Review of Academic Conferences

Animals in History And Culture
Faculty of Humanities, Bath Spa University College. July 3-4, 2000

Representing Animals
Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. April 13-15, 2000

Thresholds of Identity in Human-Animal Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. March 10-11, 2000

Millennial Animals: Theorising and Understanding the Importance of Animals
Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield. July 29-30, 2000

Julie Ann Smith
University of Wisconsin

Between July 1999 and July 2000, four international conferences dedicated to the study of nonhuman animals in culture were held in the United States and Great Britain. This activity signals what many hope will be the beginning of a new interdisciplinary field of animal studies within the humanities. If one does emerge, its outlines and internal tensions are now much clearer than they were two years ago.

The first conference, Animals in History and Culture, was held at Bath Spa University College, England, July 3-4, 1999. Organized by Dr. Erica Fudge and Dr. Tracey Hill, the conference addressed the conceptual exchange between humanity and animality from the seventeenth century to the present. Forty-eight papers examined the ways human beings have looked at animals and human relationships to animals. Several speakers detailed historical instances of animal images or taxonomies being used to abet racism, sexism, or classism. By and large historical and British, this, the largest of the conferences, gave exciting evidence of institutional support for animal studies within the humanities.

Two conferences were held in the United States in the spring of 2000. The Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, under the directorship of Professor Kathleen Woodward, chose as its theme for the 1999-2000 academic year, Representing Animals, around which were organized a lecture series of 7 invited speakers, a panel discussion, a public address by Jane Goodall, and a conference. With all but 7 of the 38 participants coming from the United States, this conference provided an opportunity to assess the direction of animal studies in the United States. As at the Bath Spa conference, many of the papers addressed the reception and consumption of representations of animals through time as well as the underlying ideological preconceptions about animals that drive cultural representations. Papers at the Milwaukee meeting focused primarily on contemporary culture. For example, one speaker addressed the changing attitudes toward "liveness" in contemporary animal displays; another outlined the economic impetus behind promoting the mouse as the ideal research subject. Several of the papers reflected interest in animals used in zoos and "zoo culture" shared by conference organizer Nigel Rothfels, Assistant Director of the Center.

In the course of the Milwaukee conference, some animal advocates became distressed by the absence of an advocacy perspective, even the treatment of animal suffering and death with chilling detachment. The most dramatic erasure of flesh and blood animals came the day after Jane Goodall spoke to conference attendees as well as hundreds of people from the community, the majority of whom were visibly moved by her unflagging commitment to non-human primates. When the next day a young scholar dismissed Goodall's work as "anthropomorphic," many participants heatedly objected. Expecting scholarly discussion similar to that in Women’s Studies or Race-and-Ethnicity Studies, advocates were not prepared for the diverse understandings of animals, many of which recapitulated the production of animals as objects and differed little in spirit from the exploitative representations under analysis. In sum, animal advocates felt that conference papers demonstrated impressive levels of expertise about the ways that animals are processed by culture but that often the animal was tragically absent.

One professional wildlife writer and university professor, Charles Bergman, was sufficiently disturbed by the Milwaukee conference to write an eloquent article to the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2001 issue) calling for the humanities to take animals more seriously. About the conference, Professor Bergman wrote,

Some of the people attending the conference cared about creatures, but for the most part the conference abandoned the animals, talking about what animal representations mean to us and almost nothing about how our representations affect the animals or the ethical issues involved in representation….The actual animal seemed almost an embarrassment, a disturbance to the symbolic field.
Professor Bergman suggested that academic discourse needs to find a new way of talking about animals that treats them as autonomous living creatures rather than as texts that we produce. He aptly concluded, "we need to care as much for the worlds of being as we do for the worlds of meaning."

On March 10-11, the Human-Animal Relationships Research Focus Group of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara (USCB) held a colloquium on "Thresholds of Identity in Human-Animal Relationships." Organized by Professors Jo-Ann Shelton and Anita Guerrini of the Environmental Studies Program and Andrew Cuk of the Department of Dramatic Art at UCSB, the 19 conference papers were broadly focused on the role animals play in human identity and the construction of animal identity by humans. Incorporating a strong sociological and psychological interest, papers addressed the ethical treatment of animals as well as ethnographic attitudes. For example, two papers detailed animal practices and racialization through animals among African American Women and Filipinas in Los Angeles. Domestic animals and animals in laboratories received the most discussion.

This was the second colloquium of the Human-Animal Relationships Research Focus Group. One in February 1999 was entitled Borders and Bridges: Exploring the Relationships Between Humans and Animals. Abstracts of these papers will be posted on the Focus Group's website: www.ihr.ucsb.edu.The Group also expects to post the abstracts from the March 2000 colloquium and to host a third colloquium in 2002.

The fourth conference under review was held at the Department of English, University of Sheffield, on July 29-30, 2000. Organized by Robert McKay with assistance from Dr. Sue Vice, the conference hosted delegates from 11 countries who gave 43 papers. More animal advocates were present during the Sheffield conference than at the other two I attended. This had the effect of foregrounding respect for animals. Also, the organizer structured time for two plenary discussions during which conference attendees could air their views about issues related to animal studies. What emerged was the expected tension between scholarly advocacy and scholarly detachment but also the question of whether culture can ever authoritatively represent animals and, if so, in what ways.

The first discussion began with the invitation to describe one's motivation for studying animals in culture. One side of what developed as a debate felt that human knowledge about animals must necessarily be limited and interest in them self-serving. This is what we must assume and study without critique, this view maintained. Opposing opinion felt that humans have long had concern for animals in and of themselves. That concern should govern analyses of cultural practices, this view suggested. At this point, the discussion seemed problematically divided between a "pro-animal view" that maintained that animals are knowable and a "pro-use" view that held that animals can never be more than what we construct them to be. Later in the conference, another point of view emerged within individual papers: We can never fully know animals, cannot avoid imposing our own interpretations on them, but we can, nevertheless, do scholarly work on their behalf. We can deconstruct self-serving versions of animals that legitimate dismissal and abuse, can call attention to theories that seem to compel respect, and can simply serve by informing others about cultural attitudes that necessarily impact animals. Inherent in this view is the call to replace censure with investigation, no matter how disturbing the cultural practice.

The direction of the second plenary discussion was determined by the two very different theoretical approaches of the conference's plenary speakers. Carol Adams, the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, drew on contemporary American cultural images to demonstrate a continued and vicious link between women and animals as consumable products and showed how the degradation of animals enables that of women. She spoke from a modernist position, that is, the defense of animals and women from foundationalist premises of right and wrong, suffering and well-being, dignity and exploitation. Cary Wolfe, a professor at SUNY-Albany, used the work of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their 1998 book, The Tree of Knowledge, to engage in an interdisciplinary development of Jacques Derrida's concept of the "trace" as a means for deconstructing the traditional use of language as a criterion for separating the human and the animal. His paper exemplified the postmodern approach, distanced from aggressive, totalizing ideologies but productive of radical deconstructions of humanist assumptions about the primacy of human beings.

Much of the ensuing discussion was a healthy airing of the uneasiness with which modernist and postmodernist advocate-scholars view the theoretical directions of each other. Many modernist theorists, who operate from premises established by animal-rights philosophy, that is, the evolutionary continuity between animals and humans that allows authoritative statements about animal pain and pleasure, were wary of the postmodern rejection of an objectivist account of the animal. Without a firm understanding of who animals are, at least their capacity for suffering, the modernist view insists, we license all sorts of material and cultural practices, and any basis for asserting human obligations to animals is abrogated. Often engaged in animal-rights and animal-rescue work, modernist activist-scholars are only too aware of the misery human beings inflict on animals, and they link this to the failure of humans to understand animals as subjects in their own right. The practices of some postmodern artists, such as taxidermy, aggravate the modernist suspicion of postmodernism.

Defenders of postmodernism argued that animal-rights philosophy reinscribes animals as lesser human beings, failing to imagine a radical egalitarianism. They also held that postmodernism is needed to address new constructions of the animal that culture is bound to produce. For example, postmodernism recognizes that technology is going to offer reconceptualizations of animals as a result of biotechnology and cybertechnology that will challenge the premises about animal being upon which modernist defenses are based. As technology remakes the animal, the cultural enterprise will be to distance that animal from the philosophical premises about animal being that modernists have up to now so ably defended. Postmodernism also provides a needed corrective to the modernist tendency to domesticate the alterity of animals through language and in so doing confirm not animal being but the human enterprise of colonizing the other, the argument went. Ultimately, this discussion produced recognition on all sides that both orientations often merge within a single discourse and that both are desperately needed.

As I experienced the three conferences I attended, I came to expect that animal studies will gain respectability in humanities departments because the work being done is expert and engaging. However, I also recognized that animal studies is not going to be the site of unilateral advocacy that I had hoped it would be. I came to see that the field will and ought to be amiable to all points of view, that a tolerance for diverse opinion is needed to produce and respond to new ways of conceiving animals rapidly occurring already in our culture. Animal advocates of all ilks are needed to create alternative visions. The Sheffield conference set the important example of creating opportunity for discussion beyond the time typically allotted after individual conference sessions. It signaled the need for continued interchange in all formats and the imperative to keep the discussion going.
 

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