(US-tx) Breaking from the pack

[Animalconcerns Community]

[from Houston Chronicle]

History from a wolf's perspective? or a cow's? A new breed of thinkers
looks beyond Homo sapiens
...
The rebellious teenage son of a former colleague used to confront his
father with this taunt: "Say, Dad, what's new in history?"

He had a point. The past has already happened, so it seems difficult
to discover something new about it. Unlike archaeologists, few
historians unearth buried treasures or undiscovered archives that
reveal the secrets of a past civilization we didn't even know existed.
...
A few cutting-edge historians have begun to argue that animals are not
just beasts of burden, material resources or wild threats to the
spread of civilization, to be domesticated, eaten or exterminated by
human beings. Instead, animals behave in ways peculiar to their own
identity, and their independent actions impact human history in
sometimes surprising ways. In the catchphrase of the history generated
by the 1960s, animals have agency. If racism long distorted the way
historians discussed the history of African-Americans (as it did),
"speciesism" does the same for the way humans have written about
animals. Until now.
...
... At a conference last year in Montana, I heard a young faculty
member named Brett Walker present a wolf-centered paper about the
history and reintroduction of these animals in Yellowstone National
Park. While Walker had to endure the mocking howls his colleagues set
up outside the lecture hall (really!), inside he made an utterly
convincing case that the story of Yellowstone cannot be understood
unless we take into account the behavior of the wolves who have lived
there -- behavior driven by their own instinctual logic, rather than
purely as a response to the intrusions of human beings upon their
terrain.
...
The animal turn in historical scholarship is part of a larger
intellectual trend, known as animal studies or human-animal relations.
Drawing eclectically on the fields of environmental history,
psychology, cultural geography, bioethics and anthropology, scholars
have begun to think about how humans have constructed their identities
around encounters with animals, both wild and domesticated. No
emerging field can do without its scholarly journal, and animal
studies is no exception. Society & Animals is a multidisciplinary
quarterly that, in its own words, "explores the ways in which nonhuman
animals figure in human lives."

By no means is the animal turn a neutral approach to history. Just as
the upsurge of black and women's history of the 1960s grew in tandem
with the black and women's liberation movements, the animal turn is
part of today's project of animal liberation. Like their counterparts
in other disciplines, the new animal historians have a strong ethical
commitment to animal rights and reject the apparently natural dominion
of the human species over all others. They seek to connect the academy
and the abattoir, as Fudge puts it.

Most of these scholars probably draw their inspiration from the
controversial philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1975 book Animal
Liberation (Ecco, $14.95) represents a kind of early manifesto for the
animal-rights movement. But even if you are not a vegetarian -- this
is Texas, after all -- don't dismiss this fascinating work. Thinking
about the history of animals in new ways allows us to reconsider what
it means to be human. As Fudge puts it, we can learn more about humans
by understanding what they claimed they were not: animals.

Alex Lichtenstein teaches human history at Rice University.

--
full story:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/books/news/3248651

-----
http://www.animalconcerns.org/ - More News Headlines (RSS Feed),
Events, E-Mail Lists, Jobs, Organizations, and Forums (discussion
boards), ! Try searching for the news item on Animalconcerns.org!