Noske, Barbara - Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals

Anthropologist and philosopher Barbara Noske analyzes the sociohistorical context, cultural values and beliefs, and language practices as well as their influences on human-animal and animal-human relationships. After exploring continuities and discontinuities, Noske concludes with an anthropology of animals. Noske's book can be divided into roughly three sections: (1) a critique of practices and industries of domestication, (2) an analysis of the discourses and representations of animals with an emphasis on science, (3) and finally a turn towards an anthropology of animals.

1. Noske utilizes P.F. Wilkinson's definition of domestication - the process of actively forcing changes on animals' seasonal subsistence cycles in order to make it coincide with  particular needs (3) - in order to avoid how other definitions (i.e. the capture and taming by man of animals, their removal from their natural living area and breeding community, and their maintenance under controlled breeding conditions for profit) convey a picture of an active human subject deliberately manipulating an animal object. Wilkinson's definition allows for a broader continuum of human-animal and animal-human relationships as well as a broader historical understanding of the situation. This definition is essential less for her analysis of domestication itself. Rather, it allows her to deconstruct the gendered associations of animals and animality-in-the-human in the second section by providing historical evidence of how actual relations with animals do not align with recorded and repeated stories about them. For example, the claim "there is no real reason to postulate an overall connection between domestication of animals and the domestication of plants (agriculture)" (10) and its concomitant evidence becomes the foundation for a later analysis of depictions of hunter-gatherer groups and their implications. The rest of this section relies on a fairly traditional Marxist analysis of domesticated animals, focusing largely on industrially produced animals - as food, food producers, lab animals, etc. Her analysis stresses how animals and humans experience the capitalist industrial complex in similar ways. Both experience four interrelated aspects of alienation from the "product, from productive activity, from species life, and from fellow-humans [for humans... surrounding nature for animals]" (20). This seems to be an attempt to demonstrate how humanist liberatory ideals, like those of Marxists and labor rights activists, align with those of animal rights activists. Afterall, the forward does mention that the text was written in conversation with animal rights activists, implying that the text itself is a strategic part of the movement. The chapter on "The Animal Industrial Complex" is perhaps the most interesting and useful analysis of the book.

2. While Noske's reading of the role of nature in enlightenment philosophy seems a little reductive compared to the nuanced reading given by Midgley, her focus is less on content of these thinkers and more on their intellectual framework and methodology - a move I appreciated and found lacking in Midgley. Time over and again, Noske identifies in enlightenment philosophy a double standard about processes of knowing capabilities and capacities (see quotations below). When she shifts to analyzing the discourses of contemporary science, she repeatedly identifies the dangers of a biological determinism or natural essentialism that runs through their interpretations of data. One key aspect that allows animals to be analyzed and objectified, according to Noske, is their de-animalization, their reduction to genetic and biological codes which control their behaviors. In fields like sociobiology, Noske persuasively argues that these theoretical orientations push their scientists to interpret cultural behaviors as biologically determined, not only in animals but also in humans, as though we were programmed by our genetic codes to have such cultures. Autonomy, personality, and culture all disappear under the reductive grind of biological determinism with this orientation. Page 98 is particularly relevant to bioethics, as it discusses the way this theoretical outlook impacts what are seen as good and bad ethics, adaptive and maladaptive respectively. The sociobiological perspective is dangerous because "it conceals an ideology which helps legitimize inter-human forms of discrimination and, like all previous biological determinist theories, is already being used to defend the social status quo. Some sociobiologists have complained that their theory is essentially neutral and has unfortunately been politicized. This attitude is at best naive in view of the sociobiological call for a biologization of human ethics" (99). Because this theoretical framework and biologically determinist tendency can be found in areas like ethology and biology, this is particularly relevant to animal rights activists as they think about what kinds of expertise to draw on in their debates. The implications of this insight, I believe, call for a redefinition of what counts as expertise in particular ways. A rhetorical intervention would need to be made in order to focus politicians' (or judges') attention on the right kinds of expertise, such as those who work regularly with animals (trainers and philosophers like Vicky Hearne). Though this too is complicated as trainers can carry the Behaviorist perspective of animals that reduces them to mechanistic responses to external stimuli.

While we don't have to believe that all animals are the same and there can still be species boundaries, these boundaries don't exclude the species from being considered morally. Noske's most useful contribution in the book is positing that it is conceivable that animals have their own distinct cultures. She looks at cases of feral children to argue not only that animals have their own cultures that help them construct their lived-worlds, but that they can imprint this culture on others. Feral children, by becoming almost one with the Other in the form of an animal, demonstrate that animals can recognize humans as part of their distinct culture. This leads her to argue that there needs to be an anthropology of animals. Anthropology, as the "science of the Other," has all the makings of an inter-subjective science even if situated in a sea of subject-object oriented sciences. Curiously, Nosky touts "participatory observation" as the pre-eminently "inter-subjective method[s]" of research. Yet, despite her turn to ethnographic methodology, she does little to complicate or discuss how the earthshattering developments of postmodernism affected the epistemological ground upon which the ethnographic method relies. This, sadly, is one of the lacking parts of the book. By merely gesturing to an alternative without picking up its complexities, Noske's impressive book becomes 98% critique without much of a viable framework to replace the admittedly reductionist and essentializing frameworks she demolishes in her analysis.

I want to take a moment to comment on the book's methodology and presentation. As Noske is an anthropologist, I was surprised by the form of the book. It relied very heavily on thick description and then analysis - unsurprising for anthropology - but it didn't seem to take into account any of the discursive innovations the discipline has wrestled with since the 60s due to the major epistemological debates surrounding ethnographic research. I suspect this was in part because of the author's imagining the book as participating in the animal rights movement itself. While many of the discursive innovations help alleviate epistemological concerns about positivism and the complications of speaking for the other, they are also off-putting and disconcerting to read at times - collage, mixed authors, multiple languages/genres, etc.. To a reader not aware of why these discursive moves are being made, these moves could affect the credibility of the text, whether it would be read, and it could increase the ways the text could be interpreted.


Quotations:

"In a sense the consciousness of animals ranges wider than ours. To define them as human-like individuals, such as ethical philosophers do, and give them rights accordingly, is to do them a disservice - to downplay their otherness and to treat them ahistorically as it were." (xiii)


"Before the rise of capitalism animal subsistence cycles were disrupted and changed. Under capitalism animals have come to be totally incorporated into production technology." (14)

"Since animal products have become commodities, animal 'skills' and bodies have been subdivided in roughly the same way as favoured by Frederick Taylor." (15)

" the animal industrial complex cannot be called neutral even as far as human-human relations are concerned. For the question has to be asked which human needs are being fulfilled and whose interests are promoted by the existing animal industrial complex." (23)

"At the heart of the animal research industry is the paradox of a presumed comparability of animals and humans, and at the same time the negation of this comparability." (37)

"Capital interests appropriate and misapply enormous natural resources at the expense of the well-being of animals and increasing numbers of humans... To adopt a non-exploitative, intersubjective attitude towards one's fellow human whilst continuing to approach animals as objects, is indefensible. Animal exploitation cannot be tolerated without damaging the principle of inter-subjectivity." (38)

"I have always wondered how humans (Marxists and others) can be so sure about their own ability to judge animal inabilities. Humans pretend to know from within that they themselves possess certain faculties and to know from without that animals do not." (78)

"Animals will continue to be objectified (and abused) as law-bound animate matter just as long as nobody protests against their de-animalization." (88)

"Facts, in Donna Haraway's words, depend on the interpretive framework of theory, and theories are loaded with the values of the theorizers and their cultures. (All knowledge, evidence, data and truths are products of the perceptions, methodologies and language of those who describe them.)" (101)

"In other words, even if there is such a thing as a species boundary between ourselves and all animals, might this discontinuity exist on a horizontal level rather than on a vertical and hierarchical level?" (125)

"Our own limited and ddefective command of body language may have created a situation where, rather than the animals' need, it is really our own need which dictates our efforts to teach apes and dolphins human languages." (148)

"The notion that animals culturally construct their own world some people already find hard to digest, let alone that animals could actively imprint humans with their culture!" (161)