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29 Cards in this Set
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Anderson, K. 1995
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This paper develops a cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that inscribes various human strategies for domesticating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide, South Australia, the paper charts the mutable discursive frames and practices through which animals were fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public by the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. The visual technologies at the Adelaide Zoo are documented from the time of menagerie-style caging in the late nineteenth century, through the era of the Fairground between the mid- 1930s and the early 1960s, up to the contemporary era of naturalistic enclosures when exhibits such as the fanciful World of Primates continue to craft the means for the human experience of nature. Woven into the
story are more general themes concerning the construction of nature under colonialism, the gendered and racialized underpinnings of ‘human’ boundary-making practices in relation to ‘non-human’ animals and that form of power and possession known as domestication. |
Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of 'Human' Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 (3): 275-294.
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Berger, J. 1980.
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Animals were originally part of man's myths, and were at the center of his world. Animals and humans look at eachother through a "similar, but not identical, abyss of noncomprehension" (p. 252). A lack of common language will always guarantee distance. Animals represented meaning by due fact of their otherness- they were symbolic, representing the essence of certain human emotions and haracteristics. They were anthropomorphizes until the 19th century because of their proximity to man, a continuation of the animal metaphor. Since animals have dissapeared, anthropomorphism makes us uneasy.
Decartes was the first person to remove agency from the animal through the separation of the body and the soul- animals had no soul and therefore were machines. Instead of containing individualized essences, animals became reinvested as innocent as a proxy for historical nostagia. Animals became marginalized physically. Cities reduced animal populations, and eventually animals became treated as machines (labor) and then as inputs (meat) in an industrializing production system. Man was also reduced to a producing and consuming unit. At the same time, the boom of pets reflected the internalization and privatization of what was formerly the commons. However the one-directional relationship of pet ownership (the pet is a reflection of its owner, not the other way around) reduces any paralell life. Culturally, animals became turned into family life and into a spectacle, with animals always as the observed. As nature became romaniticized, animals represented an idealized version of a repressed desire to be natural and free. Public zoos became into existence in the late 1800's, as an extension of royal menageries. They were status symbols (menageries), symbols of prestige for cities, and endorsements of colonial power. However they claimed that they were to elevate the masses. Children receive animal imagery, and this is to some extent historically rooted. However kids animal toys were formerly symbolic and much less in number. Zoos now are places where kids are supposed to see real versions of stuffed animals and adults can regain innocence, but the animals don't live up to the expectations of either. This makes people wonder why zoos dissapoint. First, the animal is not there to connect with humans, it is living its life. However "it's life" is limited, reduced, and fundamentally marginalized. They are isolated and dependent. They offer the ability to look at an animal, but you can never look at an animal in a zoo because they have been neutralized of that central gaze by force of their living situation. Therefore that gaze between humans and animals is gone, zoos are an elegy to it, and therefore they will always disappoint. |
Why look at animals? In About looking. New York: Pantheon.
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Brownlow, A. 2000.
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Looks at the Adirondaks as a potential site of wolf reintroduction, arguing that restoration presupposes that there is an appropriate space for animals to be brought back in to since Adirondaks are not a national park (or wilderness). Looks at landscape meaning in Adirondaks since early 1800's. Argues that historical and cultural processes are imperative to understand if you are going to understan dwolf reintroduction today. First wave of settlers was pastoral, second wave was urban-driven recreation, and in second phase the wold lost it place in landscape and was replaced by more culturally acceptable and economically viable species (i.e. deer). Deer symbolized a tame-yet-wild landscape. Native population suffered extermination along with wolves. Establishingment of park forced extractive industry workers to move or work in the tourist industry. Conservation ideology has stayed constant, but has shifted from eliminating wolves to including them (irony).
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A wolf in the garden. In C. Philo and C. Wilbert eds., Animal spaces, beastly places: New geographies of human-animal relations. London: Routledge. 141-158.
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Collard, Rosemary-Claire 2012
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This paper explores how cougars and humans live together on Vancouver Island, Canada, a region home to what scientists estimate is the densest cougar population in North America and to one quarter of the continent's lethal and nonlethal cougar attacks in the last century. Drawing on biopolitical and spatial theory, I trace how safe space is made, maintained, and unmade and ask what the role of cougars has been in production of spaces and their imagined security. Discussion is informed foremost by stories of cougar^human encounters on Vancouver Island and then retold based on newspaper and archival research and semistructured interviews with island residents. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how nonhumans matter to the material ^ semiotic construction of safety and space. In particular, I examine attempts to discipline cougars in the name of biosecurity, how cougars discipline humans, and how cougars' bodies and behaviors have resisted and shaped spatial configurations. I argue that these contestations and enforcements are biopolitical. My empiri- cal research supports recent theoretical arguments by geographers and actor-network theorists regarding spaceönamely, that space is produced within network formations of which cougars, in this case, are key actors. My analyses suggest that the biothreat cougars and humans pose to each other precludes the formation of ethics through encounter and that conservation strategies must account for cougars' spatial requirements.
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Cougar - human entanglements and the biopolitical un/making of safe space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 30: 23-42
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Desmond, J. C. (1999).
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"From Shamu the dancing whale at Sea World to Hawaiian lu'au shows, Staging Tourism analyzes issues of performance in a wide range of tourist venues. Jane C. Desmond argues that the public display of bodies—how they look, what they do, where they do it, who watches, and under what conditions—is profoundly important in structuring identity categories of race, gender, and cultural affiliation. These fantastic spectacles of corporeality form the basis of hugely profitable tourist industries, which in turn form crucial arenas of public culture where embodied notions of identity are sold, enacted, and debated.
Gathering together written accounts, postcards, photographs, advertisements, films, and oral histories as well as her own interpretations of these displays, Desmond gives us a vibrant account of U.S. tourism in Waikiki from 1900 to the present. She then juxtaposes cultural tourism with "animal tourism" in the United States, which takes place at zoos, aquariums, and animal theme parks. In each case, Desmond argues, the relationship between the viewer and the viewed is ultimately based on concepts of physical difference harking back to the nineteenth century." Topic: live performance and bodily display in tourism Introduction: Argument: Public displays of bodies structure identity and subjectivity and when commodified provide huge revenue source for tourism • Idea of “staging the natural”; absence of social political, and economic institutions; erases status quo, complications of co-mingling btwn different cultures, imperialism. Naturalize social relations. • “tourism is not just an aggregate of merely commercial activities; it is also an ideological framing of history, nature, tradition; a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needs.” (McCannell) Approach: multisited ethnography across tourism categories (cultural/ecotourism) Displays give the illusion that they are unmediated/authentic: semiotically, people become signs of themselves, and performers become signs of what audience thinks they are Becomes both sign and representation Potential objects of tourist gaze must be different that tourist- out of the ordinary Part I: Staging the Cultural Native Hawaiians as “ideal native”; gracious and welcoming, female, not black or white but brown 1900-1930: • Promoted natural place • First emergence of hapa-haole Hula girl • Increase in live performance: hula • Hawaii promoted as lush, tropical, timeless site of Hawaiians • Racial discourse grew out of colonialism: Hawaiians established as intellectually, morally, and physically superior to other non-European groups • Ignored actual demographics of Hawaii (i.e. immigration) • Hawaii portrayed as place of edenic transformation • Hawaiians portrayed as living in the past • Created temporal divide between Hawaiians and mainlanders • 1915-1930: Hapa-Haole hula girl; idealized native melding two bodies into one • Sexualization of natives- closer to nature, “naturally” more comfortable with sexuality • Heterosexual normalization • In typical tourist shows, complexities of who and what Hawaii is are lost • Hawaii positioned geographically as both extension of US and gateway to Orient • Late 1800’s- emergence of cultural tourism: contact with “authentic” and “natural” natives as an antidote to modern life • Teddy Roosevelt advocated outdoor life • Southwesters tourism set the stage • Postcards/photos must be distinctive (recognizable) and must stand in for place they represent • Early 1900’s- Hula shows sexualized on the mainland • Hawaii represented as timeless, not black but brown, sidestepping memories of slavery • Hula girl’s sexuality non-aggressive • “Nativizing”- temporary racial crossing using visual and performative cues • Hawaii as area of sensuous play for mainlanders; exotic but safe • p.136- HVB tourist statistics; salt of the earth, nest builders, achievers, attainers Part II: Staging the Natural • Both cultural tourism and nature tourism share colonial history; affirm visitor identity by showing them what they are not • Promises tourists chance to escape to another world from postmodernity • Understand through visual perception of bodily difference • Animals stand in for the rest of the natural • The opposite and double of conservation is exploitation- commodified nature while posing it as unccomodifiable (Williams) • Mammals are “interlocurs” living on human-animal border • Fascination w/animals based on difference and similarity with ourselves (Berger) • Animals as more embodied than us • People’s zoo behavior often about getting animal to move; provide a show • Bodies stand for wildness and uncontrollability, yet very demonstration is created in a human-centered framework Three types of species tourism: in-situ (ecotourism), in-fake-situ (zoos), out-of-situ (Marine World). Partial history of looking at animals (p. 154) • Zoo’s, circuses, carnivals, safari all precursors to modern wildlife tourism • Long history- i.e. Egypt 2500 BC; used similar big animals • To own the other is based on inherent hierarchy of power; with current conservation orientation, humans constructed as saviors for endangered species- entertainment as moral imperative • 16th century: Large private menageries • Collected animals from Africa • 1800’s: Private collections became open to public, means of civilizing lower classes, homogenize citizenship, reform urban places • Early 1900’s wanted to present freedom-in-captivity (Carl Hagenbeck): San Diego Zoo lion grotto- represented wildness- further hide power relationships • Categories of similarity and difference- • Marine mammals as most similar while often most different; water as temporarily overcomable barrier- faces anthropomorphic, flippers as hands Ecotourism • Ecotourism as ultimate in contextual realism: viewing and ideology turn animals into display, but all props are real. Seem to possess autonomy, but subjected to our gaze for our pleasure • Made decisions about what is worth looking at and worth time and effort • Most difficult to detect staging with ecotourism • Ecotourism • Cross from our world into there (geographically) • Must maintain boundary between humans and nature, but must also be able to cross it. Fantasy of seeing (and participating) without changing what we see. • Animals do have agency in short term (can leave or charge) but continued existence depends on our long-term interest in them (p.191). • Categorization of biology sanctions behaviors, as if neutral category. Marine World (lots of interesting stuff here, but not entirely on point) • Animals represented as fun, interesting, possessing individual personalities • Trainers represent dream of crossing human/species border- nostalgic prototype of Eden • “The implication is that all animals an humans could reflect this intimacy and trust if they got to know each other as well” (p.197) • Animals must be shown to be more like us to transcend bodily difference, whereas cultural tourism must be defined as different • Touching animals as putting humans and animals on the same side of the human-animal divide • “Anthropomorphism “as a cultural strategy for addressing relations between humans and the natural world…can allow animals to be addressed as social beings, and nature as a social realm” (Alexander Wilson)- means of eroding speciesism (Desmond aggress, but believes these shifting boundaries are motivated) • Goal is not to become animal (i.e. nativized)- need to maintain bodies to be able to cross boundaries Conclusion “This is the ultimate fantasy, that which would both remove for the white middle class the fears associated with contestory social eruptions by nonwhite, non-middle-class populations and simultaneously provide the reinvigoration associated with greater naturalism and natural expressivity ascribed by whites to others and the natural world as a model for cultural organization.” (p.256) The utopian fantasy of crossing boundaries while simultaneously maintaining them |
Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea Word, University of Chicago Press.
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Dwyer, J. (2007)
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The name is an obvious reference to Donna Haraway's essay, which looks at the reciprocity in human-dog relationships. She focuses on a 1-way relationship of non-reciprocal emotional attachment. She believes that treating wild animals as capabale of emotional reciprocity will result in negative consequences. She uses two texts- an Alison Baker book called "The Heaven of Animals" and the Hertzog documentary "Grizzy Man" to show the ways in which overriding non-reciprocity is challenging, though in Baker the protaganist resists interaction while Herzog's main character embraces it. She argues that we have to deny our childlike desire to be one with animals, and feel the pain of anthropomorphism.
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"A Non-companion Species Manifesto: Humans, Wild Animals, and "The Pain of Anthropomorphism"." South Atlantic Review 72(3).
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Emel, J. and J. Wolch (1998).
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Why have human-animal relationships become so important in social theory? What political and intellctual purposes are addressed by "the animal question"?
Part due to the "Animal Economy" - globalization and the world diet, economic development and habitat loss, the wild animal trade, and biotechnology In response, there has emerged a politic surrounding animals. Contested sites of animal activism, protecting wilderness and wildlife species, defense of individual animals and their rights. Criqtiues of modernity, esp feminist, multicultural, and postmodern, opened up the space for discussion. Animals now seen as "serious business". Decentering of the subject and debunking dualisms, and exposing modern myths of social progress (animals generally part of progress, rationality, and economic growth). Lack of indifference to animals also hallmark of movement. |
Witnessing the Animal Moment. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. J. Emel and J. Wolch. London, Verso Press.
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Emel, J., C. Wilbert and J. Wolch. 2002.
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(no abstract)
History of emergence of animal geography: (1) Cultural animal geography in 1960's- focus on domestication and distribution, role of animals in landscape, (2) Resurgence in 1990's, when human geog met cultural studies, social theory, and environmental ethics. Focus on role of animals in social construction of culture and how human animal divide shifts over space and time. Questions of subjectivity and agency- ANT argued that it was relations that created individuals, not differences between agents. Borderland studies of how animals and their networks imprint places. Domesticated animals and connection to specific places. Inclusion and exclusion of animals from certain places. Environmental ethics and rethinking moral landscape to include animals. |
Animal geographies. Society & Animals 10 (4): 407-412.
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Gullo, A., U. Lassiter, et al. (1998).
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Looks at how human ideas have been shaped by patterns of urbanization, science, and media coverage in Los Angeles. Both lions and suburbanites don't know how to co-exist and live together- "need to learn". Rasies question of how animals construct people. Modernity creates mediated experience of animals. Shows how media characterized the lions as having agency and therefore being undeserving of support; vicious "nature" leads to crime. Misconceptions on both sides- lions think people are safe, people think lions are dangerous. Ends by advocating that animals "adapt" through learning to stay away from people (being "hazed").
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The Cougar's Tale. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. J. Wolch and J. Emel. London. New York, Versa.
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Haraway, D. 2003.
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Haraway begins with rejecting biological and cultural determinism, arguing for the doing away with of dualisms, thus engendering her idea of significant otherness. She argues against treating dogs as a projection of ourselves, but rather "dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships" (p. 12). Her manifesto is about the way in which historical specificity, nature, and culture are manifested through significant otherness by companion species living together in the flesh. She employs the concept of "metaplasm", or the reworking or remolding codes of relating between dogs and humans. She advocates co-evolution and co-constituency, rather than the narcissistic idea that dogs have unconditional love. Unconditional llove is about "seeking to inhabit an inter-subjective world that is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship" (p. 34). She contrasts two dog trainers approaches- Garrett, who advocates positive firmness, and Hearne, who does not and is more military style. However Haraway believes that the two are connected insofar as "I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alterness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together". She believes that living as companion species eliminates our ability to engage in puritanical critique of history.
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Companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
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Hobson, K. (2007).
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This paper is positioned within on-going debates about the expansion and re-theorization of political geography’s ambit. It argues that animals could and should be included as subjects within sub-disciplinary research. Whilst political ecologists regularly employ animal conservation case studies to detail the com- plexities of struggles over resource distributions, this work often frames animals as static components of a thoroughly human sociality. This paper draws on conceptual debates within cultural geography, in par- ticular those pertaining to ‘animal’ and ‘hybrid’ geographies. It argues that animals be viewed as dynamic beings, inextricable to political processes, and integral to the formation and operation of the political net- works that regulate, protect and exploit them. This assertion is elaborated here through discussions of re- cent campaigns to end bear bile farming in East Asia, in particular, the work of the Hong Kong-based charity Animals Asia Foundation. This example aims to illuminate the potential strengths and limitations of arguing through a ‘hybrid geography’ lens, and aims to stimulate further debate around the standing of animals within an enlarged and enlarging political geography.
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"Political animals? On animals as subjects in an enlarged political geography." Political Geography 26: 250-267.
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Ingold, Tim. 2000.
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Chapter four focuses on the history of human-animal relations and shift from hunting and gathering to pastoralism. Relationships of hunter-prey are based on trust, constituted by autonomy and dependency. Human-animal relationship under pastoralism is characterized by domination. Transition from hunting to pastoralism is not about changing identity of animal (from wild to domestic) but of human-animal relationship (from trust to dominance).
Argues that both hunter-gatherers and pastoralists "make" (produce) things. The difference is that pastoralists create the conditions for the development of plants and animals rather than capitalizing on naturally existing conditions for growth. Compares Western biologists and indigenous hunters accounts of caribou behavior during predation. Argues that both cut out nature and culture as objects of attention. Western approach does this through scientifica authority, while indigenous hunters do this through culturally specific cosmology. Uses a framework by Gregory Bateson, which reconciles mind/nature dichotomy where "the mind opens out into the world in a process of revelation". This is compared to Levi-Strauss' approach where the mind recovers information through a process of decoding. Argues that people are given "clues" to meaning, rather than codes. Sensory education, such as that of the hunter, is guided by these clues and deemed "sentient ecology". Focuses on art, arguing that for hunter-gatherers it is not a way of elevating above life, but rather digging in deeper to significance of life that is there. Compares aboriginal cultures and Northern cultures, showing that they represent totemic (morpological) and animic (movement and behavior) ways of understanding the human-animal relationship. Argues that they are not "art" as it is created today as an object to be produced, but rather historically situated ways of understanding the world. Argues that the depiction of the earth as a globe divorces humanity from the lifeword because it shows that earth surrounds us rather than us surrounding it. Conservation ethic puts nature on the inside and humanity on the outside, universalizing the nuance of the local. He prefers the idea of a transparent sphere perceived from within, consistent with indigenous cultures. While this is anthropocentric, it does not counterpose people and nature, or local and global. He argues that the globe disempowers local communities from caring for their own environments. |
The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skills. Routledge. 13-26, 61-76.
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Isenberg, A. C. (2002).
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Wildlife within boundaries of parks was an afterthought- in the 20th century realized that wilderness became authentic with addition of wildlife. Emotional regard for wild animals distinctly 20th cen phenomenon. Goes on to discuss the history of the wolf, asserting that its reintroduction in certain places in the 1990's was a reflection of a new moral order, belief in the inherent structure of ecosystems managed by wildlife. Argues that in the 19th century wilderness ideology, humans and natural was unbridgeable but in 20th century, Americans believed they could bridge that gap.
This essay provides a good history of the situatedness of the animal welfare movement and the human relationship with both domesticated and wild species. In taking on Leopold, he shows that his land ethic was not something innate, but rather something he realized through his professional position in the Dept. of Game Mgmt at UW Madison. Chronicles the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, and he cautions that the reintroduction presumes a that the wolves will stabilize the ecosystem. Ultimately, the values of wildlife continues to be what we ascribe to it. |
The Moral Ecology of Wildlife. Representing Animals. N. Rothfels, Indiana University Press.
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Lorimer, H. 2000.
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This paper considers how the concentrated pattern of private landownership in the Scottish Highlands can be understood in relation to the field sport of deerstalking. Focusing on devel- opments during the interwar years, it demonstrates how a series of connected representa- tional practices, embodied rituals and political strategies were deployed by the sporting and landed community in defence of this elite leisure activity. These power-laden strategies coalesced into a distinctive culture of nature, which, although in part a continuation of ten- dencies set in train during the nineteenth century, also embraced new rhetorics of nation- hood, ecological thought and landscape preservation. The paper demonstrates how humans, animals, technologies, science, localized history and popular memory were all drawn into deerstalking’s unequally weighted networks of association. Ultimately it asserts that the motif of custodianship and tradition commonly associated with modern sporting landownership in the Highlands was, and still is, used as an effective means to retain hegemonic control of the land resource.
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Guns, Game and the Grandee: The Cultural Politics of Deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands. Cultural Geographies 7 (4): 403-431.
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Lorimer, J. 2007.
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In this paper I outline the parameters of nonhuman charisma in the context of UK biodiversity conservation. Although conservationists frequently discuss charismatic species in their professional discourse there is little existing work that explores the character of this charisma and how it operates in environmental governance. In this paper I map nonhuman charisma and explore its ontological, ethical, and epistemological implications. I first illustrate a three-part typology of nonhuman charisma, comprising ecological, aesthetic, and corporeal charisma. Exploring nonhuman agency through the lens of charisma I contribute to ongoing efforts in geography and cognate disciplines to forge a `more-than-human' understanding of agency and ethics. Nonhuman charisma provides a bounded relational ontology for considering nonhuman difference. Furthermore, nonhuman charisma draws attention to the importance of affect in understanding environmental ethics. Affect provides the vital motivating force that impels people to get involved in conservation. Second, I provide an example of nonhuman charisma in action. I draw on earlier work on human charisma to explore how charismatic organisms, operating as `flagship species', are mobilised as boundary objects to achieve organisation order in the assemblages of UK biodiversity conservation.
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Nonhuman charisma. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (3): 911-932.
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Lulka, D. (2002).
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Supported by scientific modes of representation, wildlife-management agencies commonly adopt policies that subordinate nonhuman species and resubstantiate human ^ nonhuman hierarchies. In this paper I illustrate the inadequacy of current management policies by drawing upon Deleuzian notions of immanence and movement and applying them to the specific case of Yellowstone bison. Modes of representation that define nonhuman ontology in terms of genetics are shown to be inadequate for they separate essence from experience and facilitate the removal and exclusion of nonhumans. In contrast, a Deleuzian theory of wildlife accentuates the importance of movement, contact, and contingency in the constitution of nonhuman ontology, thus outlining an approach that can also lead to a revision of human^nonhuman relations. In particular, movement provides a physical mechanism to bridge the theoretical gap that separates human from nonhuman, and suggests a means to link together ethical and evolutionary concerns regarding nonhumans. With the distinc- tions between Deleuzian theory and common wildlife-management practices in mind, the paradigm of sustainability is criticized for prioritizing demographic and genetic stability over spatial transgression, thereby minimizing the developmental capacities of nonhumans and legitimizing existing spatial structures of exclusion and control.
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"Stabilizing the herd: fixing the identity of nonhumans." Environment and Planning D 22: 439-463.
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Lynn, W.S. 1998.
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If the moral status of animals is so clear, why am I bothering with this topic? The reason is that, like shunk-Tokecha, geographers and other scholars across the academy are taking a second (and clear-eyed) look at animals and animal ethics. As a consequence of our inquiries, we are remapping the moral landscape of animal-human relations, revealing a diverse world of ethically relevant non-human beings. Moral value is the keystone concept for remapping this world and locating animals in our moral landscape. My intention in this chapter is to centre our attention on the subject of moral value, and present a geographically informed argument on the moral status of animals. This avowedly normative project is indispensable, for it holds the key to reconfiguring how humans (including geographers) understand and relate to the animal world.
The chapter begins with a brief discussion of “geoethics”, a geographically informed theory of moral understanding that positions context at the centre of our moral concerns. Geoethics’ contextual emphasis on geographical being and community serves as the starting point for our exploration of moral value. Next, I examine anthropocentric and non- anthropocentric value paradigms (including one I call geocentrism) to explain the case for including animals in our moral community. I conclude with a set of principles to help guide our thought and action toward the animal world. Geoethics can help us actualize solidarity by providing principles directed at animal-human relations. So I conclude this chapter with four principles -- geocentrism, equal consideration, hard cases, and moral carrying capacity. 1. Principle of Geocentrism -- Recognize the moral value of animals, humans, and the rest of nature. 2. Principle of Equal Consideration -- Give equal consideration to the well-being of all creatures affected by our actions.34 3. Principle of Hard Cases -- When faced with hard cases pitting animals against humans, solve the problem, look for alternatives, or choose a geographic compromise that defends the well-being of animals. 4. Principle of Moral Carrying Capacity -- Humans should live within a carrying capacity that preserves the integrity of the entire geographical community. |
Animals, ethics and geography. In Animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands, edited by J. Wolch and J. Emel, 280-297. London: Verso.
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Nollman, Jim.
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Humanistic take on human-cetacean interactions that focuses on the "charged border" where notions of desires and motivations for interactions exist. Looks at why different groups of people relate differently to cetaceans (whalers, "mystics", biologists, etc).
Ch2: Whale Nature and Human Nature: Begins with Nollman watching tourists watch whales in Japan, where dolphin killing currently takes place. Cultural change from economic persepctive to ecological perspective. Good summary of taxonomy of centaceans. Basic separation between mysticetes (blowholes, baleen. Tend to be large, and all large whales near extinction. Include humpbacks, blues, right whales, bowheads, pygmy). Odontocetes (toothes whales, hunters, single blowhole, include orcas, dolphins, porpoises, belugas, sperm whales. Big brains, band together into pods, echolocate). Contact: sperm whales and other toothed whales do not flee our advance. Swimemrs interact with them, many argue not just entertainment or intellectual curiosity- argue that charged border is where natural and cultural bring about supernatural. Many studies that show that people "heal" when swimming with dolphins, though mainstream observers argue that sick patients are simply distracted form pain. Also virtual dolphin swims help due to "dolphin healing energy" (David Cole, AquaThought). The charged border is a "luminous crack between worldviews" (p62), where many people have same expereince byt take away very different meanings. Scientists often reject cetacean awareness as purely anthropomorphic, instinuating that only humans can be self-aware. Ch5: When Nature is Larger than Life Focuses on his experience in Barrow (1988), where 3 gray whales were struck in an icehole near Beaufort Sea. Whalers once say gray whales as devil fish, particular vulnerable to whaling due to their regular migrations. Makah still hunt them, but Inupiat don't (they hunt a few bowheads). Huge expense of time and money (US Army, NGO's etc) turning into journalism circus wanting a narrative of rescue. US president supports huge effort but wont oppose Petty Amendment against scientific whaling. When he stares at whales, he knows that he cannot see into and beyond the eye. NOAA people force him to play whale sounds first, but he evetually lures them out using Ladysmith Black Mamabazo (though the baby dies). Ch8: Getting into the Groove Focuses on Ocananda, an orca research camp that is also a kids wildlife camp. Experiment with playing music and whale vocalization. Parents often presume that whales will eb attracted to kids, which is a naieve view of charged border as peaceful kingdom. More conceptual art- doesn't always work and takes a long time and long term commitment. Often seen as non-rational and non-scientific, and there is an unproven hypothesis that people who are in the groove do the best at communicating. Species barrier removed when performer and audience relationship eliminated. Argues that indigenous groups have been talking and signing with animals for a long time. Gets annoyed with research that harasses whales- subject/object paradox that he tries to overcome. Discussion of sonic pollution. |
The charged border: Where whales and humans meet. Henry Holt and Company. (43-67, 119-50, 205-32)
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Price, Jennifer.
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Jennifer Price looks at how Americans define what is and is not nature, and why we need to do so to make sense of modern culture. She argues that create a nature out there to escape the environmental degredation inherent in American consumer culture. She chronicles the following:
(1) the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Colonists originally thought of them as eternally abundant resources, and hunting was an American right that brought together rural communities. That said, it was not a vital economic resource- the tie was expendable. The Seneca did not kill adult birds, and pigeon hunting was a core activity in the culture as a whole. In the 1870's as the railways expanded, hunters traveled to piegon hunt and hired locals to help facilitate their objectives. They shipped the pigeons to cities for consumption, and live birds to sporting clubs for trap shooting. They became about man and money and power, and ultimately became scarcer. Became fetishized in the city. This represented the disconnection between the species and the demand due to the increase in economic and geographic networks. (2) The bird hat craze and the women's movement to stop it. Brought about the Lacey Act in 1900, prohibited interstate shipmet of wild species killed in violation of state laws. One of the first hug conservation shifts was by urban Audobon Society women who associated bird killing with non-moral womanly behavior and social causes as "national housekeeping". Men, the pragmatists, were excused from examining their moral character. Much of this unraveled in the early 1900's when the boundaries between mens and womens roles stated to dissolve. (3) Pink Flamingos. Only North American species was made extinct in Florida. Originally emerged as the suburbs became more accessible to the working class, and was seen as bad taste by the Hudson landscape school of lawn decoration which was supposed to be "natural" (but of course was groomed and simply tried to erase the hand of man). Pink flamingos represented (1) Florida, which was becoming in the 1950's an increasingly accessible due to higher standards of living and (2) Plastics, which represented modernity. Also, it was pink! Represented the boundary between nature and artifice, but the struggle was so ridiculous that it eventually became co-opted by baby boomers and gay groups who used it as a symbol of being subversive or ironic. (4) Looking for Nature at the Mall (see Cronon) (5) Skimmed. Uses concept of "reality" Argues that TV's appropriation of nature capitalizes on the desire to have it all- mass consumption and an escape for mass consumption. One does not negate the desire for the other. |
Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America
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Robbins, P. 2006.
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Critical researchers of underdevelopment have established a well-known record celebrating the environmental knowledges of sub- sistence communities in contested wildlife conservation zones. Similar battles are being fought over science, uncertainty, and wild animals in the American west, however, with far less attention to local epistemologies. Often dismissed as ‘‘barstool biology’’, the ecological knowledges of local hunters in the Northern Yellowstone ecosystem are rooted in environmental experience and situated politics. How does local hunter knowledge diverge or converge with that of state officials, environmentalists, ranchers, and other constituencies, and to what effect on wildlife management policy? This paper seeks to answer that question, reviewing recent research amongst local resource users, managers, and activists in Montana. By rendering empirical the question of local knowledge around AmericaÕs oldest national park, rather than trying to ‘‘read it off’’ political affiliation, education, or livelihood, a clearer pic- ture of power, knowledge, and conservation emerges. The results suggest that emerging management policies have developed from the discursive alliance of landowners, outfitters, and environmentalists, shifting priorities towards enclosure and exclusion in wildlife at the expense of other silent constituencies.
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“The Politics of Barstool Biology: Environmental Knowledge and Power in Greater Northern Yellowstone” Geoforum. 37: 185-199.
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Robbins, P. and A. Luginbuhl 2005.
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(no "true" abstract)
This study examines the efforts to privatize public wildlife in the U.S., pointing to both institutional and physical efforts at enclosure. Reviewing these efforts in the context of the changing political economy of the rural U.S. West, and with specific reference to the elk economy in the state of Montana, the study shows the way in which nature and labor resist efforts at enclosure. The combination of a rising inci- dence of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and an increasingly well-organized anti- privatization movement points to general contradictions in capitalism’s encounter with nature. A complex confluence of eco-managerial bureaucratic interests, gun populism, and virulent infection has created a barrier that is highly resistant to efforts to privatize wildlife. |
“The Last Enclosure: Resisting Privatization of Wildlife in the Western United States,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 16(1): 45-61.
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Shepard, Paul. 1996.
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"In this provocative, illuminating volume, Shepard examines the role of animals in human history from the Pleistocene to the present. He argues that anthropomorphism binds our connection to the rest of the natural world. Noting that narratives in which animals are protagonists occur in all kinds of societies and in different forms at all stages of life, Shepard (Thinking Animals) analyzes fairy tales (child), folktales (juvenile) and myths (adult), concluding that the last is the most revealing source of information about how people relate to the nonhuman world. He reviews the sources of biblical natural history and parable, and he discusses the "nightmare of domestication." Shepard argues that the benefits to other species of being domestic are fictitious; they are merely slaves. Additional topics include animals in language, the cult of the cow and the rise of pastoralism, augury and the biblical zoo." (Publishers Weekly)
"Paul Howe Shepard, Jr. (June 12, 1925 – July 27, 1996) was an American environmentalist and author best known for introducing the "Pleistocene paradigm" to deep ecology. His works have attempted to establish a normative framework in terms of evolutionary theory and developmental psychology. He offers a critique of sedentism/civilization and advocates modeling human lifestyles on those of nomadic prehistoric humans. He explores the connections between domestication, language, and cognition. Based on his early study of modern ethnographic literature examining contemporary nature-based peoples, Shepard created a developmental model for understanding the role of sustained contact with nature in healthy human psychological development, positing that humans, having spent 99% of their social history in hunting and gathering environments, are therefore evolutionarily dependent on nature for proper emotional and psychological growth and development. Drawing from ideas of neoteny, Shepard postulated that many humans in post-agricultural society are often not fully mature, but are trapped in infantilism or an adolescent state." (Wikipedia) ""The Others" traces the roles animals have played in the evolutionary and cultural development of human societies. The book considers many aspects of this role, including ecology, mythology, domestication, hunting, conservation, and evolutionary. One recurring theme in the discussion of these different roles is the shift that has occurred in societies where contact with wild animals is significantly reduced. Shepard argues that this reduction leads to an abandonment of metaphorical roles for wild animals (e.g. stories about what an animal is like, based on direct knowledge of, and interaction with, the wild) to metonymical roles (e.g. stories where animals serve as referents for unrelated ideas). The core ideas Shepard keeps returning to are that our experiences with animals give us the raw material for constructing and understanding our own identities and cultures. While Shepard is perhaps at his most passionate when discussing the paucity of the city-dwelling, pet-owning, modern's relationship to animals, the book's analytical strength is on display during his analysis of three specific cultural groups (the Lele, Nuer, and Fipa tribes) whose lifeways (hunting/gathering, pastoral, and farming/trade) are reflected in their relationship with domesticated and wild animals. He goes further to examine how these animal relationships (i.e. herding cattle, driving off herbivores, etc) relate to the construction of individual and group identity and cosmology." (Stuart Anderson) |
The others: How animals made us human. Washington, DC: Island Press.
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Tuan, Y.F. 2007 [1984].
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YFT is "father of humanistic geography". Influenced by phenomenology, made place central to human geography. Concerned with mistreatment of nature, esp. when it appears playful (i.e. waterfountains, banzai, pets, etc.)
Starts w/stroy of domestication of goldfish (esp. well documented). Domestication means domination. Domestication is altering genetic composition through breeding. One way of establishing dominance was to reduce size, which helps managability and control. Dog as embodiement of relationships he wants to emplore- self-sacrificity devotion (affection) and temptation to wield power (dominance). Dogs can be bred to arbitrary standard without damage to their health. Dog training as dominance. Highly sentimentalized view of animals caused by distance from them. Easy to be affectionate to animals that are playthings. History of deep bonds between animals and people. |
Animal pets: cruelty and affection. In The animals reader: the essential classic and contemporary writings, edited by L. Kalof and A. Fitzgerald, 141- 153. Oxford: Berg.
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Whatmore, S. (2000).
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In this paper we explore tensions between the notions and spaces of social agency mobilised in actant network theory and feminist science studies by focusing on their implications for the status and treatment of nonhuman animals, in this case the African elephant. The notion of a spatial formation of wildlife exchange (SFWE) is deployed to trace the diverse modalities and spatialities of social networks in which such creatures are caught up and the ways in which these practical orderings work through the bodies of elephants, both in the sense of their energies being variously transduced and of their experiences being reconfigured in the process. These themes are pursued through two contemporary global networks of wildlife conservation/science. The first, characterised as a mode of ordering of foresight, is a network concerned with `captive breeding' and configured through the coding and exchange of computerised information on the lineages and breeding properties of animals held in zoological collections worldwide. The second, characterised as a mode of ordering of authenticity, is a network concerned with `in-situ' conservation projects and configured through the recruitment of paying volunteers, corporate donors, and field scientists to a global programme of research expeditions. Our account traces three simultaneous moments in the patterning of elephants in each networköas virtual bodies, as bodies in place, and as living spaces.
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"Elephants on the move: spatial formations of wildlife exchange." Environment and Planning D 18: 185-203.
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Wilson, Robert M.
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Wilson is consistent with other environmental historians and historical geographers in that he attempts to break down the conceptual barriers between nature and culture, arguing that all landscapes were and continue to be modified by humans, while natural forces find their way into human engineered landscapes. He rejects the "fall from eden" narrative, instead telling a story about "protecting wild nature in working landscapes." A second theme is the intersection between species (namely birds) and their tendency to not stay within the boundaries set for them.
This book chronicles the history of the Central Valley refuges and 3 other North American "flyways" during the 20th century, with a focus on FWS. Flyways are distinct because they are small, relative to other types of reserves, and very closely connected to the activities (largely agircultural) on their borders. However he shows how the reserves were produced, not protected, for changing goals as time went on. Originally, FWS produced waterfowl for hunters, who were the intended consumers, though things have changed to (allegedly) protect biodiversity. Many reserves were created using wastewater. The fragmentation of government agencies charged with conservation also negatively effected conservation goals. In the conclusion, he advocated that federal refuges need senior water rights, and environmentalists strategies should be sensitive to rural concerns. He advocates that the "tattered and frayed" flyways receive more attention and concern. |
Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway. Seattle: University of
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Wolfe, C. 2003. (Intro)
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Focus:
Decentering human and vision from privileged place Cultural studies assumes that the subject is already human. Debates of racism, classism, etc. are stuck in speciesism; discrimination based on generic Science continues to show that other species harbor what were previously thought to be only human characteristic Current politics takes for granted and reproduces a discourse that reproduces the institution of speciesism Embodied in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents: to be human is “organic repression”- different at the origin, and humans do their best to balance human biology and second order relations. Being and Nothingness and Foucault’s Discipline and Punshiments: the figure also tied to being human. Prioritizes the “look” as a means of transcending the situated individual. Should expand to multiple senses and not only human. Nagel: Phenomelogical differences make animal a good site for exploring philosophy of difference and otherness. Hearne: Animals trust other senses than just vision (smell, kinesthetic) Cavell: Traditional humanist subject finds prospect of animal knowing us simply unnerving, domesticated pets. Are we ready to leg go of the dream of mastery? Current cultural studies and theory post-humanist, insofar as humans bound up in technology and informational networks. Animal part of posthumanism, but animal has historical pervasiveness unlike the cyborg Derrida: Must mark other humans as animal Burden of speciesism falls on animals First, must recognize the taken-for-grantedness of speciesism, and know that posthumanism isn’t about liking animals. Morrison: Human freedom base in material condition of control over nonhuman others? If structure of subjectivization is taken for granted, discourse will be applied to all kinds of others. Overarching logic of domination. Animal rights discourse remains humanist (Singer utilitarianism, Regan Kantianism) Disengage from postmodern puliarism, and take seriously embodiement because human never was purely itself Conclusion: Does not provide foundation for more humane treatment of animals However, argues that we should be non-discriminatory with regards to species However, while overdue to draw a larger boundary of moral equality to animals "like us", problem is that we are basing rights on humanism that is the problem in the first place. Appreciates that animal rights arguements are socially and politically practical, but inadequate for post-humanist philosophy ANimal rights projects use "residual" models, relics. What's harder is to consider that we share world with nonhumans and are also animal ourselves Animal rights are part of larger issue of non-human modes of being and are inseparable form broader challenge of posthumanism Maintaining commitment to posthumanism enhances understanding of embeddedness of of the human in its others or opposites Posthumanism has implication for ethics: Bauman says that postmodernism which represents "demise of ethical" and replacement of ethics with aesthetics, also opens up questions closed by enlightenment era modernity and rejects modern ways of going about moral problems. Moral phenomenon are non-rational, and non universalizable. Moral unity is unthinkable because the self preceeds the other. Animal ethics- mostmodern ethics reject reciprocity and contractualism because they are calculable actions. Bauman: reciprocity ignores that we becomes I only by glossing over I's multidimensionality (e.g. Deluze becoming animal, Derrida the animal that therefore I am, Haraways situated subject). Anyways uneqaul because other conceptualized along familiar lines of needing our help. But Bauman becomes not so useful when he argues that moral conscience is the domain of a certain type of subject. Bauman- ability to reciprocate crucial to membership in moral community, but isn't supremenly moral act (such as to animals) not expecting of reciprocity? Also Bauman is not postmodern insofar as he sees morality as rooted in what humans are. Advoctes for moralization of politics (!) Wolfe thinks this is a big problem- Baumans Postmodern Ethics assumes that there is some untainted space of subjective interiority where someone can critique codes and roles and ethics without being bound by them. This God's-eye Standpoint (Rorty) has been discredited. Derrida critiques it in his reading of Husserl's Speech and Phenomena Clearer sense through Luhmann: all observations based on system codes, which are based on paradoxical or tautological distinction. Cant acknowledge paradox while carrying out reproduction of self. Luhman- one cannot see what they cannot see. Luhman is to Baumann is sociology as Derida is to Levina on philisophy. Luhman and Derrida- "there" is the outside of the inside. Or "I am human before I think". |
Introduction and Conclusion of Animal rites: American culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Woods, M. 2000.
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In this essay, Woods chronicles the representation of the fox by different interest groups in the context of the Bateson Bill and foxhunting debate. He argues that because the debate occurs in the courtroom, rather than in the fields, and therefore foxes must be represented and hence divorced from the representative object. But sinces foxes cannot represent themselves, they hence become silenced. He brings in ANT at the end and attributes agency to foxes, thereby fending off criticism that representations and what is being represented are two wholly separate things.
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Fantastic Mr Fox? Representing animals in the hunting debate. In Animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations, edited by C. Philo and C. Wilbert, 182-202. London: Routledge.
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Bear, C. and S. Eden (2011).
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This paper investigates how recreational anglers make sense of, and engage with, fish behaviour over space and time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted around rivers in Yorkshire, UK, it explores how anglers differently categorise and differentiate between fish through their fishing practices. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal, and attentive to Haraway's concerns for ``beings-in-encounter'', the paper examines angling as a transformative practice whereby anglers and fish adapt through their coconstitutive encounters. While anglers often attempt to `think like a fish' when deciding on their tactics, we demonstrate their ambiguous classification of `fish' on the basis of species, size, and rhythm. Their attempts to become-fish are not always, therefore, with Haraway's ``actual animals'' but with complex groupings. The paper argues that studies should be more attentive to the heterogeneity of the categories of human and nonhuman. It is also critical of assumptions that certain animals, such as fish, are alien to humans and calls for greater attention to be paid to these and to the nonairy spaces in which they dwell.
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"Thinking like a fish? Engaging with nonhuman difference through recreational angling." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 336-352.
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Davis, Susan G.
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Explores Sea World as it is presented in its theme parks, with respect to the dominant arguments about human relationships with nature. Themes of touch and contact are large. Presents itself as a distilled perfect world. Exotic and remote but accessible. Urges you to make contact with another world, both external world of animals and internal world of emotions and feelings. Rational pleasure, self-selection. Animals in Berger never look back, hence the distancing and discomfort of zoos, but they look back at Sea World. What relationship is being promised?
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"Touch the Magic". Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
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