Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters

Claire Parkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367785291
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515255
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book critically investigates the pervasiveness of anthropomorphised animals in popular culture.

Anthropomorphism in popular visual media has long been denounced for being unsophisticated or emotionally manipulative. It is often criticised for over-expressing similarities between humans and other animals. This book focuses on everyday encounters with visual representations of anthropomorphised animals and considers how attributing other animals with humanlike qualities speaks to a complex set of power relations. Through a series of case studies, it explores how anthropomorphism is produced and circulated and proposes that it can serve to create both misunderstandings and empathetic connections between humans and other animals.

This book will appeal to academics and students interested in visual media, animal studies, sociology and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Anthropomorphism is ubiquitous in western popular culture. In general, anthropomorphism refers to the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, ‘animal’ or object, and it is the second of these categories – ‘animal’ – which is arguably the most contentious. Such is its prevalence that anthropomorphism shapes ideas about nonhuman animals more than any other aspect of their popular representation. Yet, despite their undeniable and enduring popularity, anthropomorphised animals are considered a problem. The overexpression of similitude between humans and other animals has become synonymous with Disney and a set of representational practices apparent in popular culture that reduce other species to simple feathered, furred and scaled human analogues. Anthropomorphised animals are, so the argument might go, subsumed into a human social logic where their commodification, especially for a family audience, is predicated on the erasure of their individual complexity and species difference. In its pejorative sense, anthropomorphism remains to some extent weighed down with associations to childishness, a lack of objectivity and sentimentality.

Concerns about anthropocentric conceit motivate valid criticisms of anthropomorphism, when it serves only, or primarily, human interests. Kari Weil observes that ‘as a process of identification, the urge to anthropomorphize the experience of another, like the urge to empathize with that experience, risks becoming a form of narcissistic projection that erases boundaries of difference’ (Weil, 2012: 19). Weil draws attention to the importance of difference in critical discussions about anthropomorphism. The stakes are high, and in humanising animals we risk losing sight of them as beings in their own right, with individual experiences and capacities that are quite different from our own. But there are also good reasons to be critical of the rejection of anthropomorphism where it is also motivated by anthropocentric concerns that sustain oppression, exploitation and suffering. As Richard Ryder remarks, ‘The words “anthropomorphism” and “sentimentality”, both widely used in twentieth century Britain to disparage those who treated nonhuman animals in ways considered to be only appropriate to humans, were unheard in this context until after Darwin’s day’. He goes on to ask, ‘Is it too fanciful to suggest that they were the animal exploiter’s defences against the logical implications of Darwinism?’ (Ryder, 1989: 164). Why should it be that the use of animals as human proxies in biomedical research is not considered anthropomorphic, yet challenges to such practices on the basis that those individual beings are sentient and suffer can be dismissed as sentimental anthropomorphism? Ryder’s question throws anthropomorphism into the centre of the politics of human-animal relations. It also raises a further question about what anthropomorphism has the potential to do for nonhuman animals. In this sense, anthropomorphism is a disruptive force, a capacity for imaginative appreciation of another’s perspective; it opens the opportunity for cross-species intersubjectivity, and it can play a role in the development of empathetic relationships with other animals. Studies which suggest that anthropomorphism is linked to pro-environmental behaviours (Tam, 2015; Waytz et al., 2010) and that a tendency to anthropomorphise is related to lowered meat consumption and increased concern for the welfare of animals (Niemyjska et al., 2018) would seem to support the contention that anthropomorphism has a role to play in expanding effective forms of human concern for the wellbeing of other animals. At the core of this book is the claim that anthropomorphised animals in popular culture are highly significant within the politics of human-animal relations and intervene in discourses that shape the practices which govern the material lives of species other than humans. Crucially, anthropomorphism in popular culture engages both human empathy for and misunderstanding of other animals.

Mediation and media

The term anthropomorphism is derived from the Greek anthrōpos (human) and morphē (form). Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, it referred to the practices of attributing deities with humanlike characteristics or bodily form. By the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropomorphism had come to be regarded, in a pejorative sense, as the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to other animals. The widespread rejection of anthropomorphism within western science and ‘serious’ art exposed various fracture points in humanism that assembled around the threat to the unified rational subject conceived of in terms of human exceptionalism. Anthropomorphism, in other words, can be a troubling irritant to ideas of human uniqueness. Allied with this, the feminisation of emotion and sentiment, the hierarchisation of knowledges that dismissed forms of animism as primitive and anti-enlightenment, and ambivalence towards popular culture also played a role in the legitimacy afforded to non-anthropomorphic ways of thinking about, seeing and representing animals and their experiences. If we scratch at the surface of the historical regulation of anthropomorphism, we find that it has been closely managed for more than a century by anthropocentric ideas and racialised and gendered systems of thought. Despite such endeavours, anthropomorphism has not been expunged from our contemporary lives. On the contrary, anthropomorphism and its equally problematic (for some) accomplice, sentimentalism, are alive and well and circulating in abundance throughout systems of cultural production.

This book is primarily concerned with anthropomorphism as it relates to mediated encounters with other animals. With the focus on popular culture, I use the term ‘mediated encounter’ to signal not only the emotional appeals and audience reception of nonhuman animal representations but also the processes and practices by which individual sentient beings are produced as anthropomorphic, commodified narrative agents. This means that, at times, I give space to discussions of the industrial and cultural practices and conventions involved in creating film, television, social media content, advertising and so forth and the discourses that shape the mediated encounter. I do this because it is vital that we acknowledge not only the potential for stories to mobilise empathy and misunderstandings about other animals, but to also recognise that those narratives are constructed through practices and processes that involve real animals. This in turn raises ethical questions about their treatment within systems of cultural production and the asymmetries of power that are involved.

By thinking about the mediated encounter, I move away from a concern with representations of other animals as having only or mainly symbolic value in service to our understanding of human identity. Instead, I take the mediated encounter as the meeting point between the institutional, social and industrial practices and processes that reshape nonhuman animals into commodified narrative agents, the affective dimensions and emotional appeals that are involved and the reception of such encounters by human audiences. In the human-to-human communication of popular culture, mediation is an act that brings ‘the animal’ into a human world. Mediation in this sense is inevitably anthropomorphic, and it is the constellation of conditions and relations that relate to it which concern the substantive focus of this book.

The mediated encounter does not exclude embodied encounters. Filming, photographing or otherwise recording another animal involves a material encounter between humans, technologies and a nonhuman animal subject, and across the book I discuss anthropomorphism in relation to this wider understanding of mediation as process. At the same time, it is crucial to point out that the direct embodied and mediated encounter differ and to acknowledge that while they are relational (in that the material encounter is reshaped by and as the mediated encounter), they are not interchangeable. Cultural production and consumption encompass myriad situated practices that are entangled but, at the risk of overstating the obvious, the embodied ‘real-life’ encounter with another animal is qualitatively and materially different to a mediated encounter via a screen with that same individual animal. This should not be taken to imply that we arrive at the embodied encounter without some form of mediating knowledge or setting; the spaces in which we encounter animals are always highly organised and their meanings managed. I start from the position that the processes of mediation are always situated, privilege certain senses, viewpoints, knowledges and ideologies and rely on specific institutionalised practices, strategies of engagement and systems of meaning. Nor does this approach imply that we are not embodied sensorial subjects when we engage with onscreen media. On the contrary, as Vivien Sobchack contends, when we ‘watch’ onscreen media, we do not experience it only through our eyes, we ‘see and comprehend and feel […] with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium’ (Sobchack, 2004: 63). This then prompts the question, how does mediation specific to the cultural production and circulation of anthropomorphic animal stories and images shape our encounters with other species?

To answer this question, my approach is informed by the shift in media studies towards understanding cultural production and consumption as situated practices, a form of ‘radical contextualisation’ (Ang, 1996) that moves beyond ‘the text’ – the individual film, programme, image and so forth – to a thick context that encompasses practices of production, aspects of reception and affect, the text and its entanglements with other narratives, technologies and cultural forms (Spitulnik, 2010). Within media studies, such an approach commonly focuses on media entanglements in the lives of people where media is seen primarily in terms of human production, distribution, circulation and consumption (Spitulnik, 2010: 105; Merskin, 2016: 16). As such there has been a blind spot when it comes to animals even though species other than humans are central to so much popular media content. In recent years, animal studies and critical animal studies (CAS) have found disciplinary alliances within film, media, communications and cultural studies such that there has been a greater scholarly focus on nonhuman animals and the development of a discrete sub-field: ‘critical animal and media studies’ (Almiron and Cole, 2016). It is nonetheless the case that ‘animals’ remain a specialist field of interest within the larger disciplines and where they do figure as central in scholarly work, differences in approach reflect varying levels of concern with their treatment and the role of media in sustaining normative views and attitudes about animal issues.

Almiron and Cole contrast animal studies with critical animal studies approaches in media and communications scholarship, arguing that the former holds a more mainstream position that although acknowledging the central importance of nonhuman animals does not challenge their oppression, while the latter position aligns strongly with an anti-speciesist praxis (Almiron and Cole, 2016: 3). Crucially, the obligations of critical animal and media studies push to the foreground questions of the relation between cultural representations and the material conditions of actual animals (Molloy, 2011; Merskin, 2016: 19). Such an impetus can drive academic enquiry to look at connected systems and practices and the messy configurations that develop via social, industrial, cultural and economic discursive formations (Molloy, 2011). To these ends, in its aims to address issues of oppression, domination, control and power, critical animal studies finds an intellectual ally in the political economy of communication and the wider concerns of Critical Theory, cultural studies and critical media studies. For this reason, the convergence between critical animal studies and critical media studies, Almiron and Cole suggest, was inevitable (Almiron and Cole, 2016: 2).

Informed by critical animal studies, I look to popular media forms to ask if and how anthropomorphism can be utilised effectively to mobilise empathy for other animals. As Almiron and Cole point out, to claim a critical animal studies position is to demarcate a specific set of intentions and motivations. The anti-speciesist praxis that they propose is usefully summarised by Nik Taylor and Richard Twine (2015: 2) as ‘concerned with the nexus of activism, academia and animal suffering and maltreatment. […] CAS takes a normative stance against animal exploitation and so “critical” also denotes a stance against an anthropocentric status-quo in human-animal relations’. A CAS approach then shapes the intent to untangle anthropomorphism as a form of anthropocentric projection and its rejection where it is underpinned by anthropocentric interests that sustain animal exploitation from anthropomorphism as an affective and effective means of mobilising empathy. In doing so I pay attention to ways in which gendered norms come to inform our understanding of other animals and where they are deployed to deny, reduce or erase the experiences of real animals. In this regard, I acknowledge the extent to which pejorative meanings ascribed to anthropomorphism have relied on dualisms such as the feminisation of emotion opposed with a masculinised discourse of scientific objectivity which has distanced itself from associations with ‘primitive’ animism.

Despite the problematisation of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge by feminist scholars (Haraway, 1988, 1989, 1991), discourses of science continue to haunt our understanding and critiques of anthropomorphism. Much of the twentieth century was characterised by the authority of scientific knowledge production, capitalism and humanism within a mutually informing discursive formation that has been, in large part, predicated upon differentiating humanness from animality to privilege human progress. A consequence of maintaining difference between humans and other animals has been to deny the validity of anthropomorphic practices and thereby render it a casualty of the politics of human-animal difference. Shifts in thinking about animals, similitude and difference occur across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and as a result discourses correspondingly flex and alter according to knowledge conditions, revising and redacting the story of human-animal relations and anthropomorphism. These revisions change the ways in which we can meaningfully represent other species and talk about our relations with them. In this regard, then, where I turn my attention to instances of anthropomorphism, I am interested in reading them not simply as media representations of anthropomorphic animals but as social and cultural practices of making other animals ‘like us’, with all the complications that that entails.

The expanded context approach taken here understands anthropomorphism as situated and culturally contingent, but in adopting a ‘wide-angle lens on media’ (Spitulnik, 2010) the thorny question of how the object of study is delimited becomes all the more urgent. Expanded approaches can move in multiple directions, and the ubiquity of mediated encounters with anthropomorphised animals presents a further problem in terms of narrowing the field, and within that lurks another issue, that of the homogenising category of ‘animal’.¹ To address these issues, I take a thematic approach to anthropomorphism generally with Chapters 3 through 6, being concerned with different ideological boundaries between humans and other animals that have informed western critiques of anthropomorphic practice. Chapter 3 deals with seeing and the relationship between human sensory hierarchies and ethical concerns; Chapter 4 explores emotion; Chapter 5 looks at language; and Chapter 6 focuses on the thinking mind. The cultural contingency of these ideological boundaries and the situated practices that they frame as anthropomorphic delimit the scope of this study to western media.²

‘Animal’, as a category, homogenises a massive diversity of life and beings, and in attending to anthropomorphism as a situated practice it has been necessary to be selective in the number and range of case studies. Chapter 3 explores the mediation of animal experience through a study of praying mantises, conceived here as a limit case to test out the arbitrary ethical lines that humans draw in relation to our concern for other species. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which emotion is ascribed or not in particular instances of photography, social media, news and advertising to free-roaming (wild), companion (pet) and farmed animals through case studies of kangaroos, dogs and cows. Chapter 5 turns to the topic of language in relation to aquatic mammals and dogs, looking at the cultural sites where science and fiction collide. Chapter 6 then examines nonhuman animal minds and how film and television communicate the capacities of sharks and orca for mental suffering. Anthropomorphic practices are diverse and not all animals are anthropomorphised in the same way. The aims here are therefore to move beyond thinking about a singular monolithic anthropomorphism and the arguments around category error or methodological validity, to acknowledge anthropomorphism’s entangled relations as a situated practice, and to explore its potential to contribute to the development of empathetic human relationships with other animals.

An affective/discursive approach

In one sense, there is a problem inherent in the aims I mention above, and that is that the discourses that continue to treat anthropomorphism as a methodological issue or category error also continue to shape, usually by some act of circumscription, the situated practices of anthropomorphism (Molloy, 2001). To examine anthropomorphism as a situated practice by an expanded approach necessarily involves acknowledging the discourses that shape its meaning in context. Where anthropomorphism is contested as a practice, we find sites where boundary maintenance between humans and other animals is negotiated within popular culture. These are spaces where the discontinuity discourse that views humans and other animals as absolutely distinct intervenes to ‘correct’ popular anthropomorphic interpretation (such as I discuss in Chapter 4). Often this will be in the form of media accounts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anthropomorphism, mediation and authority
• 3 When animals look
• 4 When animals feel
• 5 When animals speak
• 6 When animals think
• Index