History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 1-12 © Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

A WAY WITH ANIMALS

DAVID GARY SHAW1

PREPARING HISTORY FOR ANIMALS

Since its distant beginnings, thinking about history has never been about animals. It couldn’t have been. It is a problem we can only even grasp now. History has been about things we can understand as having affected our choices and destiny or about human achievement, what we did and suffered.2 To remember ourselves through our ancestors, perhaps to learn from the past—these were history’s motivations. But that “we” was always just a way of saying “those enough like us to count.” The “we” sets limits. It is our gang, a social group, whether a king and his crony vassals, the senate and people of Rome, the subjects of the Middle Kingdom, or all humanity. History started as a social perspective on the past, and at its core were two concerns: the individual exploit within the common endeavor and the collective action of a group of individuals. Recall Vico’s thought that “the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”3 For this fundamental reason, Vico thought, we were at home in understanding social life, language, history. It was the world of nature that was difficult if not quite beyond us—and animals seem to lie in that neck of the woods.

There is a fine fellow in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer. He has been seen as a version of Christ, as a vain and proud but much loved husband. Certainly he was commanding and skilled. “His voice was sweeter than the pip-ing of the finest organ on Sunday.”4 But he was shaken by premonitions of doom, and susceptible, as the beautiful often are, to the flattery of the clever.5 Meaning bursts from his story, especially once he was trapped by the wily fox and became a prisoner as well as a probable meal. Chanticleer is, of course, a cock.

He seems a thoughtful rooster too, worried about providence, debating the history of oracles with his wife. He could have had a good conversation with Achilles’ horses, the immortal Xanthos and Balios, who told Achilles his fate,

1. The thinking behind this article was enriched especially by exchanges with Kristin Asdal, Colleen Boggs, Ethan Kleinberg, and Laura Stark, the last of whom also read and commented on it in draft.

2. Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 6, on a history of animals: “such a thing is impossible.”

3. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, transl. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 331.

4. The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 600. I translate: “his vois was murier than the mirye orgon on masse-dayes that in the chirche gon.”

5. Fortunately, the clever are even more susceptible to the flattery of the beautiful.

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yet were keen to exonerate themselves and blame the gods. Were it up to them, they would run as the wind and keep him safe, and how they cried in sympathy when their human heroes died!6

Real chickens and horses seem different. “Personification” is the literary term that crosses the line for rhetorical effect, “anthropomorphism” its social-science cousin, and they both mark the great divide between animals and people. We understand Chanticleer’s talk and mind because he is written as a person. The philosopher Wittgenstein provocatively said: “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.”7 For most of human history, we have understood animals as persons only when we make them out to be humans, albeit in sheep’s cloth-ing. It is precisely these assumptions that have been changing across academic culture, slowly over the last thirty years, building on wider cultural shifts that go deeper into modern history.

Key to understanding animals’ current place is perhaps seeing how our ideas about the proper subjects of history have changed. The slow movement toward taking animals more seriously is a function of a dynamic weaving of contrary social and intellectual tendencies over some time. On the one hand, as Susan Pearson reminds us below,8 the effect of Darwinian thought—we might say Eras-mus Darwin’s thought—was partly to accelerate claims about the (nonreligious) sameness of people and animals, “arisen from one living filament,” which could then be understood as part of a material continuum.9 On the other side, the spiri-tual or sensible nature of animals and their susceptibility to suffering drew them experientially closer to humans, even for those who denied animals souls. Euro-American culture, somewhere in the nineteenth century, was struggling, both becoming disenchanted (through naturalism, science, and liberalism) and spread-ing a new sort of enchantment (through liberal religion, Romantic pantheism, early environmentalism, and a sort of gnostic spiritualism). Animals’ roles as pets, coworkers, entertainments, and food disturbed old ways. It was as early as 1826 that the Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to Animals was established.10

Even earlier, say from the late eighteenth century, God’s special relationship with reason declined. The nineteenth-century liberal cultural turn didn’t so much undo religion as free reason from its alliance with it. Much Christian religion became more overtly and proudly affective, deepening its special relationship with love and experience. Perhaps to be reasonable was human, but for a growing number of Europeans and Americans to be worthy was to be able to feel and to

6. The Iliad of Homer, transl. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 425. I thank Sarah Graham-Shaw for pointing me to this incident.

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hack-er, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 235e (#327).

8. Susan Pearson, “Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 91-108 (this issue).

9. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 3rd ed. [1794] (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1809), 397: “would it be too bold to imagine that all warm blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality.”

10. See Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England,” English Histori-cal Review 88, no. 349 (1973), 786-820. “During the eighteenth century a powerful combination of evangelical piety, romantic poetry, and rational humanitarianism gradually alerted the public to the plight of animals” (788).

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suffer. On such ground, whether Universalist, Methodist, or rational utilitarian, the links among all feeling things could be posited. In other words, some ratio-nalists and some religious enthusiasts joined to worry about animals, even while they disagreed about the human and the divine.11

Common creaturely feeling was not the only basis on which some people started to question the animal’s “nature.” The general expansion of academic and research work in biology and the developing agricultural sciences played a large role, and their impact accelerated heavily from the mid nineteenth century.12 One suspects that elements associated with growing urbanization, such as the decline of direct exposure to animal husbandry, animal slaughter, and the rise of pet-keeping, might have played a part too.13 Thus when ethology began to emerge as a distinct field from the 1930s, the stage was set for the sort of systematic and intimate knowledge of animals that marks many of the articles in this issue.14 New knowledge about animals, new attitudes about people, and old doubts about gods changed what people could be and how animals looked. So, if history is what we can understand because we made it, part of the preparatory process of seeing animals as historical has included understanding much better what animals are like, especially in their similarities to the human. To some extent, we have domesticated our understanding of animals and can increasingly incorporate them into our world as like us, as akin, as kin.

As crucially, historical research has steadily expanded its topics. To start, the fact that historiography developed in the nineteenth century as fundamentally implicated with nationalism helped. If the odd horse registered as historically interesting it was typically as part of the turn to national heroes.15 Over time, however, and in more radical hands, the revolutionary age in Europe and the Americas (1774–1919) worked to validate the nation rather than the kingdom and that meant especially the “people.” And while it was assumed that adult men were the nation’s leaders and actors, the organic totality of the nation included women and the family. All sorts, all statuses were relevant too: Junker Bismarck and his loyal peasants.16

11. See John Passmore, “The Treatment of Animals,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (1975), 195-218; Alice Kuzniar, “A Higher Language: Novalis on Communion with Animals,” Ger-man Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003), 426-442. See the source collection Animal Rights and Souls in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Aaron Garrett (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2000).

12. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1971); Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

13. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Katherine C. Greer, Pets in America: A History (Chapel-Hill: University of North California Press, 2006). See also Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Stud-ies Now (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 53-62.

14. Richard W. Burkhart, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Found-ing of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

15. David Gary Shaw, “The Torturer’s Horse: Agency and Animals in History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 146-167.

16. See Daniel Woolf, “Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organization of the Past,” in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Franz Fillafer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 71-103; Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present, ed. Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and

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Thus the growing interest in social history, rooted in the prewar period but powerful from the late 1950s, decisively contributed to the new nation, as it explored the roles and lived experience of people of all social types, including those neglected in traditional political power narratives. In other words, social history brought its concerns for history’s sufferers right to the conceptual edges of the feeling animal. The simultaneous interest, characteristic especially of the Annales School and its admirers, in economic and material life helped too. Ani-mals or parts of animals fed the economy.17 So, a landmark 1930 study on the fur trade led its economist author to begin with a brief chapter on the natural history of the beavers themselves.18 Environmental and ecological histories from the late 1960s on, such as The Columbian Exchange and Plagues and Peoples, moved early toward animals.19 More generally, history—in its powerful political, social, and cultural variants—would develop from an interest in the elite as the nation’s leaders to a greater consideration of the wider population, including its sectional and oppositional character. History’s subordinated peoples mattered more and more, whether the subjects of empire or slavery, the workers in factories, or the subordinated second sex itself.20 The life of the poor joined the thoughts of the rich and each helped to open a space in which historians might eventually glimpse animals. With respect to animals, this was a long and accidental process, but the social targets of history—the who that mattered—had grown, and the interest and importance of people who appeared to have little traditional power was a lesson not easily unlearned and potentially applicable to other sensible beings.21

From the mid 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that animals deserved a larger place in history at least because people in the past thought animals were impor-tant. Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World appeared in 1983 and included substantial discussion of early modern British attitudes toward animals, just as Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate focused in diverse detail on Victorian atti-tudes.22 In France, Robert Delort’s 1984 Les animaux ont une histoire remains striking and something of a harbinger of a more radical because truly animal-centered perspective.23 The growth of interest was decisively signaled by the

Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 2012); Eileen Ka-May Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

17. Perhaps the best icon of this approach is Fernand Braudel, Civilisation Matérielle et Capital-isme (XVe–XVIIIe siècle), vol. I: Les Structures du Quotidien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), 259-270 focuses on animal power, having dealt with human power first.

18. Harold A. Innes, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History [1930] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3-6.

19. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976).

20. Contemporary with the rise of Annales was Simone de Beauvoir’s book of this name: Le Deuxieme Sexe (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1949).

21. Interestingly, much of this story was anticipated in the strangely prescient satirical paper by Charles Phineas, “a researcher in veterinary history at Boxer College,” “Household Pets and Urban Alienation,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 3 (1974), 338-343.

22. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

23. Robert Delort, Les Animaux ont une Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1984).

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selection in 1997 of “Animals and Human Society” as Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies’s annual theme.24 Since 2000 especially, there have been many historical works on animals around the world and across most historical periods. 25 Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire in 2004 was a sort of landmark in early American history,26 and a recent study linking key social move-ments (witchcraft) to political movements (the English Civil War) to a specific animal (Prince Rupert’s dog, “Boy”) is a token of the impending normalization of the animal within historiography.27 The animal’s historiographical place is not just a fashion; it will persist, revealing of both the present and past. It also raises key methodological and theoretical questions that this theme issue hopes to advance.28

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

These articles reflect a willingness to place the animal at the center of historical concern, something enabled by the growing influence of posthuman and animal-studies perspectives that should embolden historians.29 Two clusters of theoreti-cal issues recur often in this issue. The first centers on the question of what the animal is, historically; the second relates to the question of how do we come to know it, historically.

The first continues the story that I’ve sketched above. Animal and human have never constituted a simple binary, and whom we mean by “animal” is as dis-puted as what we mean.30 In exploring this conceptual problem, Thierry Hoquet demonstrates the persistent and dubious effect of crude generic categories on current thinking and action. His skepticism about the term “animal” is compel-ling partly because of his exposure of the scientific and religious quandaries that Enlightenment natural history displayed, especially in the rich Buffon–Condil-lac controversy. How to fit the human and the animal into one framework was already hotly contested.31 In her complementary article, Susan Pearson discusses

24. This eventually generated the volume edited by Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan, The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (Rochester, NY: University of Roch-ester Press, 2002).

25. A key example is Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); for a recent sampling, see Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

26. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

27. Mark Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2011). I thank Bruce Masters for bringing this book to my attention.

28. We certainly aren’t the first to reflect on the theoretical issues. Animal studies and posthuman-ism are theoretically quite self-conscious, but for historians working here, see Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow”; Hilda Kean, “Challenges for Historians Writing Animal-Human History: What is Really Enough,” Anthrozoös 25 (supplement) (2012), s57-s72.

29. The influence of Donna Haraway is particularly notable, including in this theme issue. 30. See, for other perspectives on this, Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does the ‘Ani-

mal’ Exist?” in Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures, 17-37, and Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 149-189.

31. Compare, too, Mahesh Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of

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nineteenth-century debates in early academic linguistics and biology, as how to understand and relate (deaf) humans and (mute) animals was contested. Theories about the essentially human trait anxiously overlaid questions about the animal.

But the larger point that Hoquet pushes and that I would suggest haunts the issue is that the definition and usage of the word “animal” has never been straightforward. It has changed significantly through history in a variety of over-lapping registers—scientific, agricultural, literary, colloquial, domestic, legal, and theological—that we continue to need to discern and analyze. Strikingly, we don’t today have a single word for the animal creatures that interest us most in history. We might think those we care about historically are the intimate species, borrowing from Brett Walker,32 but does that mean forgetting the secret agents that fill our guts, sometimes laying “us” dead through disease? The terms “pets” and “domesticated animals” are useful, but much of our theoretical conversation is still bedeviled by the sort of generalization that makes Hoquet urge us to adopt the individual as the only honest validating term.33 Certainly, the difficulty of assimilating bats to humans was perhaps the reason Thomas Nagel chose that beast to stage his epistemological crisis.34 Whatever we do, we need to retain the sense of distinctiveness and difference that actually confronting an animal makes immediately clear.

The animal–human division has long been linked with that of culture and nature. It is, as Chris Pearson notes, one of the contested conceptual spaces, by which animals might be kept from their place in history.35 Mahesh Rangarajan makes clear that this distinction is quite foreign to South Asian history, so if historians aren’t prepared to criticize the elision of animal and nature, human and culture, they might well be reinscribing it as well as exporting it to quite different contexts.36 Walker suggests in effect that nature absorbs animals and humans to overcome the divide.37 From the other angle, however, it can be considered that animals are in fact rich in culture. They might even be capable of something like art, as Hoquet suggests.38 If so, culture and nature might survive as relevant historical categories but no longer in line with any animal–human border.39 At least for some animals, it looks as if they are putting a foot, like humans, onto

Gir Forest, Gujarat, India,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013), 109-127 (this issue) for vary-ing South Asian systems of categorizing animals. See Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

32. Brett Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013), 45-67 (this issue).

33. Thierry Hoquet, “Animal Individuals: A Plea for a Nominalistic Turn in Animal Studies,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013), 68-90 (this issue).

34. Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974), 435-450.35. Chris Pearson, “Dogs, History, and Agency,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013),

133.36. Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories,” 111.37. Cf. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” 48. See, for integrating an environmentally

focused approach, Edmund Russell, Environmental History: Uniting History and Biology to Under-stand Life on Earth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

38. Hoquet, “Animal Individuals,” 79. Jared Diamond, “Animal Art: Variation in Bower Decorat-ing Style among Male Bowerbirds, Amblyornis inornatus,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 83, no. 9 (1986), 3042–3046. See Damien Jayat, Les Animaux ont-ils une Culture? (Paris: EDP Sciences, 2010).

39. I thank Colleen Boggs for highlighting this issue for me.

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the side of culture. But do we want a framework that encourages us to consider the variable quality of complexity of cultures, whether simian, canine, or human?

Part of the challenge of delineating animal and human arises because we are increasingly aware of theories that stress, not methodological or nominal-istic individualism, but interdependence, interactivity, and system. Many such theories also deny the existence of definite boundaries between one animal, one thing, and another. There are many sources of this movement. For instance, the materiality that environmental history has always assumed is particularly apt for stressing connection, and, understandably, environmental history has been an important long-term animal-aware field. Of course, interdependence often means one thing eating another, the ultimate confusion of subject and object and the pre-sumed elimination of difference and individuality. In Walker’s article, the meat on offer is human, whereas Rangarajan essentially tells the tale of South Asian lions’ dietary preferences, which he sees as a form of adaptation to the great pressures of ecological history.40 Ultimately he shows the lions developing their twentieth-century aversion to eating people. Our sense that environment always impinges on and affects human life through an ecological web provides a very broad conceptual and geographical framework in which to closely link animals as historical players.

Walker’s focus on intimacy finds a sort of resonance in Vinciane Despret’s article, in which the nonhuman animals dominate through their interactions with the world.41 Even insects find their role, symbiotically and with others. Conver-sant with theories that stress ontological and material interactivity such as assem-blage theory (Deleuze) and actor-network theory (Latour), Despret disrupts some assumptions about domination and warns us against adopting overly reductive ontologies for understanding animal life. She offers one way forward for radi-cally decentering the human. If such can be achieved for theorizing animals in the present, it might become a launching pad for a posthuman history as well.42

Clearly, the sense of interconnection and blurry boundaries around animals raises questions about who acts in history. Although scholars have been includ-ing animals as objects in history in some respects for a very long time, we are now discussing the revolutionary question: to what extent are animals historical actors? Indeed, agency’s prominence in these articles and in the conference we held to discuss them took even those of us who wrote about the subject somewhat by surprise. If we had never thought of agency before, animals and history might have made us invent it. What is going on?43

Arguably, possessing agency brings to the fore the very purpose and point of history. For some, to deny agency seems almost to deny historical significance. Indeed, one reason for expanding history’s subjects to include the whole of human society was to demonstrate that agency could exist even where political

40. Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories.” 41. Vinciane Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52,

(2013), 68-90 (this issue).42. See Ewa Domanska, “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies,” Historein 10 (2010),

118-130.43. Brantz also noted agency’s place in making animals in history problematic; see her “Introduc-

tion,” in Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures, 2-3.

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power was small.44 Where there was a mind, there was an actor. The debates about animal minds were central in nineteenth-century considerations of animal language, as Susan Pearson shows. To have language was to be the sort of thing that mattered. Still, in the 1920s the social psychologist and philosopher George Mead thought that animals lacked the self that let them exist historically and thus to become much more than objects.45 To some extent, agency and its acting self is a shibboleth of historical significance: if you can’t perform it, you can’t matter.

Agency is also about effect, however. Actors make things happen.46 Holding onto this aspect of doing-with-an-effect, but stepping away from notions of self and intentionality, allows Chris Pearson, for instance, to find a middle space in which dogs could act significantly in the First World War, in some ways similar to my discussion of warhorses in Napoleonic Europe. Backing away even further from intentionality, Despret insists smoothly on the idea of agencement, “a rap-port of forces,” the bringing together—constantly renewed—of one thing and another. “There is no agency that is not interagency.”47 Some associations matter more than others, of course, and so I argue in my article for special cases, which I call unities, in which animals fuse with people into new agents. Clearly, this theme issue includes divergent notions of agency, but the common implications are that agency is an interdependent structure or dynamic in which neither self nor intention is required.48 Incorporating animals into history as agents remains a goal for some just because to be an agent is to become a proper, customary focus for historical concern.

Less debatable is the fact that animals make a difference; teaching ourselves to look for that difference throughout history has to be the lesson learned going forward, even where the shock of intimacy might make us want to look away. Intimacy, interagency, unities: the subtext of this theme issue is the uncanny proximity of animals to history, to humans. They are always there, just out of focus. The barriers between us are “touchy.” Jacques Derrida and his cat stare each other down, naked, their roles and positions a matter of (mutual) perplexi-ty.49 Purity can’t wholly avoid pollution. The cat’s mouth is full of surprisingly nasty germs, animals in their own right perhaps, legions of them at war, poised to touch. From their existence, we can see that there is a systemic complexity that might take the historical role of animals in diverse and surprising directions. The effects occur, somewhere in the biosphere, even when intention is left far behind. Within these frameworks of interdependence, it will often be hard to know what

44. In challenging the use of the term, Walter Johnson went so far as to call agency “the master trope of the New Social History.” See “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003), 113. See also Andy Wood, “Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley c.1596–1615,” Past & Present 193, no. 1 (2006), 41-72.

45. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 136.

46. See my paper for efforts to draw an outline of the conditions of agency: Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse.”

47. Despret, “From Secret Agency to Interagency,” 44.48. This is not to say that they might not be present or transformative of the sort of agency that

occurs.49. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Mary Louise Mallet, transl. David Wills

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

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the power relations are. Once fused in an actor network, is the animal still the subordinate to the human or is history their common creation, their mutual, some-times coordinated action?

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONCERNS: SOURCES, SCIENCE, AND PERSPECTIVE

There are many methodological challenges in doing history well with animals, but I want to raise two that are sometimes interrelated, and that are both connect-ed to the epistemological question: how do we know about animals in history? I don’t particularly mean “will the sources mention them?” Often they will, as several of these articles show, and an early nineteenth-century British racehorse or the Duke of Wellington’s horse Copenhagen will be better attested in the archives than almost any contemporary nineteenth-century agricultural laborer or her husband or child.50 As several of the articles in this issue show, our methods are able when our questions are insistent.

Yet, in writing the history of people’s experience or motivations, we can qui-etly fall back on the historian’s favorite theory: common sense. In other words, there is a presumed sameness to humans that allows us easier access to them, through some form of sympathetic or analogical understanding. We can get away with a lot of speculation about motivation, for instance. There is help through extrapolation. First-person narratives sometimes authored by socially modest people are found in many geographical contexts and many centuries, providing glimpses into the psychic, emotional, or symbolic worlds of past individuals and then their “cultures” or social groups. Scholars then transpose their insights from one context to the next. Their historical experience and historical perspective are in principle accessible to us because they are similar to us.51 For animals, how-ever, Chaucer and Homer just won’t do as guides, and there are no first-person accounts.

The anthropomorphic fallacy threatens. The word “anthropomorphic” was used exclusively about gods until well into the nineteenth century when its appli-cation to animals developed.52 The error of making gods derive from people then became the sin of making animals seem like people. Now that we are done ignor-ing animals, how do we avoid just putting ourselves in them?53 How do we start to know what it was like for them? When documents thin or fail, other forms of knowledge prevail.

Support from natural science becomes quite attractive at such points. Many of these articles make at least some attempt to face the problem of understand-ing animals by turning to the wide variety of supporting scientific theory and example. For instance, Despret explores (and criticizes) the perspectives and spe-

50. See Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse.”51. Of course, dispute over this claim has to some extent dominated theoretical debates throughout

history and the humanities for much of the last forty years, but practically this is less evident in this issue.

52. “anthropomorphism, n.”. OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.wesleyan.edu/view/Entry/8449?redirectedFrom=anthropomorphism& (accessed November 1, 2013).

53. See Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse,” for some discussion of this problem.

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cific achievements of ethological thought, and Fudge deploys Temple Grandin’s innovative and empathetic insights from animal science and her own autism to explore the phenomenological horizon of bovine experience. For Chris Pearson as well the target is to gain access to animal behavior, for which he turns to canine psychology, often really a branch of cognitive psychology. Susan Pear-son’s account nests nineteenth-century proto-scientific linguistics inside our own Darwinian evolutionary assumptions, whereas Hoquet ranges widely, arguing, for instance, that even current biological knowledge is itself improved by an individualizing turn.54

The turn to particular sorts of scientific knowledge does have its risks. Science-studies specialists are often worried that “science” gets taken at face value, as if it had no history, no political commitments, nor implications.55 Faced with the strange novelty and difficulty of accessing animals, historians might indeed seek scientific finalities that the humanities never offer; but sometimes a positivistic approach to science slips in to anchor history. This is a tendency, however, not only in animal or environmental history but also in the newer ambitious ventures of Big History and Deep History, approaches that also work to go where the trail of human writing and even artifacts do not as reliably lead.56

At the same time, this turn toward scientific theories and material evidence to answer our questions about animals in history is a notable instance of the return to the real within historiography.57 Some might answer after all—possibly Walker in his article58—that it might be the radical poststructuralist critique of science and the skepticism or constructivism of the linguistic turn in the humanities that are themselves now behind the times. Right or wrong, access to the animal might be one of the reasons that historians are willing to adopt and adapt more scien-tific conclusions in their work. If so, they must face the challenge of using that science well and that might be a very large task, one for which interdisciplinary collaboration will likely prove necessary.59 The fundamental challenge remains even where the science might be uncontested, as Fudge at least is very aware: things change, cattle change, and psychological and animal sciences might only have the durability of social science when applied to essentially social situ-

54. Despret, “From Secret Agency to Interagency”; Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts”; C. Pearson, “Dogs, History, and Agency”; S. Pearson, “Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds”; Hoquet, “Animal Individuals.”

55. See, for instance, for its proximity to our particular subject, Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (2003), 60-74.

56. See, for example, Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

57. This refers to historians’ large and growing interest in materiality, geography, things, the body, emotions, time, presence, but declining interest in words, ideas, and concepts.

58. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” 48.59. Big and Deep History both have more collaborative turns built in, but on the need for and

nature of interdisciplinary work, see Eric Baratay, “Les Socio-anthropo-logues et les animaux,” Sociétés 108, no. 2 (2010), 9-18.

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ations.60 Science might seem to save us from anthropomorphism by handing us over to anachronism.

CONCLUSION: HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM FROM THE ANIMAL POINT OF VIEW

In their attempt to understand animals as feeling and acting beings, the articles in this theme issue are anchored in many diverse theoretical and disciplinary sources. Indeed, deciding if there is an “animal point of view” and whether humans ought still to be considered exceptional are two of the themes that run most insistently through the issue.61 We need, of course, to remind ourselves that the historical questions are necessarily sometimes warped: whether or not we today think humans are just other bits of the biosphere, we cannot lose track of the fact that what people thought in the past and how they acted because of those thoughts must speak in our historical work alongside our own assumptions and definitions. The human exceptionalism that lingers might be that of the past and it might be a historiographically necessary loiterer.

But turning back to Vico’s idea, we might at least insist, especially after reflect-ing on the articles in this issue, that we have usually made “our” history not by ourselves alone, but with our intimate allies, our assemblages, with interagency, and among unities, that is, with uncanny animals, the historical animals, whose presence historians should find and write into their accounts. To understand the history people have made really does require animals, and the articles in this theme issue suggest that we are well on our way to diverse and effective—if not wholly reconcilable—ways of integrating many animals into history and going some way to understanding them too.

At this moment, history and theory have generally been turning away from the symbolic and the linguistic. Trends are toward sensation and presence, to mate-riality and space, to the body and its affect. Yeats’s “rag and bone shop of the heart” is a jarringly apt metaphor for this turn to the real. Animals fit this frame and this moment. Animals in history have made clear material contributions to the environment and economy. They call for attention even more because of the massive importance they had to the people in the past. But we also want to theo-rize the animal in history because it helps us think even harder about who, these days, the “we” of history is. Certainly, the centrality of the human generally is not being overthrown here, but modulated, reconceived, just about challenged.

Wesleyan University

EDITORIAL NOTE

This theme issue began with a mini-conference, “Do Animals Need a History?” held at Wesleyan University in March 2013. The arrangements and organization were practically managed by Julia Perkins, and I repeat here what all the attendees said at the time: the

60. Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” 61. This move is reflected too in Eric Baratay, Le Point du vue animal: Une autre version de

l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012).

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conference’s success, including reorganizing on account of Hurricane Sandy, would have been impossible without Julie’s work, wisdom, good humor, and professionalism.

In addition to the authors included in this theme issue, attendees included editors of the journal, members of the Wesleyan faculty, and some fine commentators who made significant contributions to the papers’ improvement and to all our thinking. They were Kristin Asdal, Colleen Boggs, Susan Crane, Ewa Domanska, Brian Fay, Sandra Swart, Kari Weil, and John Zammito. They did a terrific job at illuminating, provoking, and sweetening. I thank them.

In addition, I want to thank Wesleyan colleagues Andrew Curran and William John-ston for fruitful suggestions about participants and my other History and Theory editorial colleagues Brian Fay, Ethan Kleinberg, and Vijay Pinch both for their general support and specific advice on people and ideas. Last, I thank Associate Editor Laura Stark, who helped me over the last two years with the overall conception, developmental editing, and detailed planning of the conference and this theme issue.