The Rise of Critical Animal Studies

From the Margins to the Centre

Nik Taylor, Richard Twine, Nik Taylor, Richard Twine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415858571
• eBook ISBN: 9781135100940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the scholarly and interdisciplinary study of human/animal relations becomes crucial to the urgent questions of our time, notably in relation to environmental crisis, this collection explores the inner tensions within the relatively new and broad field of animal studies. This provides a platform for the latest critical thinking on the condition and experience of animals. The volume is structured around four sections:

• 
  
  

• engaging theory
• doing critical animal studies
• critical animal studies and anti-capitalism
• contesting the human, liberating the animal: veganism and activism.

The Rise of Critical Animal Studies demonstrates the centrality of the contribution of critical animal studies to vitally important contemporary debates and considers future directions for the field. This edited collection will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, gender studies, psychology, geography, and social work.

Part I

Engaging theory

1 Beyond speciesism

Intersectionality, critical sociology and the human domination of other animals

Erika Cudworth

Introduction

Talking about non-human animals and the profound difference of ‘species’ has proven difficult for sociology, whose disciplinary boundaries were historically constituted around the designation of an arena – ‘the social’ – which was defined as exclusively human. Whilst sociology has broadened its subjects, objects and processes of study, it has held fairly fast to the conception of the social as centred on the human. This chapter argues for a sociology that is not human-exclusive, and acknowledges the way species shapes the human and non-human lifeworld as part of the condition of life. In this sense, sociology needs Animal Studies as a corrective to its limitations and to paint a more convincing picture of social lives, which are those of multi-species. Sociology cannot continue to produce work on the body, on work or on the ‘family’ for example, which assumes that all bodies or workers are exclusively human and that we dwell in single-species households. The conventional trilogy of social domination, of class, ‘race’ and gender that has been the focus of critical sociological approaches to matters of oppression and exclusion, has been challenged by new concerns with other differences – of place and location, age and generation, sexuality and various forms of embodied difference. Despite these important developments, most sociology stops short at the difference of species. It is time for sociologists of a more critical persuasion to properly consider the difference of species in social relations.

In turn, Animal Studies might benefit from the insights of a critical sociological framework. The concept of ‘speciesism’ has been of great significance in raising political questions about the use and treatment of non-human animals. It is a foundational concept for more critical approaches in Animal Studies and has introduced an analysis of power and domination into discussions of human–animal relations. Whilst speciesism has been used across the multiple disciplines of Animal Studies (in particular, in philosophy and political theory), it does not translate well into contemporary sociological discussions around inequality and difference. In the discipline of sociology, critical perspectives have moved away from the terminology of ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ (sexism, racism, homophobia, for example) and have developed concepts that raise questions about the patterns of social relations and the norms associated with them (in terms of gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and so on). Thus gender for example, is used to discuss the multiple and complex ways in which the difference of sex is constituted and reproduced. This chapter will suggest that ‘speciesism’ is not adequate for capturing the full range and forms of our social relations with non-human animals.

A critical and sociological analysis of human relations with non-human animals will understand contemporary societies as structured in terms of particular configurations of species relations. It can provide us with the tools for the theorisation of species in terms of human domination, exploitation and oppression so important in Critical Animal Studies, whilst remaining sensitive to differences in the kind and degree of human practices which are geographically and historically situated. A critical sociology of species must account for both the discursive and material placement of non-human animals, interrogating institutional contexts and related practices, and considering the extent to which these change and/or reconstitute themselves over time. Being critically sociological, it should be underpinned by the conception that the oppressions of human and non-human animals are intersected. Finally, a critical sociology of species will draw political inspiration from Critical Animal Studies. Thus it must be an engaged sociology, a call to action, which grounds its attempts to theorise, document and explain the world in the context of political struggles to change it.

This chapter maps the territory on which a more satisfactory sociological approach to thinking about non-human animals might be grounded. The argument advanced here focuses particularly on those species whose lives human beings have urgently shaped – domesticates. With respect to these non-human animals, I contend that species difference means human domination, and the paper ends with a brief discussion of human domination as a complex system of social relations that privileges the human but within which, different degrees of domination of non-human animal species might be found, dependent on social context.

Sociology and animal studies

Sociology has generally held to the conceptions of those foundational figures such as Simmel and Durkheim, of a society that emerges ‘through the symbolically constituted and linguistically mediated encounters and interactions through which meanings and representations are communicated from one mind to another in the course of human association’ (Scott 2010: 16–17). It is only fairly recently that influential voices have been heard to argue for the radical configuration of the discipline. For Latour, whose sustained intervention here has been significant, sociology must fully embrace the world of non-human beings, objects and things and the ways our lives are constituted with them (Latour 2010: 75–78). Critiques such as this have helped to open up the discipline to new areas of concern, such as Animal Studies, which has emerged as a diverse and expanding transdisciplinary field.

Whilst bringing animals ‘in’ to the humanities and social sciences has encouraged inter- and post-disciplinarity, much of the work remains cast within disciplinary paradigms. It is interesting to note however, that its impact has been far greater in arts (particularly in history, cultural geography, philosophy, literature and film) than social science disciplines. Sociology has had limited engagements with Animal Studies, certainly in the UK. Where it has, an interest in non-human animals has often been brought into view through more established sub-areas such as science and technology studies (Twine 2010), food and eating (Stewart and Cole 2009), the family (Charles and Aull-Davies 2008) and rural studies (Wilkie 2010). As Burawoy (2005: 268) has argued, it is critical sociologies that often draw attention to the omissions of the disciplinary mainstream and identify new subjects and objects for study. Twine (2010: 8) has suggested that sociological Animal Studies might be understood in Burawoy’s terms as a ‘critical sociology’ (Twine 2010: 8). The ‘bringing in’ of animals as new subjects of sociological study has been via both mainstream and critical routes. On the one hand, we have a sociology that includes non-human animals and can certainly be considered critical in terms of Burawoy’s framework. On the other hand we have sociological Animal Studies, which raise questions about the exploitation and oppression of ‘Other’ animals, and this, I would suggest, is more reflective of critical traditions in sociological enquiry. Parallels here might be drawn with the influence of feminism in sociology. Whilst more liberal scholarship considered that ‘adding’ the concern with gender to existing frameworks and approaches might be sufficient, more critical approaches contended that approaching social life with the ‘lenses’ of gender radically alters not only the subjects and objects of enquiry, but the nature of enquiry itself (see Peterson and Runyan 2010; also Peggs, Chapter 2 this volume).

A new sociological subject?

Whilst the notion of species suggests taxonomic classification of kinds, types or varieties, it is also a social assignation. Human social relations also shape the biology and sociality of other species as they are incorporated into and co-constituted with, social institutions and practices. Interrogating naturalised categories and practices has been an important sociological preoccupation, and sociology lends itself to problematising the human–non-human animal binary and the ways this is played out in social formations. In addition, species is constituted by and through ‘human’ hierarchies – ideas of animality and of ‘nature’ are vitally entangled in the constitution of ‘race’, gender, class and other ‘human’ differences with which critical sociologies have very well established preoccupations.

However, as Alger points out, there is a ‘hard line that sociology has always drawn between humans and other species’ (2003: 69); reflective of the ‘species apartheid’ that characterises the social sciences more broadly (Twine 2010: 2). Arluke (2004) has noted there are very real barriers to the acceptance of Animal Studies as a research area within the discipline. Grant capture and publishing attest to the continued anthropocentrism of the subjects and objects of sociological enquiry. In addition, even critical sociologies are resistant to the study of non-human animals, shaped by the belief that studying non-human animals lessens or undermines the notion of oppression. Anthropocentrism can be seen as foundational for the discipline, which emerged with the mission of countering biological explanations in social life, and is thus wary of engagements with the non-human animate lifeworld. In this sense, studying animals and our relations with them is to redefine the ‘disciplinary matrix’ of sociology, and undermine its dualistic organising categories (Benton 1994: 29). Some sociologists have undertaken grounded studies that disrupt the common conflation of ‘society’ with the human use of language. Irvine for example, critiques the anthropocentrism of Mead and his view that non-human animals sit outside sociology due to their inability to perceive, imagine and speak, which renders them incapable of socially meaningful behaviour (2004: 121). Rather, she suggests that some humans and some animals share both meanings and communication and therefore, are the proper subjects of sociological enquiry (Irvine 2007; Sanders and Arluke 1993).

The debate is raised, of course, about how we deal with these tricky categories in producing social theory. Do we interrogate them, refine them and continue to deploy them with their imperfections, or do we abandon them? Such debates have persisted over the last two decades with respect to the tension between amorphous collective concepts such as ‘gender’ and ‘ethnicity’ and localised and situated differences in social form, identity and the possibilities for agency. Various philosophical interventions in Animal Studies have sought to problematize and rework the classical binary formulations of the human–animal distinction in Western thought (Derrida 2002: 135; 2008: 153–160). More radical philosophical positions push further, arguing for the abolition of the ‘guardrails of the human-animal distinction’ (Calarco 2008: 149). I think however, this is a step too far. In the social world, species is a powerful and persistent discursive and material distinction; and some sociologists have usefully made these distinctions the focus of their attempts to conceptualise human relations with non-human animals.

Ted Benton (1993) has sought to both retain and problematise the catch-all concept of non-human animals by using a notion of species as ‘differentiation’. Drawing on ethological work, he argues that many species have overlapping forms of ‘species life’ with humans, with certain needs, forms of sociality and ecological dependency. He challenges the presumption of human separateness from ‘Other’ animals, arguing that we should think about ‘differentiations’ rather than differences between animal species (ibid.: 45–57). Differentiations of species, and particular social, economic and ecological contexts give rise to different categories of human animal relationship. This leads Benton to a sociological categorisation of ‘Other’ animals in terms of their form of relation to humans. Certain non-human animals may be labourers of various kinds (from guarding, carrying and pulling to guiding visually impaired humans); some species will be food and resources (for human clothing and shelter needs); a limited number may be companions; and many are ‘wild’ (that is, outside incorporation into human social practices, or in conditions of limited incorporation). In addition, Benton categorises animals as human entertainment (in hunting, shooting, fishing and fighting, for example), as cultural symbols and as human edification (for example in ‘wildlife’ documentaries) (ibid.: 2–8). Benton uses these categories in arguing that humans and animals stand in social relationships to each other, that animals are constitutive of human societies and that these relationships are incredibly varied across time and space. These relationships are fundamental to the structuring of human societies (ibid.: 68–69). Although this social categorisation of animals is useful, it elides some important forms of relationship between human and non-human animals and underestimates the contingency of animals’ social location (see Stewart and Cole 2009: 461).

In these attempts to categorise non-human animals in terms of social relations, human power is foregrounded. Whilst the abandonment of categories might seem attractive by virtue of being radically transgressive, under current social arrangements the categories into which animals are placed are a description of the material world that animals inhabit. In the web of social practices and institutions which non-human animals, particularly those we have ‘domesticated’, are very much caught, the difference of species structures material practice and has real effects on the lives and deaths of non-human animals. For a critical sociology of non-human animals, we need the highly problematic human–animal distinction as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: locating the ‘critical’ in critical animal studies
• Part I Engaging theory
• Part II Doing critical animal studies
• Part III Critical animal studies and anti-capitalism
• Part IV Contesting the human, liberating the animal: veganism and activism
• Conclusion: future directions for critical animal studies
• Index