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ANIMALS WITH RICH HISTORIES: THE CASE OF THE LIONS OF GIR FOREST, GUJARAT, INDIA

Dezember 9, 2013, 10:08 a.m., MAHESH RANGARAJAN, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10690

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ANIMAL INDIVIDUALS: A PLEA FOR A NOMINALISTIC TURN IN ANIMAL STUDIES?

Dezember 9, 2013, 10:08 a.m., THIERRY HOQUET, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10688

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SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS: ANIMALS, LANGUAGE, HISTORY

Dezember 9, 2013, 10:08 a.m., SUSAN PEARSON, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10689

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FROM SECRET AGENTS TO INTERAGENCY

Dezember 9, 2013, 10:08 a.m., VINCIANE DESPRET, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10686

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