Animal Turn Research Articles

Narrating Animal Trauma in Bulgakov and Tolstoy

Following the recent “animal turn” in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, this article focuses on the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory. It offers new animal-centered close readings of Tolstoy’s Strider and Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, paying attention to animal pain rather than seeing it, and the text as a whole, as an allegory of human society. Like many other authors of literary fiction featuring animal narrators, Tolstoy and Bulgakov employ a kind of empathic ventriloquism to narrate animal pain, an important project which, however, given the status of both the animal and trauma outside human language, and thus susceptible to being distorted by it, produces inauthentic discourse (animal-like, rather than animal narration); therefore, these authors get closest to animal pain, not through sophisticated narration, but through the use of ellipses and onomatopoeia. Ultimately, any narratological difficulty with animal focalization is minor compared to the ethical imperative of anti-speciesist animal-standpoint criticism, and the goal is to reconceive the status of animals in literature so as to change their ontological place in the world, urging that this critical work and animal rights advocacy be continued in the classroom.

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

“Animal History after Its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary Approaches, and the Animal Lens”

AbstractPart of a broad animal turn in the humanities, animal history is now a large, mature field. Taking the triumph of animal history as a starting point, this essay draws from scholarship on a diversity of places and time periods to provide a state of the field. The discussion opens with an account of a central theme in animal history: the “animal lens.” This lens uses animals to explore broad historical phenomena, from industrialization to ideas about gender. Next is a discussion of two recent trends in animal history: (1) scholarship on “unexpected animals” and (2) evolutionary history, which examines how humans have shaped animal bodies over time. The overview closes with a discussion of agency, suggesting that the field abandons this paradigm.

Global Animal Law: What It Is and Why We Need It

AbstractThe symposium collection in this issue ofTEL, consisting of four articles including this framing article, seeks to conceptualize and flesh out a new branch of law and legal research: global animal law. The starting hypothesis is that contemporary animal law must be global or transnational (that is, both transboundary and multilevel) in order to be effective. In times of globalization, all aspects of (commodified) human−animal interactions (from food production and distribution, working animals and uses in research, to breeding and keeping of pets) possess a transboundary dimension. Animal welfare has become a global concern, which requires global regulation. This foreword introduces the three symposium articles, sketches out the research programme of global animal law and links its emergence to the ongoing ‘animal turn’ in the social sciences, including political philosophy.

Globalization and the Animal Turn: How International Trade Law Contributes to Global Norms of Animal Protection

AbstractMany animal and environmental activists think of international trade law as a block to the achievement of their goals and perceive the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a threat to animals. Yet, the first legal decision of an international tribunal to devote careful, sustained attention to animal welfare issues comes from the WTO, in the EC – Seal Products decision. This article argues that international trade law is currently an important, although under-acknowledged, locus for the development of global norms concerning the protection of animals, and that animal conservation and animal welfare can be seen as aspects of a single overarching principle of animal protection. International trade law contributes to animal protection in two ways. Firstly, WTO jurisprudence has recognized animal protection as a legitimate basis for invoking exceptions to trade rules (as in EC – Seal Products). Secondly, international trade negotiations enhance cooperation on the implementation and enforcement of existing conservation obligations (as in the new Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Environment Chapter).

Animal Difference, Sexual Difference, and the Daughter of Jephthah

As many commentators note, the daughter of Jephthah is given as a burnt offering while Isaac is spared by divine intervention and animal substitution. Thus the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter raises questions about the relationships among sexual difference, animal difference, and human sacrifice in the Bible. This article explores such questions in dialogue with the interdisciplinary “animal turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The daughter of Jephthah is one of several women in biblical literature whose fate involves an association with domesticated animals. Attention to both the gendered structure of biblical households and the domestication of “companion species” (Donna Haraway) is crucial for understanding their stories. In addition, Jonathan Klawans’ symbolic theory of sacrifice proposes analogical relations between Israelites and the domesticated animals they cared for, and God and the Israelites who desired God’s care. Perhaps against Klawans’ intentions, his theory helps us understand child sacrifice as a problematic but logical consequence of metaphors that structure biblical symbolism and biblical sacrifice. By virtue of their continued existence in the realm of the domesticated after marriage, daughters/women remain more vulnerable than sons to a potentially animalized fate.

Influence of grazing and vegetation type on post-fire floristic and lifeform composition in Tasmania, Australia

Fire and herbivory are important disturbances in vegetation globally. These disturbances are widely applied in combination for conservation and livestock management. Little is known regarding the relative effects on species composition of post-fire grazing, grazing by itself, burning by itself, the absence of both of these disturbances or of the variation of their influences between vegetation types. At seven sites in Tasmania, Australia, in sedgeland, heathy forest and grassland, the covers and heights of tracheophytes were measured before and for 2 years after the commencement of a fire experiment that nested grazing within burning. Burning followed by grazing, largely by native vertebrates, tended to result in greater changes in species and lifeform composition than either grazing by itself or burning by itself. Heathy forest and sedgeland responded primarily to fire rather than grazing. Heathy forest shifted to a new state with burning while sedgeland began a return to its pre-burn state. Grazing after burning most strongly affected the lowland tussock grassland, while also strongly influencing the height of highland tussock grasslands. Intact canopies in eucalypt forest after fire prevented a return to the original understorey while grazing animals turn tussock grassland into lawn after fire. In all cases, the effects of grazing after burning are incremental rather than strongly synergistic.

Neuroethology: Unweaving the Senses of Direction

Three recent studies have significantly advanced our understanding of the highly conserved central complex of the insect brain, showing how it provides an internal representation of body orientation, encodes behaviorally relevant sensory cues, and at the same time controls motor actions.

English

Animals have held an important place in written literature for thousands of years; hence animal fiction comes to mean a fictional work where an animal plays an integral part of the story to make it complete. In most works of literature throughout the ages, animals function only in service to humans. They represent their human counterpart symbolically in order to teach lessons or correct human weakness. This tendency of moral didacticism could be exemplified in Aesop’s Fables composed around the sixth century. With the Victorian era animals become more central in the human thoughts because of Darwin’s Origin of Species. During the twentieth century especially in the later part literal and figurative animals become particularly important in gender studies and women’s literature. In these works, however, the animals do not reflect the animals in themselves, but they are used to demonstrate some aspect of humanity.  All of these texts are not animal-centric, since these texts are not interested in the animals in themselves but as subservient to the human master. Key words: Fiction, posthumanism, ‘animal turn’, animals.

Effect of Zinc on Antibiotic Susceptibility in Standard Escherichia coli

An increasing problem for the treatment of different infectious diseases is bacterial resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents. Our hypothesis was that a correlation exists between metal tolerance and antibiotic resistance in bacteria. In the hospital the most common pathogen associated with various disease conditions is E. coli. So in the present study our test organism is standard E. coli strain 25922. It was exposed to varying concentrations of Zinc in the form of ZnSO4 ranging from 20 ppm to 70 ppm. As the time period of contact with Zinc increased, the strain developed tolerance to increasing concentrations of Zinc. Important finding was that by time, the standard strain developed resistance to various classes of antibiotics in the presence of Zinc without even the presence of antibiotics themselves culture broth. The results indicate that metal contamination present in the environment may develop antibiotic resistance in otherwise antibiotic sensitive strains of bacteria when they are exposed to various metals such as Zinc in environmental surfaces. These bacteria when come in contact with humans or animals turn pathogenic and cause multiple drug resistant diseases. So there is a possible role of metals in spreading antibiotic resistance among bacteria.

Introduction

Abstract This introduction puts into conversation two seemingly divergent analytics: transgender studies and animal studies. It asks: How does the prefixial nature of trans—across, into, and through: a prepositional force—further transfigure the “animal turn”? If the animal turn has recharged inquiry into difference and ethics, what happens to these magnetic pulls when they are transformed, transacted, or transduced by trans studies? Taking as a central logic that transgender subjects have never been fully human—consider how the indeterminate pronoun “it” has been used to name transgenders—the introduction posits how a trans heuristic allows us to better understand the limits of “the human” as a biopolitical tool for privileging a few so as to de-, in-, nonhumanize the many. Trans exposes what is at stake in these prefixial maneuvers, what is materialized and dematerialized, what is made livable and unlivable, killable and un-killable.

Animals and Technoscientific Developments: Getting Out of Invisibility

The essays in the section “Animals in technoscientific developments” have been collected from the submissions to the 3rd European Conference of Critical Animal Studies that I organized in Karlsruhe on 28–30 November 2013. The aim of the conference was to stimulate critical scholars to engage on the multifaceted relationships between animals and technosciences, an underresearched topic. Technoscience has become an important concept in the current debate on the epistemic and normative changes taking place in how scientific and technological research is currently being conducted. Although there are different modes of describing technoscience (and thus different interpretations of whether it is a “new” mode of knowledge production and when it started), generally speaking the term refers to a means of developing knowledge in which it is not possible to separate the scientific from the technological (cf., among others [20, 38]). In contrast to the “traditional mode of doing science,” in which scientific objects are relevant because there are facts about them, technoscience looks at the deep entanglements between theoretical representations (science) and technical interventions. Technoscience is, therefore, interested in things as configurations of different interests [2]. The animal turn in humanities, realized through the establishment of human–animal studies (HAS) and critical animal studies (CAS) over the past two decades aims at integrating animals in scholarly and (social-) scientific inquiry and liberating them from the ontological status of objects [14, 52]. Animals should be no longer perceived as mere metaphors or symbols but individuals in flesh and blood and involved in different mechanisms of knowledge productions and practices [41]. Critical perspectives on animals are shifting the focus of the inquiry from the insistence in looking for the capacities of animals to the complexity of interspecies relationships, critically challenging the idea of human domination and human exceptionalism (among others [63, 49, 52]). Since the inquiry on technoscience shows the hybrid nature of knowledge and its producers, and thus fundamentally challenges differences between nature and culture, it works implicitly for the reconsideration of the idea of human exceptionalism, which is defined as “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” ([43]:11). As technoscience points out the interdependence and inseparability of science and technology and society, its inquiry cannot but embrace a rejection of the transcendental human subject who is external to socionatural entanglements and thus stresses the need to develop relational ontologies. The animal turn works toward revealing the profoundly interrelated nature of humans and animals. Therefore, the fact that technoscience indicates a different Nanoethics (2015) 9:5–10 DOI 10.1007/s11569-015-0224-3

Shattering Silence: Tracing Speciesism in Philippine Children’s Literature

What does it mean to write the animal? In Philippine children’s literature where the population of the nonhuman animal is difficult to ignore, writing (about) them is supposed to aspire familiarization: an action that guides the child reader toward concepts of animality. The nonhuman animal has also been recognized as therapeutic narrative elements, aids in identity construction, and effective fictional teachers of species relationships. The inclusion and, more accurately, the functions of the nonhuman animal in the text, however, are symptomatic of speciesism: the belief in human superiority, and the redundant establishment of their supremacy. Influenced by the insights of the likes of Jacques Derrida, Tony Milligan, Tom Regan and the plights of the “animal turn,” this paper exposes the speciesist and marginalizing misrepresentation of nonhuman animals in both word and visuals that exist in select children’s picture books. Both sides of the binary—the human/nonhuman animal—are significant elements in the discussion; to talk about one side entails remembering the other. Hence, an exploration of representation yields conclusions about the literary, and perhaps even the real, relationship between the two. The dangers these misrepresentations and conclusions pose to the mindset of children not only prove threatening to nonhuman animals, but also to the construct of equal significance among species.

Shattering Silence: Tracing Speciesism in Philippine Children’s Literature

What does it mean to write the animal? In Philippine children’s literature where the population of the nonhuman animal is difficult to ignore, writing (about) them is supposed to aspire familiarization: an action that guides the child reader toward concepts of animality. The nonhuman animal has also been recognized as therapeutic narrative elements, aids in identity construction, and effective fictional teachers of species relationships. The inclusion and, more accurately, the functions of the nonhuman animal in the text, however, are symptomatic of speciesism: the belief in human superiority, and the redundant establishment of their supremacy. Influenced by the insights of the likes of Jacques Derrida, Tony Milligan, Tom Regan and the plights of the “animal turn,” this paper exposes the speciesist and marginalizing misrepresentation of nonhuman animals in both word and visuals that exist in select children’s picture books. Both sides of the binary—the human/nonhuman animal—are significant elements in the discussion; to talk about one side entails remembering the other. Hence, an exploration of representation yields conclusions about the literary, and perhaps even the real, relationship between the two. The dangers these misrepresentations and conclusions pose to the mindset of children not only prove threatening to nonhuman animals, but also to the construct of equal significance among species.

Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa

This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swart included here but also the article and artwork by Wilma Cruise on the figural animal. All the articles in this edition have been gleaned from the HAS colloquia which have their own narrative. Held at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, the first colloquium, Figuring the in Post-Apartheid South in 2011 was followed by Animal Vulnerabilities (2012) before reprising Figuring the in Post-Apartheid South Africa II (2013). This year the theme was Animal Absence/Animal Presence. articles included in this special issue constitute a representative glimpse of the literary, historical and figural debates at these events, but other non-represented discussions also contributed substantially to making the colloquia vibrantly transdisciplinary. Don Pinnock and Adam Cruise delivered papers on effective strategies for elephant activism. Duncan Brown discussed the indigeneity of trout in the postcolony. Sharyn Spicer asked: What's Race Got to Do with It? in her investigation into the pet-keeping practices of a sample of township residents. Shirley Brooks and Dayne Botha presented research on a project to locate owls in a number of townships, and critiqued the discrepancy between discursive constructions and practical consequences. Brooks also co-presented a paper with Mahlatse Moeng on the social-nature divide in relation to flamingos at Kamfers Dam, Kimberley. terms Studies (AS) and Human-Animal Studies (HAS) have been used almost interchangeably in this fairly recent, burgeoning field. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely entitle their edited collection Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Studies (2012), whereas Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh call their collection the Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014). Either way, AS or/and HAS challenge accepted beliefs as their basic theories, and subsequent research undermines the dualism of anthropocentric thought underpinning the humanities. HAS as a term has the edge for us, as it suggests the intertwining of human and non-human and the belief that animals cannot exist in isolation in our research or imaginations. Critical Studies, which has become more visible locally in recent years, has its provenance in social justice concerns. (1) Since roughly 2000, the animal turn in the humanities has drawn heavily from Ur theorists Jacques Derrida via That Therefore I am and J.M. Coetzee via Lives of Animals both of whom connect animals and humans. Both texts insist on the presence of the live, embodied non-human animal. While Derrida opens a philosophical space for the to be empowered to respond (rather than merely reacting), Coetzee has Elizabeth Costello focus on representations of animals through philosophers and poets and maintain that poets are more primed and equipped to imagine and represent animals. If the essays in this special issue engage with international theorists and philosophers, all evince a deep sense of the embodied in southern Africa (and within a broader political context). In The Post-humanist Gaze: Reading Fanie Jason's Photo Essay on Carting Lives, Woodward discusses Fanie Jason's photographs of carthorses and humans on the Cape Flats in the class-based carting industry. In his article Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels, Wylie stresses the pedagogic urgency of teaching children about the future of elephants within the environment of southern Africa. …

Settler Children, Kangaroos and the Cultural Politics of Australian National Belonging

This article reflects upon the ways in which white settler children and kangaroos were enlisted into the cultural politics of nation-building and belonging in the early days of Australian Federation. It revisits Ethel Pedley's turn-of-the-century children's book, Dot and the Kangaroo, and contextualises it within some of the notable kangaroo/settler events within Australia's colonial history. It draws attention to the paradoxes inherent in the symbolic association of settler children with native Australian animals in the emerging national imaginary. The article brings early Australian children's literature into conversation with settler colonial critique and the ‘animal turn’.

Introduction

The collection of five original articles in this special issue of French History, ‘Animals in French History’, offers a small sample from the vast outpouring of scholarly studies about animals in France—and perhaps French animals—that itself constitutes a ratrappage, a catching-up, of French animal studies in relation to anglophone scholarship. Yet unlike some of this scholarship, in the field and movement of critical animal studies and elsewhere, the issue’s concerns are not drawn from the philosophical tradition of continental (post-structural) philosophy from Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida about the human animal, or from the moral and ethical engagements of animal activists. Instead, these articles emerge directly from the discipline of French history as currently practised on both sides of the Atlantic. It is true that ‘animal history’ itself was born of an anglophone tradition, with the pioneering work of Keith Thomas and Harriet Ritvo in the 1980s.1 For despite Robert Delort’s proclamation of 1984 that Animals Have a History, the historian’s attention to animals in France (apart from as the traditional subjects of agrarian history) has not been as robust as in Britain and the United States.2 The French lag in the historical studies of animals might be explained in relation to the belated arrival and relatively weak movements of anti-vivisection, animal welfare and animal rights in France, compared, for example, with Great Britain.3 Or it might be tracked in and as a Cartesian tradition, a specific and enduring marker of French identity that denied animals souls and turned their bodies into complex machines—and thus cast them out of history.4 Yet the persistent attention paid by historians and others to animals in the last decade in France, climaxing perhaps in 2012 when the Animal Question found expression in a plethora of cultural exhibitions in Paris and throughout France, suggests that traditions are not immutable, and that counter-traditions opposing vivisection and Cartesian animal automatism have long existed. The articles in this volume constitute proof of the multiple and complex modes of representing animals in French history, but they are also evidence of the broad animal turn, a turn towards the animal as a subject of history.5

Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane (review)

Reviewed by: Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane Robert Mills Susan Crane. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 271. $59.95. Susan Crane has been at the forefront of developments in the field of medieval animal studies. At the New Chaucer Society’s Congress in 2010 she organized a lively strand of sessions devoted to “Animal Discourses,” select papers from which were collated into a symposium in New Medieval Literatures in 2011. In the same year, postmedieval dedicated a special issue to “The Animal Turn,” to which Crane contributed an essay that now features, in revised form, in the book currently under review. The following year saw the publication of a virtual colloquium on “Animalia” within the pages of this journal, in which the author again participated. Crane’s latest study, Animal Encounters, represents an exceptionally rich and insightful intervention in these ongoing debates, one that will be a point of reference for years to come. Animal Encounters responds to a number of key concerns in critical animal studies. First, Crane hopes to rectify what she sees as a tendency to “forget” the animal in literary analysis, by striving, as she puts it in her opening paragraph, “to redirect attention from the animal trope’s noisy human tenor back to its obscure furry vehicle” (1). Even a genre such as beast fable, which has generally been viewed as inhospitable to an animal-centered perspective, gets reconfigured in Crane’s analysis as a space where animals matter. Additionally, Crane is motivated to reconsider human specificity in relation to (other) animals. What happens when traditional markers of human distinctiveness, such as language or reason, can be shown also to exist among nonhuman animals? [End Page 295] What are the implications, ethical or otherwise, of these encounters with animality beyond the confines of the human? Furthermore, Crane resists the notion of a univocal medieval “paradigm,” or the idea that, between the earlier and later Middle Ages, there was a “paradigm shift” in attitudes to animals. Readers are invited instead to envisage a complex and contradictory terrain, crisscrossed by multiple sites of animal encounter—spaces in which animals never simply operate as figures. This plurality derives not only from Crane’s engagement with a multiplicity of genres, milieus, and timeframes, but also from her application of approaches developed outside literary studies. These include, as outlined in the introduction, “evolutionary biology, taxonomy, language acquisition, ethology, and environmental studies” (3). For instance, in the chapter on second-family bestiaries, information derived from scientific DNA analysis, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s work on taxonomy, and Jorge Luis Borges’s imaginary “Chinese” encyclopedia are cited in support of the view that the bestiary can be interpreted as an exercise in taxonomic thinking. Crane also conveys with admirable clarity possible resonances between medieval texts and modern critical theories, notably Jacques Derrida’s influential critique of philosophy’s dichotomy between human and animal. Each chapter incorporates sensitive analyses of visual material (mainly manuscript illuminations), which, like the texts that are the book’s main focus, call into question the idea of a single human/animal “boundary” in medieval culture. Crane calls the materializations of animal presence she collates “fragments” (8), and concludes by describing the project as one of “recovering and reconsideration” (169); this is reflected in the book’s eschewal of a central methodology in favor of a more eclectic range of approaches. The opening chapter, which centers on Irish and Northumbrian hagiography, resists the assumption that saintly encounters with animals in these early medieval vitae are ultimately only human in significance. Animals have not simply been enlisted as participants in a “divine puppet show” (38), Crane submits. Rather, figures such as Saint Cuthbert are also envisaged coming into contact with animals whose species-specific behavior is enlisted as a site of wonder. Chapter 2, focusing on relations between humans and wolves, takes as its point of departure the contrast between the fable of “The Priest and the Wolf” by Marie de France, and a courtly lai, Bisclavret, possibly also authored by the same Marie, about a werewolf whose body shifts...

A multi-species archaeology

These are interesting times for the exploration of the relationships between humans and other animals. The ‘animal turn’ is in full swing in a number of disciplines; anthropologists have started talking of the emergence of a multi-species ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010); and even archaeologists have, somehow hesitantly, started contributing to wider discussions within animal studies (e.g. see the recent – 2013 – special issue of the journalSociety and animalsdevoted to archaeology; and Harris and Hamilakis, in press). Another indication that things are changing is the overwhelmingly positive response to our ‘manifesto’ by most commentators, who have offered many valuable thoughts which expand our reflections in many and interesting directions: we are grateful. Rather than trying to comment on every single point raised in this discussion, which in any case would have been impossible in the space provided, we have selected instead a couple of issues that, we hope, readers will find engaging and fruitful.

A manifesto for a social zooarchaeology. Swans and other beings in the Mesolithic

AbstractRecent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this ‘animal turn’, zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeology's ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdiscipline's firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of ‘subsistence’ and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human–whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbæk.