our symbolic and material relations with other
animals, the extent to which this has been a deliberate omission is perhaps open to
question. If scholars reflect upon why nonhuman animals may or may not be
incorporated into sociological enquiries then perhaps ‘silent assumptions [about
animals and human-animal relations] rooted in the ideological or cultural background
of the society’ to which they belong, may come to the fore which would otherwise go
unexamined (Ichheiser, 1949: 1). For example, ‘Every attribute that it is claimed we
uniquely have, the animal is consequently supposed to lack; thus, the generic concept
“animal” is negatively constituted by the sum of these deficiencies’ (Ingold, 1994a:
3). This shows how human beings are depicted as unique and distinct from all other
animals (i.e. human exceptionalism). Since the term ‘animal’ encompasses all species
of animals apart from humans, this has prompted the use of unwieldy phrases such as
‘nonhuman animal’, ‘other-than-human animals’, ‘other animals’, and the formation
of new terms such as ‘anymal’ to manage this ‘lexical gap in the English language’
(Kemmerer, 2006: 10-11). This may be a matter of semantics, but ‘these categorical
errors have historical roots in philosophical and religious ideas that formed the
foundation of Western culture and ensured a subordinate and inferior status for
nonhuman animals’ (Shapiro, 2008: 7).
The depiction of animals as mindless automatons by René Descartes in the 17th
century perpetuated the view that animals were incapable of speech and the ability to
think: ‘Without thought, they did not experience emotion and were unencumbered by
what Descartes saw as the elemental and most unique human possession – the soul’
(Sanders, 1999: 114). Elements of this perspective may arguably be traced in George
Herbert Mead’s depiction of animal communication as a ‘conversation of gestures’
(1934: 48). Mead suggests when two dogs fight they are instinctually responding to
each other’s bodily gestures: ‘The dogs are not talking to each other; there are no
ideas in the minds of the dogs; nor do we assume that the dog is trying to convey an
idea to the other dog’. As humans typically communicate via the spoken word, this
type of vocal gesture ‘usually calls up the same response in the speaker and listener –
if both people use the same language, and their words have standardized usages’
(Baldwin, 1986: 77). Since animals do not converse as humans do, i.e. by means of
‘significant symbols’, they are considered incapable of participating in symbolic
interaction. According to Clinton Sanders, a pioneering American animal sociologist,
Mead’s view of animals
came to be a taken-for-granted assumption when sociologists occasionally
passed lightly over the topic of animal-human interactions. Since animals
were not full-fledged social actors from the Median point of view, their
encounters
with
humans
were
one-way
exchanges,
lacking
the
intersubjectivity at the heart of true social interaction. People interacted with
animals-as-objects (1999: 118).
Over time, every discipline develops its own classics and ways of seeing the world
which are more or less imbibed by each generation that enters the field. Sociology is
no different. For example, introductory textbooks play a key role in inducting new
entrants into disciplinary assumptions and what has been described as ‘“common
denominator” or non-problematic” sociology’ (Ferree and Hall cited in Alger and
Alger, 2003a: 70). However, the accumulation of contemporary research in areas such
as cognitive ethology, primatology, and animal science has greatly enhanced our
understanding of animal intelligence, emotion, sociality, communication and culture
in different species of animals, (e.g. Bekoff, 2006; Birke and Hockenhull, 2012; De
Waal, 2001; Griffin, 1984; Hillix and Rumbaugh, 2004; Masson and McCarthy,
1994). Moreover, such findings have been popularised in televised documentaries
such as Super Smart Animals (BBC1, 2012) and Life on Earth hosted by naturalist
David Attenborough. As ‘documentary makers [have] employed the fly-on-the-wall
approach to bring the intimate lives of animals closer to humans’, this not only
introduced exotic and familiar species of animals into people’s living rooms it also
decentred ‘humanity by … reducing the perceived distance between humans and
animals’ (Franklin, 1999: 48). It is interesting that the emergence of this new
knowledge about animals was barely evident in the majority of introductory sociology
textbooks published in America between 1998 and 2002. Instead, such texts typically
reinforced species differences rather than challenging them (Alger and Alger, 2003a:
70). Although this may be the result of ‘inadequate scholarship’ (Alger and Alger,
2003a: 75), ‘By focusing on the differences between humans and other animals,
sociologists have lost sight of all that we share with them’ (Murphy, 1995: 692).
Such disciplinary assumptions are further reinforced by a division of academic labour
that largely segregates nature from culture. Since social science disciplines have
tended to perpetuate a ‘discontinuity between humans and animals’, albeit to varying
degrees, this contributed to nonhuman animals being omitted from or placed at the
fringes of sociological enquiry (Noske, 1993: 187; Tovey, 2003). Zerubavel suggests
the way academic scholarship is organised mirrors ‘the way we mentally carve up the
world in our minds, as well as the way we experientially construct our professional
identities as scholars’ (1995: 1093). Given that academic research is peer-evaluated to
ascertain how centrally or marginally relevant it might be to a field, this spatial
positioning of intellectual endeavours can ‘condemn scholars for being too
“provincial” or “limited” in their academic interests’ or raise questions as to whether a
‘particular topic falls “within” or “outside”’ their disciplinary area (Zerubavel, 1995:
1095). The extent to which colleagues are ‘rigidly or flexibly-minded’ may also
influence the degree to which they perceive academic fields and sub-fields as more or
less demarcated ‘islands of scholarship’ (Zerubavel, 1995: 1095). If we return to
Bryant’s (1979) plea to attend to the zoological connection, his request has generated
a rather cool and at times contemptuous response from peers within sociology.
‘Although sociologists have shown increasing interest in this topic, it can hardly be
called a flood. … Indeed some belittle it as mere boutique sociology … or consider it
to be a passing fancy or trendy insignificance’ (Arluke, 2003: 28-29). At best, this
‘more-than-human’ topic is perceived to be of tangential relevance to the discipline
(Whatmore, 2006: 604). At worst, it reflects a ‘rigidly-minded’ response to a rather
quirky ‘island of scholarship’ that lies outside of sociology’s remit.
Multispecies Scholarship: Human-Animal Studies and the ‘Animal Turn’
Having said all this, an interdisciplinary field has emerged called Human-Animal
Studies (HAS), which is ‘primarily devoted to examining, understanding, and
critically evaluating the complex and multidimensional relationships between humans
and other animals’ (Shapiro, 2008: 5).1 The current torrent of ‘new books, journals,
conferences, organizations, college programs, listserves, and courses, both in the
United States and throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada’ attests
this interspecies area is attracting considerable interest (Shapiro and DeMello, 2010:
307). So much so, that within thirty years, the social sciences and humanities have
embarked on what Sarah Franklin has dubbed an ‘animal turn’ (Armstrong and
Simmons, 2007: 1).The field itself is likely to be associated with politicised
scholarship synonymous with an animal rights agenda (Jerolmack, 2005). Such a view
is not ungrounded because animal-related issues can engender polemic and politicised
standpoints (Best, 2009). Even so, like any field there is a continuum of positions and
perspectives; HAS is no different. For example, ‘while activism to better the lives of
nonhuman animals is not a key component of Human-Animal Studies, many HAS
scholars are themselves activists’ (DeMello, 2010: xiv). This is especially the case
for Critical Animal Studies (CAS), which ‘is the academic field of study dedicated to
the abolition of animal and ecological exploitation, oppression, and domination’
(ICAS website, 2012). Given this, CAS-orientated scholars are more likely to engage
in emancipatory-type scholarship and advocate ethically-motivated veganism
(Humphries, 1997; Twine, 2010a).2 However, just because academics are engaged in
pro-animal research this does not necessarily mean they are uncritical of or
sympathetic to animal-related politics (Aaltola, 2011). In other words, those studying
human-animal issues may to varying degrees be involved in activist-scholarship
and/or animal advocacy politics, but necessarily so.
The reinvigoration and radicalisation of the animal protection movement in the 1970s,
however, has played a pivotal role in translating contemporary ‘private troubles’ held
by individually-concerned citizens and ethically-troubled consumers about animals
into high profile ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959: 8; Ryder, 2000; Singer, 1995). As
anxieties over the moral status, welfare and utilisation of different species of animals
in modern industrialised societies have intensified, people have taken to the streets to
register their personal concern, moral outrage and ‘zoocentric empathy’ (Franklin,
1999: 175). For instance, during the mid-1990s, the anti-live animal export protests in
the South and South East of England generated such widespread local, national and
European support this signalled a political consensus was emerging about ‘the moral
case for animal welfare’ (Benton and Redfearn, 1996: 51). This also indicates that
people feel they have a duty of care towards animals used for human purposes: i.e.
dominion-type assumptions co-exist with and are off-set by more animal-centric
perspectives such as the Christian notion of stewardship (Franklin, 1999: 175). In
practice, people and scholars living in anthropocentrically-orientated cultures are
therefore exposed to competing positions and discourses, and changing assumptions,
about the moral and legal status of different species of animals and how they should
be perceived and treated.
For example, up until the mid-1990s agricultural animals were legally classified as
‘goods’ or ‘products’ (Stevenson, 1994: 116). In effect, livestock were like any other
agricultural resource such as wheat and potatoes, and could be processed as such.
Following a lengthy campaign by animal welfare groups such as Compassion in
World Farming the status of livestock in European law was revised in the Treaty of
Rome to that of ‘sentient beings’ (Camm and Bowles, 2000). In theory, this is a
significant reclassification of food animals because it destabilises their ‘tool-like’
status by (re)acknowledging their animate qualities (Arluke and Sanders, 1996: 173).
It also demonstrates that ‘The status of commodified domestic animals … once
excluded from spheres of moral concern and legal protection, is being re-evaluated’
(Emel and Wolch, 1998: 14). If these moral concerns are combined with the public
angst generated by genetically modifying animals (Macnaghten, 2004), the creation of
‘interspecies entities’ as in stem cell research (Parry, 2010) and the global health risks
associated with emerging infectious diseases, many of which are zoonotic diseases
that are transmitted from animals to humans, such as Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS) and Avian Flu (Jones et al, 2008; Torrey and Yolken, 2005), then
lay people and experts alike, are increasingly faced with and compelled to consider
the ethical, political, socio-economic and institutional implications of hybridised
beings and interspecies risks in late modernity (Brown and Michael, 2004; Whatmore,
2002; Wilkie and Inglis, 2007).
Haraway’s term ‘critter’ aptly refers to the ‘motley crowd of lively beings including
microbes, fungi, humans, plants, animals, cyborgs and aliens’ that are ‘always
relationally entangled rather than taxonomically neat’ (2008: 330). This notion
resonates with Latour’s argument that the purified realms of nature (i.e. nonhuman)
and society (i.e. human) are a modern myth that relies on not attending to what he
calls the ‘work of translation’ or ‘hybridization’ (1993: 10-11; Latour, 1994). By
dutifully perpetuating the ontological division between nature and society this
‘provides an impoverished analytical repertoire that purifies the vast “middle
kingdom” of hybrid nonhuman entities, both organic and inorganic, that increasingly
proliferate in our contemporary world’ (Lorimer, 2007: 913).3 Given ‘the creative
mind’ is ‘attracted by problems which are overlooked, or not recognized as anomalies
by his [or her] colleagues’, the emergence of HAS provides an institutional home and
vital melting pot for like-minded scholars interested in hybrid-related scholarship
(Shapiro cited in Dogan and Pahre, 1990: 35; Shapiro and DeMello, 2010).4
Although the animal turn has been slower to register on sociology’s radar (Taylor,
2012: 44), a growing number of sociologists are considering social life through a
multispecies lens (e.g. Arluke and Sanders, 1996; Cudworth, 2011a; Franklin, 1999;
Irvine, 2004, 2008; Peggs, 2012; Twine, 2010a; Wilkie, 2010). This development
provides an opportunity to address ‘possible blind spots in sociological theory’ and
animalise the ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959; Myers, 2003: 46). This
animalising impulse has already garnered sufficient support within the discipline to
stimulate professional sociological associations to establish specialist research groups
dedicated to the study of human-animal related issues in America (2002) and Britain
(2006). That said, Leslie Irvine speculates that the continuation of the Animals and
Society Section in America lies mainly in the hands of ‘graduate students who have
the courage to challenge the field’s outdated ideas about animals’ (2012: 127). Even
so, those who traverse disciplinary and species margins have harnessed the ‘creative
marginality’ to produce innovative scholarship that goes beyond human-centric
accounts of social life (Carter and Charles, 2011; Dogan and Pahre, 1990; Taylor and
Signal, 2011). In the process of grappling with the empirical, theoretical and
methodological challenges of attending to nonhuman others (animate and nonanimate) such scholarship is destabilising longstanding disciplinary assumptions and
dualisms, such as society/nature, human/animal and subject/object and decentring the
human-centric focus of social science disciplines (e.g. Birke and Hockenhull, 2012;
Haraway, 2003, 2008; Hinchliffe, 2007; Latour, 1993; Law and Hassard, 1999;
Murdoch, 1997a, b).
In some ways, such boundary-related debates tap into ongoing religious, philosophical
and cultural dialogues throughout the ages, about the vulnerability, mutability and
permeability of the border that is purported to separate humans from other animals
(e.g. Clutton-Brock, 1995; Gilhus, 2006; Hirst and Wooley, 1985; Horigan, 1988;
Thomas, 1983; Salisbury, 1997).5
The extensive time and energy expended on
(re)constructing, (re)negotiating and (re)affirming this nebulous natural-cultural
nexus, clearly shows how culturally significant this interspecies frontier is. As Taylor
notes, ‘the boundaries between human and animal are not “natural” but are
constructed and policed in order to maintain the purity of the different categories’
(2012: 39). Multispecies scholarship is also unearthing areas of modern-day life that
highlights ‘Our social enterprise is not composed of humans alone’ (Bryant, 1979:
417). Of course the realisation that animals are ‘good to think’ with is not new in the
social sciences; animals have long been symbolic vehicles for understanding human
societies and how they are organised (e.g. Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Mullin, 1999). Since
animals have been humans’ ‘other’ this means ‘the very idea of the human – the way
we understand and experience ourselves as humans – is closely tied up with ideas
about animals’ (Armstrong and Simmons, 2007: 1). For example, Anderson illustrates
how the formation of human identity in European societies is intimately tied up with
the notion of animality and the ‘politics of domestication’ (Anderson, 1997: 467). By
explaining how animal domestication as
‘a political
activity historically
interconnected with ideas of human uniqueness and dominion, savagery and
civilization’ she shows how this shaped the nature of people’s relations with animals
and other people too (1997: 470). Since the domestication and farming of animals
were key ‘hallmark[s] of a civilized society’ during the colonial period, if indigenous
peoples did not engage in these practices they were deemed ‘uncivilised’ and likened
to animals (Anderson, 1997; Anderson, 2004: 8; Elder et al, 1998). As Raymond
Williams notes, ‘To cultivate nature was to draw it into a moral order where it became
‘civilised’. Indeed, it was the practice that signified culture itself, a term, which in its
earliest use, meant to cultivate or tend something – usually crops and animals’ (cited
in Anderson, 1998: 126). By implication the more humans worked on nature and
subdued their brutish natural instincts the more they could claim they had transcended
this realm to become cultured and rational beings. However, the ideal human subject
underpinning this Western narrative is riddled with gendered, racialised and specieist
assumptions:6
Those who were European, white, male and adult set themselves up as the
prototype of humanity, with animality as its opposite. This sleight of hand
relegated the feminine (equated with the body/the irrational), racialized
peoples and children. All such ‘other people’ had ambiguous status (Anderson,
1997: 473; Spelman, 1982).
Since ‘[o]ur ability to pass as ‘human’ may be compromised by being marked out in
various ways as “more animal”’, this illustrates how the human-animal divide, and
discourses of animality and nature, can contribute to the construction of ‘intra-human
categories of difference’ (Twine, 2010a: 10-11). Whilst sociologists often draw on the
concept of intersectionality to understand the multifarious and entangled nature of
social inequality, domination and difference (e.g. gender, ‘race’ and class), the
dimension of species difference has been overlooked.7 Multispecies scholars,
especially within CAS, are addressing this oversight by ‘reimagining’ the humancentric focus of this concept to enable ‘more-than-human account[s] of
intersectionality’ (Twine, 2010b: 397). In light of this initiative, Cudworth suggests
‘It is time that more sociologists took the social power of species seriously’ (2011b:
171). Since the animal turn also requires social scientists to pay heed to tangible
animals, and peoples actual relationships with other species, this highlights that
animals are more than just symbolic vehicles, they are ‘symbols with a life of their
own’ (Daston and Mitman, 2009: 13). This is a significant amendment, because it
draws attention to the nature of people’s material ‘entanglements’ with other animals
in a multitude of personal and institutional contexts (Haraway, 2008: 4). Attending to
our ‘co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality’ not only
emphasises the multifaceted and exploitative nature of our connections with a
multitude of critters (Haraway, 2003: 4), it also‘re-vitalises’ our understanding of
such connections because people can and do ‘become with’ other species of animals
(Buller, 2012; Greenhough, 2010; Haraway, 2008).
Multispecies Networks and Encounters
As scholars flesh out the multifaceted nature of people’s liaisons with other species,
there is a growing interest ‘in animals as subjects rather than objects, in animals as
parts of human society rather than just symbols of it, and in human interactions and
relationships with animals rather than simply human representations of animals’
(Knight, 2005: 1 emphasis in original). This change of emphasis has triggered
discussions about nonhuman agency in HAS and an interest in actor-network
theoretical (ANT) approaches too (e.g. Law and Hassard, 1999). Although ANT was
first used by sociologists of science to investigate how scientists conducted
experimental studies in practice (Murdoch, 1997a), ‘It is a way of looking at the social
world which stresses that humans live and operate within wide networks of
phenomena’ (Taylor, 2011: 209). This realisation that humans act-in-concert with a
plethora of animate and inanimate others has shifted attention away from those doing
the relating (i.e. a human subject who has the capacity to act intentionally) onto the
relational webs and practices which connect humans with other species of animals
(Law and Mol, 2008; Murdoch, 1997a, b). This approach typically flattens out and
disperses agency throughout the entire network, i.e. via the beings and things enrolled
within it, to the extent that this ‘principle of symmetry’ means that all types of
‘actants’ (e.g. humans, animals and artefacts) may be treated in the same way (Jones,
2003).8 Although this ‘liberates, or brings out from the shadows, oppressed [animal]
subjectivities’, it simultaneously ‘undermines their identity as distinct subjects worthy
of epistemological, political and ethical distinction’ (Jones, 2003: 293).9 Moreover,
since the ‘networks are flat – there is little ontological depth - no sense of
multileveled qualities or hierarchical relations and the different kinds of sets of
relationships therein’ (Cudworth, 2011a: 58-59). Perhaps a more contextualised
understanding of interspecies relations that considers where species are located in a
network and any power differentials that may exist between and amongst human and
nonhuman animals would add more texture and depth to multispecies networks. As
Cudworth notes, ‘Animals have more or less limited agency, depending on the kind of
environment they are in’ (2011a: 77).
This proliferation of more-than-human perspectives, discourses and issues has also
exposed scholars to new ways of thinking about how species are symbolically and
materially entangled with each other. This means ‘a new generation [of sociologists]
may arise with new background assumptions, ones that are not resonated congenially
by theories based on older [i.e. anthropocentric] assumptions which the younger
generation feels to be wrong or absurd’ (Franklin and White, 2001; Gouldner, 1970:
34). Given there are about 67 million pets in the UK and 48% of UK households are
now ‘multi-species households’, it is likely that many scholars have personal
experience of sharing their lives with nonhuman companion-type animals too
(Franklin, 2006: 139; Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association, 2012).10 Just as
background assumptions may partly explain why some scholars regard some theories
as more ‘intuitively convincing’ than others, then perhaps colleagues who have been
socialised into multispecies relations, assumptions and scholarship may regard largely
human-centric accounts of social life as intuitively unconvincing (Gouldner, 1970:
30).11
For example, a number of American sociologists have revisited Mead’s work to
provide an alternative understanding of how humans and animals may meaningfully
interact with each other without the use of linguistic symbols. By conducting
ethnographic studies into people’s routine everyday interactions with animals in
contexts such as, animal shelters, veterinary clinics, living and playing with ‘pets’ and
dog training sessions this has enabled such sociologists to re-think notions of
intersubjectivity, personhood and selfhood to include nonhuman animals too (e.g.
Alger and Alger, 1997, 2003b; Arluke and Sanders, 1996; Irvine, 2004, 2007, 2012;
Sanders, 1993, 1999, 2003; Sanders and Arluke, 1993). Even though this pioneering
work has opened up new lines of enquiry, the tendency in such research to ‘elevate
animals to symbolic interactants … [or] assume “minds” or shared meanings’
between people and animals has been critiqued by fellow sociologists (Jerolmack,
2009: 376). According to Jerolmack ‘associations with humans and animals are still
possible and enjoyable to humans even if symbolic interaction is impossible’. Given
this, he contends ‘It is useful to consider symbolic interaction as an ideal type by
which to compare various interactions along a continuum of intersubjectivity’
(Jerolmack, 2009: 376). Moreover, although such studies show how animal
practitioners and guardians may attribute ‘mindedness’ and grant ‘personhood’ to
more-than-human beings this ‘simply maintain[s] dualist conceptions whilst moving
the boundary slightly (i.e. from human/social v. animal/natural to human and (some)
animals/social v. natural’ (Taylor, 2011: 206). Whilst the extent to which different
species of animals may or may not be minded actors engaged in more or less
meaningful exchanges with people is a point of contention, exploring contexts where
people encounter individually known animals and/or groups of unknown animals does
provide an opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of interspecies
liaisons and sociality (Candea, 2010).
To illustrate, I will draw on an interesting article that documents the experiences of a
female primatologist who abandoned the accepted wisdom of ‘habituation’ whilst
studying a particular troop of wild baboons near Lake Naivasha in Kenya (Smuts,
2001). Usually, the practice of ‘habituation’ requires animal researchers to ‘ignore’
the animals under study so that the animals will ‘ignore’ them (Candea, 2010: 246).
However, Smuts’ attempts of being a neutral observer were ineffective in this species
context. Instead, the more she understood how to behave and react in ‘baboonappropriate fashion’ the more the primates disregarded her (Candea, 2010: 246).
Smuts suggests this was because the baboons perceived her as ‘a social subject
vulnerable to the demands and rewards of relationship. Since I was in their world,
they determined the rules of the game, and I was thus compelled to explore the
unknown terrain of human-baboon intersubjectivity’ (cited in Candea, 2010: 246). In
practice, this meant she had to alter her behaviour as opposed to the animals
accommodating to her presence. As Smuts explains,
The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the world
they had always lived in. I, on the other hand, in the process of gaining their
trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and
sat, the way I held my body, and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was
learning a whole new way of being in the world – the way of baboon (2001:
295).
Clearly, the more Smuts attended to and reflected on the baboons’ bodily gestures,
and inter-baboon engagements, the more she could mirror and ‘send such signals back
to them’ (Smuts, 2001: 295). She became so attuned to the tacit subtleties of the
troop’s behaviour that she reached a point where she responded at the same time as, or
even before, the rest of the baboons when they had to stop eating to take shelter from
the rain. Smuts writes:
… something shifted, and I knew without thinking when it was time to move. I
could not attribute this awareness to anything I saw, or heard or smelled; I just
knew. … I had gone from thinking about the world analytically to
experiencing the world directly and intuitively’ (Smuts, 2001: 299).
She recalls how the transition from self-consciously to perceptively engaging with the
baboons fundamentally altered her sense of identity. In effect, her ‘subjective
consciousness seemed to merge with the group-mind of the baboons. … Increasingly,
the troop felt like “us” rather than “them”’ (Smuts, 2001: 299). This transformation in
how she perceived herself has been described as an ‘intersubjective merging of
identities’ (Dutton, 2012: 100).
In contrast, an ethnographic study that explored how biology and zoology volunteers
managed their relations with Kalahari meerkats found that both species practiced a
restrained form of interaction termed ‘interpatience’ i.e. ‘relationships based on
detachment or disengagement’ (Candea, 2010: 249).12 Whilst Smuts deviated from
the norms of habituation by actively adapting to and participating in the norms of
baboon sociality, in this case, the volunteers emphasised the importance of blending
in or ‘becoming part of the scenery’ so that both species could maintain ‘a polite
distance’ from each other (Candea, 2010: 245-246). The striking differences between
the species, in terms of size and physiology, meant that even if the volunteers attuned
themselves to meerkat social etiquette in all likelihood they would be unable ‘to play
the meerkat game’ (Candea, 2010: 246). What these two ethological-type studies
indicate is how people had to negotiate and respect species-specific socialities in
completely different ways i.e. relations of engagement (baboons) and relations of
disengagement (meerkats) to be co-present with these animals. As Segerdahl notes,
‘Cross-species relationships thrive in so many locations, creating new animals and
new humans, shaped not only by their novel genomes but also by their unpredictable
bonds in new circumstances’ (2012: 157).
Such studies compel social and natural researchers to go beyond their disciplinary
boundaries too (Birke and Hockenhull, 2012). The methodological challenges of
multispecies research has already stirred scholars to engage in a series of inter and
intra-disciplinary dialogues about established approaches to research that have tended
to prioritise human-centric norms, assumptions, behaviours and practices. As Buller
notes, ‘The methodological techniques of ethnography and ethno-methodology,
coupled with ethology and behavioural observation have proved to be a potent mix to
this new more-than-human social science’ (2012: 65). Given the interdisciplinary
nature and interspecies focus of HAS scholarship it is thought this field also holds the
‘transformative’ potential to transfigure more orthodox ‘methodologies that hitherto
were imbued with anthropocentrism’ (Segerdahl, 2012: 156-157). It is interesting to
note that such changes are already afoot, as evidenced by Cultural Anthropology’s
special issue dedicated to ‘Multispecies Ethnography’ which was published in 2010.
In some ways, the emergence of this approach within anthropology takes us back to
Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘critters’ because these ethnographers are studying
‘contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where
encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and
coproduced niches’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010: 546).
Conclusion
Attending to zoological connections can highlight the entangled nature of our
symbolic and material configurations with a multitude of critters that constitute our
everyday lives. As multispecies scholars question the largely human-centric depiction
of social life, they ‘disturb the comfortable certitudes of life by asking questions no
one can remember asking and those with vested interests resent even being asked’
(Bauman and May, 2001: 10). Like any sub-field, HAS has the potential to nuance,
augment or even challenge existing sociological knowledge and disciplinary
assumptions. On the one hand, the animal turn may ‘enrich the sociological enterprise
… [to] gain a better understanding of what it is to be human’ (Sanders, 2007: 7). On
the other hand, it messes up categories such as society and nature and human and
animal because it attends to the more-than-human relational networks that we are all a
part of.
The interdisciplinary nature of HAS also means its scholars routinely liaise with
colleagues in a wide range of social and natural science disciplines; thus its
intellectual boundaries are less ossified and less clearly demarcated than more
established areas of study. Since ‘innovative scholarship often presupposes
intellectual cross-fertilization’ this quirky island of scholarship provides an
institutional home and vital scholarly-exchange for hybrid-orientated colleagues
(Zerubavel, 1995: 1102). As more sociologists engage with the pioneering initiatives
of multispecies scholars in HAS, and other cognate fields, such as cultural and rural
geography that drew on ANT approaches to create more-than-human accounts of
social life, they too have an opportunity to contribute to the development of this
multispecies field. Although the extent to which animal sociologists might reshape the
human-centric focus, assumptions and debates within their own discipline remains to
be seen, likewise the influence of sociological perspectives upon HAS has still to be
fully realised too. What is more certain, however, is if scholars engage with the
human-animal nexus then they are compelled, albeit to varying degrees, to cross
disciplinary margins and re-think species boundaries. Such scholarly and multispecies
encounters have not only reminded colleagues that the ‘“social” is not, and never has
been, exclusively “human”’ (Cudworth, 2011b: 171), it has also laid the groundwork
to animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS.
1
HAS is being used as an overarching field descriptor.
Feminist care ethics and ‘vegetarian ecofeminism’ provide alternative rationales for abstaining from
animal-derived food (e.g. Gaard, 2002; Donovan and Adams, 2007).
3
Although the literature on hybridity perpetuates the centrality of humans, hybridity occurs amongst
nonhumans too (Lulka, 2009: 384).
4
Multispecies scholarship is in a range of disciplines: geography (e.g. Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Wolch
and Emel, 1998), history (e.g. Fudge, 2008; Kalof, 2007; Ritvo, 1987), cultural and literary studies (e.g.
Baker, 2000; DeKoven and Lundblad, 2012; Rothfels, 2002; Weil, 2012; Wolfe, 2003), feminist
studies (e.g. Adams, 1994; Adams and Donovan, 1995), anthropology (e.g. Ingold, 1994a; Knight,
2005; Noske, 1997) and philosophy (e.g. Calarco and Atterton, 2004; Regan, 1988; Singer, 1995). The
field’s first textbook (DeMello, 2012) and proliferation of edited collections indicate HAS is comingof-age.
5
For a critical cross-cultural perspective see Ingold (1994b) and Hallowell (1976).
6
‘Speciesism’ was coined in 1975 by Richard Ryder and popularised by Peter Singer in Animal
Liberation. It refers to how ‘humans are entitled to treat members of other species in ways in which it
would be deemed morally wrong to treat other humans’ (Cudworth, 2011a: 36-37).
7
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar, conceived the concept of intersectionality in 1989.
8
‘Actant’ has less ‘anthropocentric resonance’ than the term ‘actor’ (Jones, 2003: 303).
9
For an alternative perspective see Holloway (2007).
10
Within HAS, ‘pet owner’ emphasises the property status of animals used for human purposes, whilst
‘guardians’ of ‘companion animals’ aims to be more animal-centric by interacting with animals as
respected ‘others’ (e.g. Irvine, 2004: 58).
11
A study could explore whether the experience of animals in the personal lives of HAS scholars
attuned them professionally to the animal turn.
12
The Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP) in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province is a long-term study.
2
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their constructive comments. I
am also grateful to Andrew McKinnon and Steve Bruce for their support and
feedback too.
Biography
Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen.