Emotion, Place and Culture

Mick Smith, Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317144632
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in engagement with emotion and affect across a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with geographers among others making a significant contribution by examining the emotional intersections between people and places. Building on the achievements of Emotional Geographies (2005), the editors have brought together leading scholars such as Nigel Thrift, Alphonso Lingis and Frances Dyson as well as young, up and coming academics from a diverse range of disciplines to investigate feelings and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes. The book is divided into five sections covering the themes of remembering, understanding, mourning, belonging, and enchanting.

PART 1
Remembering

Chapter 1
Road Kill: Remembering What is Left in our Encounters with Other Animals

Mick Smith

The automobile might, in so many ways, be regarded as an avatar of modernity, a metallic manifestation and incarnation of this globally dominant social form (Smith 1998). Intimately involved in driving processes of urban change, mass production, commodification, and pollution it is also inseparable from ideals of private property, social distinction, mobility, and representations and feelings of personal freedom. And, as with modernity, the image of humanly controlled and managed power hides the constant emergence of unintended side-effects and risks. These are exemplified by the human deaths and injuries caused by vehicle ‘accidents’ but also by the daily toll exacted on wildlife and companion animals – the road kill literally flattened by passing automobiles.

The emotional aspects of these fatal contacts between driver/vehicle hybrids and the non-humans unfortunate enough to cross their paths are, however, rarely expressed or addressed directly in public, despite their devastating effects/affects. The ways in which these animal deaths touch, or apparently fail to touch, so many of our lives, and our evasive silences about our responses to, and responsibilities for, such impacts actually says much about our strained relations to those animal Others now permitted to share so little of ‘our’ world. It seems, in so many ways, that their suffering surpasses the limits of our sufferance: we simply cannot afford the time to care. It also speaks to the constant social re-creation and mediation of emotional (and ethical) distances, the management and control of which, however total, occasionally falters, ruptures, and fails in the face of these supposedly unavoidable collisions between inexplicably different beings and worlds. The ethical task of an emotional phenomenology of such events is to find words that might express and convey something of these incommensurable experiences, the fleeting contact, the slight swerve, marking the end of animal experience and, perhaps, also the permanent loss of a familiar(s) face. Such words are necessary not in order to rationalize these events, or to explain them away, but to release otherwise suppressed concerns about the consequences of that project of world rationalization, that indefensible denial of emotional involvement in non-human nature, and that ‘forgetfulness of Being’ under the aegis of technology, that Heidegger deems so characteristic of modernity (Smith 2001, 23–53). Indeed Heidegger’s phenomenology, so attentive to moods, mortality, language, the question concerning technology, and so problematic in terms of the differences he presumes between human and animal existence in the ‘world’ offers a way to approach the complex inter-weavings of these issues.

Ground Zero

Rounding the last corner before home two vehicles had stopped, parked awkwardly on the opposite side of the road, one a few yards behind the other. On the asphalt to the left of the first I saw the dark shape of the cat lying on her side, stretched full length. After turning on the hazard lights I walked towards her; only a young cat, breathing quick short adrenalin breaths but unable to move. She looked almost untouched; hardly any blood. It must have been a glancing blow, just a split second too soon, or too late.

The driver ‘responsible’ hadn’t even stopped but these otherwise unconnected people had. One had found the tabby’s owner who now ran from her neighbour’s front door. As she ran she called the cat’s name in a panicked howl, tearing the surrounding air in disbelief and terrible realization, a quivering expression of a crumbling world of lost attachments. It can’t be, don’t let it be, let it be alright; the hopeful/hopeless plea to recompose the world as it had been only moments before. She was followed by her distraught son. I got up and stepped back. ‘I can drive her to the vets.’ She didn’t seem to hear me, oblivious to all but immediate concerns, but the son did. Almost accusingly he blurted out ‘She’s a he.’ What could a stranger know of his cat, of anything that might matter now?

The cat was part lifted and slid onto an old board furnished from the second driver’s truck. He was placed in the back of the owner’s car, still breathing, I think. Owner, son, cat, and car drove off at speed towards the veterinary surgery 5 kilometres away, leaving us behind. We spoke only briefly about what had happened. We had cats too. ‘I don’t understand why people let their cats outdoors’, she said, ‘its bound to happen’.

And so it seems. I don’t know, but hardly dare hope, that this cat, whose name I heard but have now forgotten, still lives. I could never bring myself to stop again at the house and ask, and now they have sold-up and moved. But I know for certain that the small white cat we saw and spoke to just months later was to die a hundred metres further down this same road; that the farmer three doors further down had lost almost every one of his many cats in the same way; that the porcupine we saw cross the grass a few feet from our window in March, or one identical in size, died the very next day; that the fox we watched at play in the neighbours garden too would end up mangled in the ditch. And then there are the chipmunks, the snakes, the deer, the squirrels, the snipe that make such eerie, endearing, whirring sounds in their descending flight, and on, and on. Each of these deaths may connect with many others as abandoned young die in nests, forms, and burrows, slowly starving. Then there are the cadavers we never see, picked over and removed by coyote and crow. And this is just one stretch of road in rural Eastern Ontario less than a kilometre long, and not even a busy stretch.

I have seen deer, beaver, muskrats, hare, gophers and coyote too; turtles their shells squashed and split almost beyond recognition: Once a massacre on a quiet country back-road where someone had driven straight through a flock of birds leaving many dead. Another time a mother and young racoon lying just a few feet apart. I can only think she had ventured out to the body of her young and suffered the same fate, perhaps from the very next car. They lay there for days gradually being ground formless into the pavement. A snake writhing frantically in the air, its tail squashed into the road surface. On yet another occasion a pigeon hit at a busy junction and with broken wing flapping was flattened by a second vehicle that could easily have avoided it. Of course these animals aren’t companion animals and our encounters with other animals – even whether we recognize them as individual animals worthy of concern – depends so much on classifying them according to an effective history/geography of previous encounters (Jones 2000; Smith 2005). The estimated 41 million squirrels killed per annum in the United States and 15 million racoons may not have the emotional resonance accorded to at least some of those 26 million cats and 6 million dogs that share their ‘fate’.1 For many they are all ‘pests’. But then it seems to me that this definition is applied to any and all creatures that appear without our bidding, that are not at our beck and call, that somehow intrude into ‘our’ world and just happen to get in the way.

I know that I am not the only one who cares about this, that feels the same apprehension at every approaching shape lying on the morning’s road-side, the same ‘relief’ if it turns out to be yet another sack of litter dumped from passing truck windows, the same tugging anguish on spotting any recognizably animal features. A friend tells me about the time she stopped two men putting a dazed otter ‘out of its misery’ with a spade. Thanks to her intervention the otter survived relatively unscathed and was re-released. But two weeks later another (or perhaps the same) otter was run over and killed in almost the same place. There was the rare occasion on highway 38 when a driver pulled over to move a crossing turtle to the verge. But such activities are accompanied with a palpable feeling of embarrassment at being seen on a public highway ushering a water snake across the road. Is it a sign of emotional weakness to be caught caring about such ‘things’, to be drawn outside the private confines of your steel box, to be seen in the flesh on the other side of the windshield?

How might we venture into the phenomenology and ethics of these mechanistically mediated human/animal encounters, usually fatal for Other animals but all too often just a matter of callous disregard or awkward ‘humour’ for humans; where the final frame of the cartoon or the surprise ending of the story’s punch line imitates the unexpectedly violent demise of the animal. The title sequence of the sci-fi comedy Men in Black begins by following the acrobatic flights of a seemingly care-free animated and anthropomorphized insect that is suddenly cut-short by its impact with the wind-shield of the car involved in the ‘real’ story. Resting overlooking a beaver dam a fellow hiker subjected us to the apparently amusing story of her first encounter with a beaver. ‘That beaver was dithering, edging into the road then retreating, edging and retreating, wondering about when to cross the road. Then he finally went for it but – Wham – splat he didn’t know what hit him. That 18 wheeler just came out of nowhere! There was blood and guts everywhere.’

Is it a failure, or alternatively a denial, of our empathic abilities that such imaginative narratives of unexpected death often represent the limit of both hermeneutic understanding and of permissible public expressions concerning such events? Is this as far as anthropomorphism can take us? Or is there, even here in the forced laughter, sometimes a tinge of sympathy? Does getting such a ‘joke’ actually imply some subliminal recognition of the ultimate absurdity of situations shared by both humans and animals, where the habitually banal activities of our everyday lives can suddenly be so drastically and unwittingly transformed without reason? Is there more than a sense of dramatic irony at play here? Perhaps, even, as Freud might have suggested, a form of cathexis of pent up emotions concerning our own, all too frequent, mortality at the hands of the machines that we are supposed to control?

Such questions lack simple answers and there are innumerable, various, context dependent, forms of emotional displacement occurring in all such narratives (including, no doubt, this one). But this anthropocentric analysis seems ethically lacking since it subjugates the reality of the animal death itself by reducing it primarily to an allegorical substitute for, and illustration of, the futility of our human modes of existence. It also over-emphasizes the role of chance or fate. If the animal just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time then responsibility for their death becomes detached from any individual’s actions. It is an unpredictable ‘accident’, an uninsurable act of God.

Clearly the focus on instant and unexpected death can also operate in other ways as a form of emotional and ethical suspension, absolving us from any requirement to imagine terror, pain, shock, or sense of loss. We become both witnesses and accomplices in an ‘accident’ now redefined as unlucky, inevitable, and, in terms of its swiftness almost a form of euthanasia, a ‘good’ death. At best one might say that this is a form of ethical coping strategy, a way of diminishing responsibility for such acts. It lessens the wrongs we do or are complicit in. At worst it can exemplify the kind of macho andro- and anthropo-centric displacement of emotional involvement in the world, the re-assertion of the centrality of the individual’s autonomous and automotive interests above all else. In such cases the point seems precisely to brag to a presumably compliant audience about his lack of concern, his ability to commit or witness any atrocity as a mark of his independence from emotional or ethical concerns.2

This seems evident in the numerous recipes for roadkill to be found in print and on the web, which celebrate such emotional distantiation with what passes for wry humour, for example, ‘Ted’s original roadkill chilli’.3 These exploratory menus might, alternatively, be thought of as the final, rather pathetic, cannibalization of Western frontier mythology. The modern Grizzly Adams drives a 4x4 with double rear axles, he’s Daniel Boone in a drop-tail wagon living wild and free off what his pick-up runs over. What he is strong enough to stomach, hot chilli and potentially rancid meat, is implicitly and explicitly a mark of his masculinity and his triumphal eradication of any emotional sensitivities towards other creatures. The ‘good death’ is no longer defined from, what the coping strategy at least, attributes to the animal’s perspective, but wholly in terms of its utility in satisfying the driver’s voracious appetites.

Of course there may just be something of a waste not, want not, mentality in eating roadkill. Certainly many other carrion feeding species benefit from the year-round pile-up of carcasses. But the emotional resonances here, the combination of black humour and the literal consumption of bodies, the parading of deliberate distastefulness in both senses, is surely intended to denote emotional self-mastery and isolation. This same flaunting of emotional insensitivity recently appeared on a large scale over the issue of the Canadian seal hunt. Here too numerous web pages were filled with juvenile macho posturings and jokes about clubbing ‘baby’ seals. Here too the same refusal to recognize the possibility of ethical concerns for non-humans, the same designation of the creatures concerned as pests, even the same visceral emphasis on the rough and tough character building edibility of, in this case, seal-flipper pie. Overcoming any potential feelings of disgust is again utilized as an alimentary form of social ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1998). This was not confined to student blogs but ‘contagiously’ infected the mass-media, exemplified in the sardonic witlessness characterizing the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s radio reporting.

In this sense, points made about roadkill have a much wider resonance, standing as an expression of modern Western societies devastating environmental relations as a whole. Here too emotional distantiation is a mechanism whereby responsibility is divorced from individual action, displaced systemically amongst constantly mobile hybrid constituents that are only ever part human and can therefore, whenever politic, shift guilt as easily as they automatically shift gears. As we drive we ‘pass the buck’ – all equally guilty or guiltless as participants. ‘I just couldn’t stop in time. I needed to think of the traffic behind.’ In such circumstances we come to occupy an uneasy, unethical, space where it is never our fault – for as Hannah Arendt (1993, 21) remarked ‘where all are [deemed] guilty no one is’. The myth of the ‘accident’, which is always waiting to happen, to leap out on the innocent, combines seamlessly with the inescapable historical ‘reality’ of current social and economic systems. ‘What else can one do?’ Chance and historical necessity, two sides of the same corporate coin in a world where all associations are more than human in everything but their ability to feel for Others and the possibility of their taking responsibility for their actions.

As Neil Evernden suggests (1999, 14), people actually have to be acculturated and trained to be so emotionally insensitive to the world’s other inhabitants, a process he refers to (invoking the practices of some nineteenth century vivisectionists) as ‘cutting the vocal chords’. Our ‘transformation [he says] from beings with an interest in mysteries and animate nature to beings with an interest in a mechanical order did not come easily and quickly and still does not’ (14). The influence of scientific ‘objectivity’ in particular, he argues, trains us to regard the world as ‘made of parts, just like a car’ (14). As a child in Britain the public safety programmes instructing us how to cross roads featured, without any apparent sense of irony, ‘Tufty’ the talking red squirrel – ‘look right, then left, then right again’. Compare this to the rather different ethical ambiguities in using roadkill as educational tools in schools (see also Knutson 1987). The Roadkill (2006) website, originally facilitated by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation suggests various class exercises including using simple statistics, graphin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Geography and Emotion – Emerging Constellations
• Part 1 Remembering
• Part 2 Understanding
• Part 3 Mourning
• Part 4 Belonging
• Part 5 Enchanting
• Index