Social-Political Animals
Social-Political Animals: Humans and Non-Humans in Early-Modern Society
Presented at FORWARD Symposium, Nottingham Trent University, 28th May 2008.
This paper is now available as a PDF.
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Investigations of a Dog
Failing better at understanding the past
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Comment by Nick — 11:42 am, 30 May 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
This is a really interesting paper, Gavin. It has got me thinking about the construction of non-human animals – John Taylor, author of the World Turned Upside Down, for example, draws on animal imagery a lot in many of his poems and pamphlets. I’ve been doing some work on Taylor recently and this is an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me until reading this. I’ll have to give it some thought. There’s some good references there for me to follow up.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 12:01 pm, 30 May 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
A random thought that I had during the symposium: it seems that when woodcuts use animals to represent cavalier and roundhead stereotypes the cavalier is on the left and the roundhead on the right. This is only based on a sample of two (the war horse and mill horse which I always use, and pepper and pudel, which Lucy used in her presentation). Is it always the case that roundheads and cavaliers are that way round, and does it have any significance?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 12:03 pm, 30 May 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
And something else which should have gone in the bibliography:
Comment by Ross Mahoney — 3:22 pm, 30 May 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Gavin
You would have thought that is there was a message in the citing of images it would be the other way around as the right represent tradition and orthodoxy hence why in politics the conservatives are right wing. Therefore, the cavliers, representing the King’s forces would be traditionalist and, therefore, on the right of the political spectrum. You would then imgaine that the Roundheads representing change and revolution would be on the left, the readical arms of the spectrum. I would imagine that if this was the message that is how it would be portrayed. However, I could be way off. Just a thought.
Sounds like a good paper though.
Ross
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 5:37 pm, 30 May 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I thought it might be something like that but I’m not sure when right=conservative and left=radical originated. Also in the earlier stages of the civil war both sides tried to be seen as conservative so that they could appeal to the middle ground. So it might depend on which side the pamphlet was supporting.
Comment by oral white — 7:02 am, 1 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Interesting piece. I wish I could have attended the seminar. In adding, Hribal has addressed your question of agency and resistance to a large degree: see his e.g. various Counterpunch essays (in particular, Kasatka, Emily and Tyke, and Janet) and his Animal, Agency, and Class (in Human Ecology Review).
Cheers,
Oral W
Pingback by Who Owns Whom? « ilegirl — 7:33 am, 1 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
[...] 31, 2008 at 11:33 pm (moodring) Today I really enjoyed reading Investigation of a Dog’s paper on animals in [...]
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:41 am, 1 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I’ll have to check out those Hribal pieces. I found “Animals Are Part of the Working Class” slightly frustrating as he made a lot of interesting and important points but then tried to force them into an old-school Marxist metanarrative. I also think he under-estimated the dangers of anthropomorphism. He’s dead right that accusations of anthropomorphism have often been used as an ideological weapon to undermine arguments for animal rights, but there is a danger that assuming other species to be no different from humans leads to misunderstanding their behaviour and needs. I see both anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism as things to be avoided if possible (although it might not be possible to avoid either of them).
Comment by Karl Steel — 6:55 pm, 2 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Glad to read this, and the bibliography on early modern sources should be quite useful to me! If you want to go a bit deeper (i.e., back to the Middle Ages) on hunting, poaching, and so forth, I can recommend a few things:
Marvin, William Perry. Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature. D. S. Brewer, 2006. <– great material on poaching raids between nobles in the romance Sir Dagrevant
Rivard, Derek. “The Poachers of Pickering Forest 1282-1338.” Medieval Prosopography 17 (1996): 97-144.
Harvey, I. M. W. “Poaching and Sedition in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Ralph Evans, ed. Lordship and Learning: studies in memory of Trevor Aston. 2004. 169-82.
Britnell, Richard. “Peasant Deer Poachers in the Medieval Forest.” Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller. ed. Richard Britnell and John Hatcher. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. pp. 68-88.
Birrell, Jean. “Aristocratic Poachers in the Forest of Dean: their methods, their quarry, and their companions.” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 119 (2002 for 2001) : 147-54. (this just a sample: anything by Jean Birrell is going to be excellent)
SNELL, Rachel. “The undercover king.” Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation. Ed. Judith WEISS, Jennifer FELLOWS and Morgan DICKSON. Pp. xi, 196. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer. (2000), 133-154 (great poaching literature)
I think material on the hermit Robert of Knaresborough is also important:
GOLDING, Brian. “The hermit and the hunter.” The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey. Ed. John BLAIR and Brian GOLDING. Pp. xi, 338. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1996), 95-117
BOTTOMLEY, Frank “Saint Robert and the deer.” Historian: The Magazine of the Historical Association 85, (2005), 27-31
I don’t know the 17th-century material in any detail, but I do want to point out that, at least for medieval English forests, it’s better not to think of there being only two legal categories of animals, domestic and wild. This is the case for some (Scandinavian) hunting law I’ve seen (which might be summed up as “finders keepers,” if you have that idiom in the UK), but given that deer, boars, rabbits, &c in a hunting preserve are tended and guarded by game wardens, and given that forests–at least in the period I know–would sometimes have ‘wild’ animals only because their owners had had the preserves stocked with them, it’s probably best to think of them as quasi-wild. Your material on sheep complicates even this complicated structure, and I’ll to do some thinking about it (as sheep would be economically useful in a direct way, whereas deer were economically valuable almost exclusively as cultural capital).
I’m pleased to see my paper getting some use at such an early date. I should say that hunting is but one of the methods by which humans established themselves (retroactively) as human, that is, with all the capacities humans purportedly possess uniquely. BUT, when I say ‘in reality’ and you say ‘in reality,’ we probably mean different things, perhaps because of our disciplinary differences (history v. literature); thus I think categorization can be as effective as hunting in establishing the human (and really I don’t think we’re all that far apart, since that’s clearly what you’re doing with your excellent analysis of the scold’s bridle).
Looking forward to seeing more of your thinking on this, Gavin.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 3:34 pm, 3 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Karl: Thanks for reading and commenting. Those references should be really useful.
I had to pack a lot of ideas into just over 20 minutes so it came out a bit superficial in places. There was going to be a discussion of the legal status of animals but I cut it because it was getting too long and so complicated that even I couldn’t follow it! In early-modern English law there was yet another category (sort of – it didn’t have a name): animals which were domesticated but which were not considered useful. Whether they counted as property or not was a grey area. Keith Thomas and/or Erica Fudge mentioned a court case which contested whether a dog could be owned and stolen. Only certain breeds of dog were definitely property by virtue of being useful. Also even when a species was normally considered completely wild, individual members of that species could become property if they were tamed, but if they went wild again they weren’t property any more.
Reality is a slippery concept and I’m not always sure what I mean by it. I come from a very empirical background, but I seem to be a lot more postmodern than Jason Hribal. For the purposes of this paper I was working from the premises that we can know something about what people said and did in the past but not about what they thought. That doesn’t necessarily make much sense, and if Keith Jenkins was in the audience he would probably have taken me apart. But I correctly assumed that this audience wouldn’t ask any difficult epistemological questions (the symposium had the word “reconstruction” in the title). That’s also why I didn’t waste any time explaining that I’m not in any way Lacanian even thought I kept talking about the real and the symbolic. They’re just convenient words. I don’t think of them as being necessarily separate or opposed. Any physical object or action can also be a sign which suggests lots of possible second-order meanings. Any sign pretty much has to have a physical existence as information regardless of what meanings people might find in it (although consciousness is wild card here – until someone cracks that problem there’s always a possibility that there’s something other than matter and energy going on in the brain). I was trying to show how physical and mental things can feed back into each other: the construction of cultural identities has a material impact on the distribution of resources, and the distribution of resources has an impact on cultural identities. For the past which no longer exists this is all hypothetical of course.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:45 am, 26 June 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Since I wrote this I’ve started to think that whipping people and whipping animals isn’t quite the same. For people, whipping is supposed to be a public shaming ritual. Therefore to get the full effect they have to be able to feel shame, which inadvertently acknowledges that they are human. This follows what Erica fudge argued about anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism collapsing into each other: one leads to the other. You can try to humiliate humans by treating them like animals, but if they are humiliated they must be human. I still think this is a case of Bruce Boehrer’s relative anthropocentrism, perhaps even more so than before.