Notes & Commentary
On Multispecies Mythology: A Critique of Animal Anthropology
Theory, Culture & Society 2016, Vol. 33(5) 159–172 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276416637128 tcs.sagepub.com
Matthew C. Watson Mount Holyoke College
Abstract This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity’s seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g. geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environmental consciousness, economic prosperity, public understanding of science). I reconsider the cultural function of multispecies research through two moves. First, I read Thom van Dooren’s Theory, Culture & Society article on ‘Authentic Crows’ as such a quasi-allegorical account. Second, I develop how animal anthropology captures the contemporary mythos in an ‘affirmationist’ register that counters the pessimistic affect of late industrialism. Ultimately, the critical politics of such research may be redeemed through efforts to work closely with scientists and to render explicit the accounts’ situatedness within late-industrial mythology. Keywords affect, affirmationism, late industrialism, multispecies ethnography, mythology
Introduction In The Story of Lynx, Claude Le´vi-Strauss (1995) likens interpreting myth to playing a game. Chess serves as an apt analog. As the chess player may complete a series of well-rehearsed opening moves, the scientific analyst of myth covers the known before arriving at the unknown. But The Story of Lynx doesn’t present a simple summation of established knowledge of Amerindian myth, a ‘literature review’ as we say. In place of pawns’ advances, Le´vi-Strauss performs a new reckoning of old accounts, an introduction of his company: Lynx, Raven, Coyote, Owl, Goat. The scientist doesn’t play alone. Authorship may be solitary, but it Corresponding author: Matthew C. Watson. Email:
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isn’t solitaire. Le´vi-Strauss could take scholarly predecessors or peers as opponents. Instead, he says, ‘We play against myths, and we should not think that myths, coming to us from very far away in time or in space, can only offer us already-played-out games’ (Le´vi-Strauss, 1995: xii, emphasis added). The scientist must take on each myth, becoming reconstructed as she or he reduces the opponent piece by piece. Here I argue that the turn to the animal in much multispecies anthropology and philosophy is, in part, a return to mythology. In representing and affirming animal lifeworlds, recent scholars find themselves playing across the board from the apocalyptic mythos of a global public reeling from the failed promises and abandoned dreams of 20th-century modernity (geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environmental consciousness, economic prosperity, public understanding of science, etc.). This mythos takes shape through collective imagination – and fear – of climate change and industrial-environmental devastation. We have adopted animals as mythemes. The pawns, knights, and rooks are crows, elephants, and meerkats. They’re easy pieces to play with. They’ve long performed mythological roles, and they rarely talk back to their handlers. Adopting animals as analytical and narrative resources functions to defer anxiety about futures haunted by industrial ruination. Facing the planetary trauma of environmental destruction, we cultivate human hope by giving narrative form to the survival of endangered animal others. Populations of animals become objects through which we structure a contemporary ‘ambience’ (Morton, 2007) that affirms the persistence of human life. Casting animals as semiotic resources for a mythos of survival thus becomes legible as a form of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011). Animal anthropology is, in part, a means for those of us in the human sciences to cope with the brute and brutal facts of catastrophic global changes that may precipitate human extinction. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has passed the ‘tipping point’ of 400 parts per million. Mythologies are narrativized systems of attitudes and values that make such facts culturally, politically, and ethically sensible. As Bruno Latour (2014) incisively observes, ‘To state the fact and ring the bell is one and the same thing’. The articulated scientific fact may serve as a political call to action as well as a normative moral claim about how to live. Just take a look at NASA’s website on climate change. It’s titled ‘Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet’. Vital signs. A page of scientists’ quotations reveals the mythemic potency of the sick planet as a structuring paradigm (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2015): We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the double-black diamond run without having learned to ski first. It will be a bumpy ride. (Gavin Schmidt) Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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Scary scorecard: catastrophic climate change 400, humanity zero. Listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game. (William Patzert) We’ve put the planet on a high-carb diet for over a century. Time to get lean and go green. (Josh Willis) These quotations offer extraordinary evidence for the culturalmythological generativity of the fact and value that we abbreviate as ‘400 ppm’. Schmidt offers an odd mix of hyperbolic metaphor and understatement, as if he conceived the skiing analogy but couldn’t stomach uttering that the ride will, in fact, be deadly. Patzert brings readers to catastrophe in a sports analogy with politics in its midst, making the intrinsically political nature of scientific knowledge more palatable through metaphor. Finally, Willis fashions the earth as fat, as an overeater. It’s no stretch to say that we are to imagine here the fat American. He reconstructs environmental consciousness as health consciousness, as a diet. Vital signs. When pessimism begins to take hold, we resort to metaphor, even humor: ‘The Earth is flat-lining! Get the semiotician, stat!’ Contributors to the multispecies literature resort to similar generative cultural metaphors. Indeed, examples of multispecies ethnography recently published in Theory, Culture & Society arguably exhibit substantive allegorical tendencies, rather than simply discrete metaphors (e.g. Candea, 2013; Tsing, 2014; Van Dooren, 2016). These articles may not be representative of broader trends within animal studies. But they figure clearly within a rather-coherent ‘posthumanist’ body of literature that challenges the epistemic privileging of anthropology’s ostensible subject, the human (see also Kirksey, 2014; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Paxson, 2008; Raffles, 2010).1 In response to the pessimistic apprehension that we’ve ruined the present and negated a human future, that the end of history has arrived not as the end of economic history but as the end of natural history, recent authors in and around anthropology have seized the animal as a narrative resource. There is, of course, nothing ethically dubious or politically reactionary about the construction of animal metaphors and allegories. Any glance at Le´vi-Strauss’s mythological analyses reveals their power and pervasiveness. Such stories are, quite evidently, interpretive and political. Indeed, their interpretive function closely resembles what Clifford Geertz (1972) identifies as the cultural significance of the Balinese cockfight: to interpret and comment on Balinese experiences of status inequality. Like the cockfight, much animal anthropology is (a) not entirely about nonhuman animals and (b) not clearly designed to alter status hierarchies, including interspecies hierarchies perceived from the subject positions of privileged academic humans.
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This would be unobjectionable, were it not for the fact that the appeal to radicalized ethnographic empiricism in much animal anthropology may obscure the literature’s politics. Extending the aesthetic discourse of ethnographic description beyond ethnos and anthropos to animal others appears to have the political correlate of extending the polis across species boundaries. We offer aesthetic representation to animals today with the promise of political representation tomorrow. But this is an empty campaign promise. For better or worse, ethnographers do not control our parliaments today. Moreover, their construction of animals as objects of ethnographic knowledge often appears rather dubious. Were its metaphoricity more clearly acknowledged, were the purveyors of such multispecies accounts to follow Geertz’s Balinese informants in stating explicitly that the cockfight is a kind of theater, its political intervention might be redeemed. But this move would require such authors to acknowledge that their work mobilizes animal lifeworlds into a mythological work of mourning for the human future. It would, in other words, require these authors to recognize how their animal anthropology is, at times at least, rather anthropocentric. And, I would add, that such anthropocentrism is OK. To develop this claim, I present a short analysis of a recent example of this literature published in Theory, Culture & Society, Thom van Dooren’s (2016) ‘Authentic Crows: Identity, Captivity and Emergent Forms of Life’. While refraining from formal mythological analysis of the essay’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures, I explore how it appropriates an animal lifeworld as a conceptual resource for surpassing the ‘ruined’ human present. The reading evidences how narrative mobilization of animals enables such authors to express subtle anxieties about human futures within an apparently posthumanist and ‘affirmationist’ (Noys, 2010) register. Van Dooren’s article is not necessarily representative of all multispecies ethnography, but it shares clear narrative and epistemic practices with the broader literature. In a post-critical intellectual atmosphere, animal anthropologists invigorate forms of positivity or optimism. In turn, some scientists have picked up the cutting edge of critique and risked slicing the fact-value divide to pieces. Latour (2014) tells us that the Anthropocene’s gift to anthropology is a human repositioned in the geohistorical center. It’s a gift that we cannot accept. We must accept it.
Van Dooren’s Crows In ‘Authentic Crows’, Van Dooren (2016) examines the potential release of culturally significant captive crows (‘alala) in Hawaii. These crows draw Van Dooren’s interest because the species is apparently extinct in the ‘wild’. The remaining species representatives exist in captivity, a condition that has manifest consequences for the animals’ behaviors. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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The conservationists responsible for the animals seem to express concerns about the behavioral ‘authenticity’ of crows bred in captivity. Although he provides limited ethnographic evidence, Van Dooren suggests that the conservationists adopt rather essentialist understandings of proper crow behavior. The main conceit of the article is that extending a performative theoretical vocabulary to crow forms of life will help humans to redesign conservation efforts in ways that are more responsive to the crows themselves. Van Dooren aims to interrogate notions of authenticity and identity with respect to the socialization of crows in terms that enable them to reproduce their non-captive ancestors’ behavioral practices. Here we have a human observer drawing on the rhetoric of posthumanist animal studies as he swoops into a scene of human efforts to conserve, cultivate, and restore an endangered species of crows. Although he acknowledges a diversity of views within the conservation community, he challenges their general emphasis of stasis and continuity. He questions how we might open a space – a ‘polite’ conversation (Despret, 2006) – for crows to help determine what counts as both identity and conservation, asking, ‘what might it mean to do conservation in a way that takes seriously what matters to the “conserved”, in a way that provides these others with the space and the resources to craft their own vital new forms of life for this era of incredible anthropogenic change and biodiversity loss’ (Van Dooren, 2016: 31)? I suggest that the article counters the conservationists’ ostensible naı¨ ve species essentialism and their implicit failure to open such a space by reconstructing the crow as a generic placeholder for dynamism, becoming, and emergence. It takes form as a figuration of the very possibility of adaptation – biological or cultural. In the implicit slippage from biological to cultural adaptation, the crow becomes a paradigm for the possibilities of collective life in the late industrial West. It does so in an optimistic register that assigns intrinsic value to transformation. It appeals to the performative against the constative, to becoming against being, and – for that matter – to the syntagmatic against the paradigmatic. Such valorization of dynamism performs the cultural function of invigorating optimism for human futures in an era in which possibilities for hope within the human collective perpetually fail, arriving at various ‘impasses’ (Berlant, 2011). If late industrialism, as a collective sensibility, establishes despair, loneliness, nostalgia, pessimism, and futurelessness as definitive sentiments of its affective field, radical politics falters. The crow becomes a particularly effective placeholder for invigorating optimism because it shares with humans an extraordinary capacity for learning and a dependency on parental care and socialization (Van Dooren, 2016: 32). It is a highly dynamic species, an ‘intelligent generalist’ (p. 39). Hoping for the recovery of an endangered crow against the backdrop of a ruined modernity may well inspire us to think about methods for invigorating economic Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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prosperity or ameliorating environmental destruction. At the same time, it displaces attention to such ends onto a population of captive crows experiencing something analogous to what was once termed ‘culture loss’ in the anthropological literature. The strongest claim in Van Dooren’s essay is that released birds’ behavioral divergence from non-captive predecessors helps to challenge notions of species essence and authenticity. He argues against a ‘problematic essentialism about species identity’ (Van Dooren, 2016: 36) or ‘strongly essentialist notions of species’ (p. 37) in favor of a concept of species heavily oriented to (dynamic) behavioral practices, thus rendering taxonomic and cultural differences more comparable. The site of crow captivity is a particularly fecund metaphorical resource for achieving this end because it is a discrete contact zone between crows and humans. Indeed, I suggest that captivity amounts to a space where a controlled ritual of co-becoming can be staged and witnessed: ‘the captive breeding facility is a site of condensed co-becoming, of enhanced and intensified inheritance – which is always a process of simultaneous “carrying forward” and “leaving behind”’ (Van Dooren, 2016: 43). The facility becomes a model enabling readers to imagine, at once, crow and human futures. So the rehabilitation of ‘alala becomes legible as one allegorical expression of hope for human dynamism against the ruination of modern progress narratives. Accounts such as Van Dooren’s are differentially viable affirmationist successors to critical theoretical perspectives such as Marxism and poststructuralism. Although I do not discount the significant efforts to extend such theories to interspecies relations within posthumanist and critical animal studies, the anthropological turn to the animal makes class struggle considerably harder to conceptualize. As animals’ experiences seem to exist outside the matrices of power, desire, and signification that obsessed French thinkers of the 1970s, they challenge the form of poststructural analytics. The untimely turn to Deleuze in the last decade may be indicative of a shared contemporary sense that non- or post-critical elements of poststructuralism continue to inspire while the movement’s expansive contestation of the violences of modern and postmodern (human) subject formations appear to have lost their relevance. A Deleuzian system of attitudes foregrounds becoming as an ontological practice. Within this epistemic culture, Van Dooren’s crows serve as model organisms for ‘becoming-other’. If birds could learn to live anew, couldn’t we? Van Dooren projects a theoretical attachment to dynamism onto the species, valuing change over continuity without a particularly developed examination of this opposition. But I think that the essay’s allegorical moments may suggest a strategy for identifying the broader merit of such projects. I’m asking, in other words, for more developed allegory. Van Dooren doesn’t quite make the leap to an allegorical account that clearly Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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plays against contemporary apocalypticism. It would, perhaps, be a dangerous leap with respect to the presiding politics of the humanities and contemporary theory. Haraway (2008), though a master of mythology herself, chides Derrida (2008) for reducing an encounter with his cat to a simple provocation to explore the problem of animality in a metaphysical register (cf. Shukin, 2009; Walther, 2014). But perhaps multispecies anthropology frustrates not because it maps human anxieties onto animals, but because this transposition is too partial and incomplete. Van Dooren emphasizes throughout the article that interested researchers’ questions should be ‘centered on the practical labour of learning to be part of the constitution of flourishing forms of crowness’ (Van Dooren, 2016: 41). He even claims that, ‘as crows around the world move into cities and learn new ways of life, they conduct experiments in emergent forms of crow-ness’ (p. 38). This valorization of crow adaptability would strike many readers as an evocation of contemporary human experiences of mobility and migration. The phrasing, particularly the notion that crows ‘move into cities’, would probably read to many ecologists as odd. It becomes more sensible if we read it as an anthropomorphic trope. Although we may think of crows as urbandwelling avians, I assume that the political and geographical concept of the city is foreign to the crow ‘umwelt’ (Von Uexku¨ll, 2010 [1934]). We could articulate a comparison, but crows, unlike humans, do not simply ‘move into cities’. As humans move into cities, they certainly learn and experiment with new ways of life. But one could even question whether humans actually ‘conduct experiments’. In its echo of scientific experimentation, this phrasing calls to mind the partial rootedness of multispecies anthropology in science and technology studies (STS). One major insight of STS is that the kinds of experiments conducted by scientists are not unique to scientists, that other humans regularly engage in practices that would become recognizable as scientific experimentation if resituated within the institutions of science (e.g. Harding, 2008). Van Dooren’s phrasing seems to extend this democratization of experimental practice beyond the human, as if crows constructed themselves as objects of knowledge and could achieve self-reflection vis-a`-vis their novel forms of urban life. I remain unconvinced that such quasi-allegorical renderings of crow lifeways necessarily open for readers a clear pathway into the crow umwelt and, therefore, a corollary capacity to challenge human exceptionalism. They may risk reaffirming human exceptionalism by implicitly constructing the animal other in terms of the human self. Not only is the crow a dynamic learner, it has ‘a fluid identity’ (p. 45). Under conditions of captivity, the birds may have a diminished vocal repertoire, leading Van Dooren to speculate that they may ‘have less to talk about’ (p. 33). Such turns of phrase suggest that the rhetorical force of Van Dooren’s essay may issue in part from its implicit anthropomorphism. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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Biologists are by no means final authorities on how to describe animal experiences and umwelten, and they no doubt utilize anthropomorphic rhetoric as well. But I maintain that multispecies ethnographers have methodological and politico-ethical obligations to engage with biologist experts. This does not mean that animal anthropology must become a kind of science writing, translating scientific insights for a general public. It affirms a growing contact zone between the biological and human sciences. But those of us in the human sciences must be willing to take seriously the statements that biological scientists make about their objects of knowledge. Scientists’ representative acts should be subject to democratic checks (Latour, 2004; Watson, 2011), but this means that they merit rather direct political representation. To analyze (and help produce) today’s mythologies, scholarly and political spokespersons need to engage the sciences thoroughly, openly, and sincerely. Van Dooren (2014) models such willingness to engage both conservationists and biologists in his book Flight Ways. His use of critical theory to circumscribe the argument of ‘Authentic Crows’ exhibits a somewhat more cynical attitude towards scientists as well as an insufficiently elaborated claim that concepts from Continental theory, such as becoming and performativity, should guide efforts to vitalize crow futures. By presenting crows as dynamic animals, and rethinking the species concept – alongside Elizabeth Grosz (2004) and others – in quasiDeleuzian terms, crows may indeed become more ‘interesting’ (Despret, 2006; Van Dooren, 2016) to the animal anthropologist or environmental philosopher. But it risks disregarding the concepts of species – and of this particular species, or community of organisms – developed by local actors, conservationists, and biologists who are actively intervening into or seeking to circumvent this potential extinction event. This is an indicative problem, as the favored philosophical concepts of multispecies anthropology and posthumanist animal studies seem to substitute here for a substantive historical or ethnographic account of the history of crows’ forms of life in Hawaii. We see little of this history or, for that matter, the politics of conservation in Hawaii. But we may, instead, glimpse the anxiety of the ecological era morphing into a new ambiental politics. We may be realizing that living well with animals also means thinking well with animals.
Allegory and Affirmation The posthumanist positions held by some of today’s intellectual elite increasingly find themselves challenged by renovated variants of critique. Among the most compelling challenges emerges in Benjamin Noys’ (2010) book, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Through sequential readings of Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou, The Persistence of the Negative maps the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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consequences of the rise of metaphysical thinking as the dominant form of politics in 1970s French thought. The embrace of metaphysics among those forged by May 1968 gave rise to an ontological politics whose practitioners aimed to contest capitalist formations from within by radicalizing capitalism’s logic and form. Noys identifies Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983 [1972]), Libidinal Economy (Lyotard, 1993 [1974]), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976]) as main texts defining this tendency. He asserts that: These texts all display their authors’ formation by currents of the ultra-left, and each tries to outdo the other in terms of their radicalism. In particular they reply to Marx’s contention that ‘[t]he real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’, by arguing that we must crash through this barrier by turning capitalism against itself. They are an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. (Noys, 2010: 5; emphasis in original) This political-metaphysical brinksmanship (politique du pire) did not simply give rise to the analysis of capitalism as an economy of desire, an analysis now firmly attached to the vindication of Deleuze and Guattari. It also established a claim that capitalism has no viable outside, no outside that might threaten the dominant economic formation’s structural integrity (and this is crucial to reading Deleuze and Guattari). The intellectual left’s only political hope was that radicalizing forces of capitalist production would undo capitalism itself, that the destruction of ‘creative destruction’ would become so total as to necessitate creativity in non-capitalist forms. Noys designates this position ‘accelerationism’, a term closely associated with the quasi-Deleuzian work of philosopher Nick Land (e.g. 2011). Accelerationism shares ostensible antipathy to critique with a broader field of contemporary thought, which Noys and others label ‘affirmationism’. The key defining characteristic of affirmationist thought, from Spinoza through Nietzche through Deleuze, is an immanentist refusal to appeal to a transcendent exteriority (Agamben, 1999; Noys, 2010). The accelerationism of Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard simply presents one variety of affirmationism, an effort to remake Marxist critique in psychoanalytic terms to spur dissolution of the reigning capitalist singularity. But affirmationism, more broadly, covers contemporary work outside philosophy, including much research within posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, new materialism, the environmental humanities, and affect theory. The allegory indulged in the multispecies accounts like Van Dooren’s appears rather affirmationist. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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Crows function as mythemes for optimism within a futurist mythological imagination of apocalypse. This engagement with winged others reveals how environmental affirmationism must be cautious about adopting a fully accelerationist politics. The appeal of accounts that ‘democratize’ the ethnographic object, bringing other animals into our anthropological purview as actors, issues from knowledge that contemporary industrial and post-industrial economies threaten diverse species. A fully accelerationist futurism could necessitate complicity with, or at least ambivalence towards, the extinction of vulnerable species. The accelerationist imaginary is thus anthropocentric (and largely inattentive to intrahuman structures of privilege and marginality). For those sensitive to how other beings enrich the world and merit conservation efforts by humans in positions of interspecies structural power – animal anthropologists as 21st-century salvage ethnographers – complicity with the ‘mass extinction event’ (Van Dooren, 2014: 5–6) now under way becomes an unthinkable form of violence. Such a position should obligate multispecies and environmental thinkers to either attenuate or work to render explicit the mythological functions of their accounts. We do need to construct novel techniques of care, techniques that nuance conservation efforts – and other common worlds in the making – by responding, respectfully, to animals’ emergent forms of life. Efforts to broaden what counts as ethnography’s object of knowledge and to adopt experimental writing practices (e.g. Tsing, 2014) may well bolster such efforts. But they also risk anthropomorphic reductionism. Does Van Dooren’s characterization of crows as experimental animals read as a democratization of creativity, an effort to take seriously crows’ experiences of flourishing? Or does it impose the vocabulary of a performative and immanentist philosophy of becoming onto a form of life extrinsic to the concerns of the Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze lineage that designed such metaphysics? Haraway (2008) extends such immanentist analytics to other-thanhuman worlds in an absorbing and compelling style. But her success here does not arise out of the apparent relevance of such frameworks for animal others. It issues largely from her epistemic openness, including her willingness to take seriously the knowledge claims of scientists themselves. The magic of so-called ‘posthumanist’ engagements with animals is their capacity to ‘compost’ (as Haraway has come to say) theory, scientists’ accounts, and experiences with animals. Allowing traces of philosophy, science, conservation, and animal experience to rot together may produce fecund humus for vitalizing new forms of representation, care, and cohabitation. Many earlier science studies accounts (including, at times, my own) have tended to drown out scientists’ voices with metacritical frameworks delivered by megaphone (Latour, 2004; cf. Watson, 2014a: 144–5). Much environmental humanism and multispecies ethnography continues this tricky and troubling legacy through the implicit Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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assumption that Continental philosophy holds onto-epistemological privilege vis-a`-vis science. In Van Dooren’s article, the crows’ imputed experimentalism begins to occlude the conservationists’ and scientists’ experiments. The crows become mythemic humans in avian attire. This differs from his accounts in Flight Ways, particularly his highly sympathetic engagement with human conservationists who literally adorn themselves in whooping crane costumes (Van Dooren, 2014: 87–122). It would be easy here to condemn multispecies ethnographers as false prophets, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their apparent posthumanism is a furry fac¸ade; they are so bound by critical theory that they launder it through animal allegory to construct a mythology for humans who’ve resigned themselves to the Anthropocene epoch (geologists’ terminological caution notwithstanding). Animals now subjected to the ethnographic gaze are beasts burdened – though they don’t know it, and don’t care – by privileged humans anxious about their species’ contaminated or obliterated future. It is in this sense that much emerging multispecies ethnography amounts to the literary transposition of post-industrial environmental anguish onto animal others who speak in the tongue of Wittgenstein’s (1967) lion. As animal anthropology defers despair, it becomes cruel optimism. It becomes the fantasy of self-care, the pretense that we might surpass the impasse, the hope for a more vital future despite the scorecard that reads ‘climate change 400, humanity zero’. Such stories are affirmationist alternatives, some more groping than others, to the critical pessimism of life lived in impasse after impasse, which is to say in ruins.
Final Thoughts This reading introduces an irony that demands response. An ethnography opened to animals appears, at first glance, to be a kind of immanentist empiricism. Much of the work of Haraway, Latour, and other contemporary systems thinkers merits such designation. But once the accounts lose their empirical footing and indulge speculation about animal interiorities, they tend to pass from the lineage of philosophical immanance to that of philosophical transcendence, which Agamben (1999) traces from Kant through Derrida and Levinas. An addition to this genealogy obviously relevant here would be Le´vi-Strauss. As opposed to the successor projects of neuroscience and neurophilosophy, Le´vi-Strauss’s science of mythology arguably appealed to a mental noumenon potentially accessible through rational deduction rather than empirical induction. It is my claim that signs of animals have become literary vehicles for multispecies ethnographers to help mythologize matters of post-industrial concern. The line between constructing and analyzing mythologies is fuzzy, and necessarily so. Nevertheless, I ask that we cultivate, in our own epistemic and literary practices, a bit more Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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sensitivity to when we are constructing mythologies and when we are analyzing them. We must allow ourselves to be transformed by mythologies as we traverse them. Speaking for animals without speaking to their scientist companions, whom I regard as mythological spokespersons, is one version of today’s intellectualist, and ultimately highly-aestheticized, politique du pire. There exist alternatives to such aestheticism. For example, in How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn (2013) endeavors to rethink life itself as a semiotic field. Kohn’s argument begins from an elaboration of Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1931) triadic typology of signs: icons, indices, and symbols. In short, an icon signifies by virtue of resemblance to its referent, an index signifies by virtue of contiguity with its referent, and a symbol signifies by virtue of its designation as an arbitrary substitute for its referent within a language and speech community. These types of signs exist within a nested hierarchy. Symbols emerge out of relations among indices and indices emerge out of relations among icons. Where human communication has recourse to a rich symbolic repertoire, most worldly signification takes place solely on iconic and indexical levels. For example, natural selection involves iconicity; camouflage is a form of morphological iconicity, as an organism that resembles other elements of its ecosystem may avoid predation. Perhaps the subaltern animal cannot speak, but it can signify nonetheless (cf. Watson, 2011, 2014b). The privileging of speech and the symbolic in a cosmopolitan ‘multinatural’ (Viveiros de Castro, 1998) world is part of the interspecies structure of power that normalizes politico-ethical indifference towards other life forms. For Kohn, the multispecies accounts seem to offer little hope for contesting power structures. He challenges what I identify as the allegorical qualities of the multispecies literature: ‘we celebrate the fact that . . . horizontal processes – lateral gene transfer, symbiosis, commensalism, and the like – can be found in the nonhuman living world. I believe this is the wrong way to ground politics. Morality, like the symbolic, emerges within – not beyond – the human’ (Kohn, 2013: 19). The assumption that the living world beyond the human collective may model for us a more just politics and morality is, as Kohn puts it, an ‘anthropocentric narcissism’, a narcissism that may obscure our non-symbolic modes of relating to other worldly beings. But I would add that, at its best, animal anthropology begins to play against today’s rich, if troubling, mythologies. And a world bereft of mythology is a world bereft of imagination, science, and wonder. Note 1. Scholars within ‘critical animal studies’ have developed poignant responses to the mobilization of animals for humanist allegorical ends (e.g. Best, 2009; Meighoo, 2014; Weisberg, 2009, 2014). I approach these issues not as an animal studies scholar but as an anthropologist concerned with problems Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
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of scientific and historical knowledge production. I use the term ‘animal anthropology’ here to designate the vibrant subset of anthropological studies designed to decenter the human through multispecies affirmation rather than semiotic critique. Although it is clearly indebted to the work of posthumanist animal studies scholars such as Cary Wolfe (e.g. 2003), this literature addresses an anthropological public distinct from the communities of scholarly practice within animal studies.
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Matthew C. Watson is a Visiting Lecturer of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. He has published on cosmopolitics and the history of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment in Theory, Culture & Society, Social Studies of Science, American Anthropologist, Cultural Critique, and The Journal of Social Archaeology. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE LIBRARY on August 8, 2016
