By James Gorman, The New York Times, January 2, 2012
Once, animals at
the university were the province of science. Rats ran through mazes in the psychology lab, cows mooed in the veterinary
barns, the monkeys of neuroscience chattered in their cages. And on the
dissecting tables of undergraduates, preserved frogs kept a deathly silence.
On the other side
of campus, in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of the liberal arts and
social sciences, where monkey chow is never served and all the mazes are made
of words, the attention of scholars was firmly fixed on humans.
No longer.
This spring, freshmen at Harvard can take “Human, Animals and Cyborgs.” Last year
Dartmouth offered “Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches
and Shrews.” New York University offers “Animals,
People and Those in Between.”
The courses are part of the growing, but still undefined, field of
animal studies. So far, according to Marc Bekoff, an emeritus professor of ecology
and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, the field includes
“anything that has to do with the way humans and animals interact.” Art,
literature, sociology, anthropology, film, theater, philosophy, religion —
there are animals in all of them.
The field builds partly on a long history of scientific research that
has blurred the once-sharp distinction between humans and other animals. Other
species have been shown to have aspects of language, tool use, even the roots
of morality. It also grows out of a field called cultural studies, in which the
academy has turned its attention over the years to ignored and marginalized
humans.
Some scholars now ask: Why stop there? Why honor the uncertain
boundary that separates one species from all others? Is it time for a
Shakespearean stage direction: Exit the humanities, pursued by a bear? Not
quite yet, although some scholars have suggested it is time to move on to the
post-humanities.
The Animals and Society Institute, itself only six
years old, lists more than 100 courses in American colleges and universities
that fit under the broad banner of animal studies. Institutes, book series and
conferences have proliferated. Formal academic programs have appeared.
Wesleyan University, together with the Animals and Society Institute,
began a summer fellowship program this year. A program at
Michigan State allows doctoral and master’s students in different
fields to concentrate their work in animal studies. At least two institutions
offer undergraduate majors in the field. And just this fall, New York
University started an animal studies initiative, allowing undergraduates
to minor in the field.
Dale Jamieson, director of that program, said
that activity in animal studies had been “somewhat inchoate” up to now, but
that he hoped N.Y.U. could help “to make it a more cohesive and rigorous
scholarly field.”
Animals have never been ignored by scholars, of course. Thinkers and
writers of all ages have grappled with what separates humans from the other
animals and how we should treat our distant and not-so-distant cousins. The
current burst of interest is new, however, and scholars see several reasons for
the growth of the field.
Kari Weil, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan
whose book “Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?”
will be published in the spring, said that behavioral and environmental science
had laid a foundation by giving humans “the sense that we are a species among
other species” — that we, like other animals, are “subject to the forces of
nature.”
Think of the effect Jane Goodall had when she first showed the
world a social and emotional side of chimpanzees that made it almost impossible
to keep them on the other side of the divide. Or watch the popular YouTube
video of a New Caledonian crow bending
a wire into a tool to fish food out of a container, and ask yourself
how old a child would have to be to figure out the problem.
The most direct influence may have come from philosophy. Peter
Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation” was a landmark in arguing
against killing, eating and experimenting on animals. He questioned how humans
could exclude animals from moral consideration, how they could justify causing
animals pain.
Lori
Gruen, head of the philosophy department at Wesleyan and coordinator
of the summer fellowship program in animal studies there, said one of the major
questions in philosophy was “Who should we direct our moral interest to?”
Thirty years ago, she said, animals were at the margins of philosophical
discussions of ethics; now “the animal question is right in the center of
ethical discussion.”
And of public interest.
Jane Desmond of the University of Illinois, a
cultural anthropologist who organized a series of talks there about animals,
says that what goes on in the public arena, beyond the university, has had a
role in prompting new attention to animals. There are worries about the safety
of the food chain, along with popular books about refusing to kill and eat
animals.
Animals as food are a major subject of academic interest, Dr. Gruen
said, adding, “Given that the way most people interact with animals is when
they’re dead and eaten, that becomes a big question.”
The animals humans live with and love are also a major subject.
Another strain of
philosophy, exemplified by the French writer Jacques Derrida, has had an
equally strong influence. He considered the way we think of animals, and why we
distance ourselves from them. His writing is almost impossible to capture in a
quotation, since it constantly circles around on itself, building intensity as
he toys with the very language he is using to write about what he is trying to
understand. His approach has been adapted in a lot of academic work.
In “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” for example,
he discusses at length not only what he thinks of his cat, but what his cat
thinks of him. In a fairly simple sentence — and thought — for him, he writes
about his cat: “An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?”
What animals think — in fact, what animals have to say — is something
scholars now take quite seriously, recognizing of course that there are limits
to that approach. As Dr. Weil of Wesleyan said, referring to the gulf between
animals and previous outsiders (“others”), like women or African-Americans,
“Unlike the other others, these others can’t speak back or write back in
language that the academy recognizes.”
The academy does, it seems, recognize and understand Derrida and,
sometimes, follow in his word tracks. Consider, for instance, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or
Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant” in a recent issue of The Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Other
writing is quite approachable. The moral arguments about eating animals are
clear. And there are studies that any urban dweller could profit from, like “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of
Problem Animals.”
The great variety of subjects, methods, interests and assumptions in
animal studies does raise questions about how it holds together. Law schools,
for instance, routinely have courses in animals and the law. Veterinary schools
have courses about the human connection to animals. Some people group courses in
how to use animals in therapy as part of animal studies.
None of this variety diminishes the energy or importance of what is
going on, but at least some people who work on subjects that would be included
under the animal studies rubric, like Dr. Jamieson at N.Y.U. and Dr. Desmond at
Illinois, think the scholarly ferment has a way to go before it can clearly see
itself as an academic field.
Dr.
Desmond says it is “not yet a field.” It is, she says, “an emergent scholarly
community.” One thing it does not lack is energy.
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