Anthropocentrism and zoontologies

It almost goes without saying that the lives of people and the lives of animals are inextricably linked, but what is the social nature of this link? Consider these three statements:

1. 1. Humans and animals live as beings in the world in relation to each other.

2. 2. Humans and non-human animals live as beings in the world in relation to each other.

3. 3. Humans and non-humans live as beings in the world in relation to each other.

Which is the most appropriate statement to describe this relationship? Each is widely used, yet each has its own problems typified by the anthropocentrism that pervades much current thinking. By this I mean that they maintain the anthropocentrism that Nick Overton and Yannis Hamilakis seek to abandon in their restructured zooarchaeology. Indeed the very first point in their manifesto is a call to break with anthropocentricity. In the above statements, despite the categories ‘human’, ‘animal’, ‘non-human animal’ and ‘non-human’ being placed within a relationship, the nature of that relationship is unclear. There still seems to be a comfort of the human–animal distinction prevalent in much contemporary thinking.

It seems appropriate that Overton and Hamilakis evoke the work of Franz Kafka in the introduction to their article. Kafka wrote several unpublished short stories in the early years of the 20th century which deal with human–animal relations. Many of these feature animal characters, and often tackle the moral and ethical issues inherent in the human–animal relationship (‘The vulture’, ‘Investigations of a dog’, ‘A crossbreed’, ‘A little fable’). A recent edited volume, Kafka's Creatures (Lucht and Yarri Reference Lucht and Yarri2010), devotes almost 300 pages to the deployment of non-human animals in his published writings. The non-anthropocentric nature of many of these writings is striking, with their focus on autonomous thinking animals as agents in allegories (arguably) intended to wilfully subvert anthropocentric assumptions and colonial prejudices. There are also playful, but incisive, demolitions of the authority represented by Western scientific animal taxonomies and classificatory systems, and this returns us to the question: why do many academic disciplines – including archaeology and its subdiscipline of zooarchaeology/archaeozoology – depend upon a persistent sense of anthropocentrism when it comes to consideration, categorization and analysis of non-human animals? For me, this is the key question in Overton and Hamilakis's manifesto, and it raises a number of challenges for the development of a social zooarchaeology as we, falteringly, move to a post-human condition.

For many scholars outside the discipline of archaeology, particularly those in philosophy, issues of anthropocentrism are paramount. Key figures in the history of philosophy have attempted to overcome boundaries in general and the human–animal distinction in particular. It was Jacques Derrida who primarily instigated (Continental) philosophical thinking into what he termed ‘the question of the animal’. By this he was referring to the traditional ways in which philosophers portrayed animals in reductionist and essentialist ways by referring to them in the general plural as ‘the animal’, rather than addressing different ways of being animal, through behaviour, relationships, language and so on. He, and other theorists such as Heidegger, Levinas and Agamben, sought to challenge this traditional concern with trying to determine ‘animality’. Obviously, they argued, this leads to politically uncomfortable questions, such as where does animality reside? How much animality does the human possess? And so on. Derrida charges,

This Continental philosophical challenge to anthropocentrism colours many current debates in human–animal studies, and the reason I dwell on it here is to ask Overton and Hamilakis this: is it at all possible to overcome an anthropocentric position on the human–animal relation? A big question. I ask because it has been argued that none of the philosophers mentioned here ever managed to achieve this task (e.g. Calarco Reference Calarco2008). In Heidegger's lengthy discussions over many years on ‘the question of the animal’ he gradually attempted to think about and through the animal in non-anthropocentric ways. In so doing, he created an alternative way of animals ‘being-in-the-world’ in which he concluded that animals were ‘poor in world’. This leads us to an interesting reflection on the relationship between humans, animals and other non-human elements, one which has resonances with archaeology's ongoing engagement with agency – human and object. As Overton and Hamilakis observe, there is a lack of theoretical rumination on animal agency in archaeological writings, although we are becoming (more on becoming later . . .) comfortable with object agency. In Heidegger's concept of ‘world’, the distinction is made between stone (worldless), animal (poor in world) and human (world-forming). In other words, there is no object agency, and animals are poor in relation to humans. A hierarchical, and ultimately anthropocentric, distinction.

Derrida himself, despite his opposition to traditional philosophy's search for the distinctiveness of the animal and of animality, nevertheless insisted on maintaining (albeit reworking) the human–animal distinction, describing how, for him, there existed a difference between the human and the animal that cannot be overcome – in Heidegger's words, ‘an abyss of essence’.

For some modern Continental philosophers, and this is a position which I myself find useful in thinking through the anthropocentrism problem, the very starting point of dealing with the issue is to ‘simply let the human–animal distinction go, or at the very least, not insist on maintaining it’ (Calarco Reference Calarco2008, 148, original emphasis). In other words, it may be fruitful to adopt as our starting point the position taken by Donna Haraway more than 20 years ago in ‘A cyborg manifesto’:

Haraway's own manifesto calls for a complete abandonment, or at least reworking, of the existing categories ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Appealing as this sounds, we need to bear in mind that – as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece – human–animal relations are central to the Western society–nature distinction, so by extension those categories too have to be reworked/abandoned. As Descola and Pálsson have argued, Western scholars have found this exceptionally difficult to grapple with effectively, given the place of the society–nature divide as a dominant metaphor. As such, it is nothing less than fundamental to the ways in which the Western edifice conceptualizes the world and its place within it in relation to humans, non-humans and other elements. They argue with great incisiveness,

And this difficulty is seen in a great deal of the recent human–animal literature within archaeology, and archaeozoology, as we take those first tentative steps towards thinking about animals in non-traditional ways. As Overton and Hamilakis point out, there is a tendency to present evidence for certain types of animal treatment evident in archaeological deposits by relying on those categories not-so-long-ago-maligned by many practioners: ‘ritual’, ‘symbolic’, ‘unusual’ – those nebulous terms for material that doesn't fit into, conform with, existing analytical categories and that we do not fully understand (e.g. Miracle and Milner Reference Miracle and Milner2002; Armstrong Oma and Hedeager Reference Armstrong Oma and Hedeager2010). The majority of these publications consist of specific temporal/geographic case studies dealing with animals in a variety of ‘unusual’ contexts, but in general few show theoretical engagement with ‘the question of the animal’ as understood within current human–animal studies in the humanities and social sciences. In my own field of research – human–animal relations in the later prehistory of South West Asia, the nature of the archaeological data – in this case joint human–animal burials, extensive animal carvings associated with ‘non-domestic’ monumental architecture, and so on – has practically forced archaeologists to turn to explanations of ritual, symbolism and ‘symbolic behaviour’; there appears to be no alternative interpretive alley to run down. And of course, the archaeology/palaeoanthropology literature remains characteristically focused on ‘the big questions’: ‘what is it to be human?’ ‘What makes us human?’ ‘What does it mean to be human?’ And so on.

It is understandable that many zooarchaeologists do not feel a concern to engage with sociocultural anthropological works on animals and human–animal relations written by scholars outside the subdiscipline, or indeed with the broadly philosophical platform upon which much of the new animal studies rests. But as Overton and Hamilakis argue, zooarchaeology is an appropriate field of research for investigation into the human–animal condition only if ‘it realizes its potential’ (p. 112). The leads into a related, possibly causal, question: where is archaeology in contemporary animal studies/human–animal studies? Archaeological contributions to human–animal conferences (have a look at those listed on the Institute for Critical Animal Studies website: www.criticalanimalstudies.org) are scant. Similarly, in two of the longest-established, and highly respected, human–animal journals, Society & animals (est'd. 1993) and Anthrozoös (est'd 1997), the archaeological presence is nonexistent. That may be as much the fault of the (zoo)archaeologist, but the fact remains.

Consideration of alternative ontologies – zoontologies, maybe (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2003) raises the question, what would alternative ontologies of the human–non-human animal look like within a reworked zooarchaeology? Here, a key feature in Overton and Hamilakis's manifesto is the notion of ‘species-shaping’ or ‘co-shaping’, which gives consideration, partly at least, to mutual human–animal agency in terms of response and communication within relationship building and maintenance. Again, turning to Derrida, this brings to mind his well-known bathroom encounter with the cat, as recounted in ‘The animal that therefore I am’ (Reference Derrida and Wills2008). The cat's gaze demands, directs, elicits an emotional response, in this case embarrassment. But there is greater theoretical purchase to be had from species-shaping/co-shaping than simply thinking about response and communication, as Overton and Hamilakis show us in a number of examples relating to hunting. Of particular relevance here is Conneller's (Reference Conneller2004) ‘Becoming deer’, which evokes for me that most powerful of becomings, that of Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick, as thrown together in a ‘monstrous alliance’ by Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987). This alliance is Ahab's ‘becoming-whale’, part of Deleuze and Guattari's central animal studies ‘1730 plateau’, ‘Becoming-animal’. They deploy Melville's Moby-Dick (1851): ‘one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick’ (Deleuze and Gauttari 1987, 243). The effect of ‘Becoming-animal’ on contemporary animal studies has been profound. It has resulted in new ways of thinking about human–animal relations, ‘relations that cannot be defined in terms of kinship, or sameness, or capacities, or identities, or progression’ (Kalof and Fitzgerald Reference Kalof and Fitzgerald2007, 37), because ‘becoming produces nothing other than itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987, 238).

In his recent essay – and I relate this back to my earlier discussion of the Continental philosophers’ concern with the dissolution of boundaries – Gerald Bruns captures well what ‘Becoming-animal’ achieves: it shows that ‘boundaries are not limits but zones of indiscernibility where experiments in forms of life can be developed and put into play . . . a kind of freedom’ (Bruns Reference Bruns2007, 716). Perhaps thinking through this kind of ‘species-shaping’/‘co-shaping’ would profitably transform – metamorphose – (zoo)archaeology into a discipline that can achieve its potential.