The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History

Hilda Kean, Philip Howell, Hilda Kean, Philip Howell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429889240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History provides an up-to-date guide for the historian working within the growing field of animal-human history. Giving a sense of the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the field, cutting-edge contributions explore the practices of and challenges posed by historical studies of animals and animal-human relationships.

Divided into three parts, the Companion takes both a theoretical and practical approach to a field that is emerging as a prominent area of study. Animals and the Practice of History considers established practices of history, such as political history, public history and cultural memory, and how animal-human history can contribute to them. Problems and Paradigms identifies key historiographical issues to the field with contributors considering the challenges posed by topics such as agency, literature, art and emotional attachment. The final section, Themes and Provocations, looks at larger themes within the history of animal-human relationships in more depth, with contributions covering topics that include breeding, war, hunting and eating.

As it is increasingly recognised that nonhuman actors have contributed to the making of history, The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History provides a timely and important contribution to the scholarship on animal-human history and surrounding debates.

PART I

Animals and the practice of history

2

THE OTHER CITIZENS

Nationalism and animals

Sandra Swart

‘Wounded Lions angry and disappointed after Springboks victory’, ‘Angolan Black Antelopes outrun the Lions of the Atlas’, ‘Congo’s Leopards devour Mali’s Eagles’, ‘Wallabies wallop Los Pumas’, ‘Vultures off to a flying start against Mauritius’: one reads the headlines and one might be forgiven for thinking that there is a global war raging in the animal kingdom. It appears to be an apocalyptic post-human extension of the nation-state; as though governments had wearied of human casualties and decided to appoint animals as their proxies – like knights of olde jousting to represent their kings. Another image is that of the more jaded of the Roman emperors, wearying of his bestiarii slaughtering exotic creatures and simply pitting the beasts against each other for the thrill of the crowd. Or perhaps it is rather as if heraldry itself had come to life and suddenly the lion rampant confronts a griffin sergeant or a springbok courant. This muscular menagerie of competitive and athletic beasts struggle to defend their nations’ honour. They seem to have taken Darwin’s hypothesis to heart and wish to see if really only – literally – the fittest survive. To turn from the sports pages, however, to the political cartoons, we see international disputes between the British bulldog, the Spanish bull, the Russian bear, the New Zealand kiwi, and the South African springbok. Sometimes even real, living animals make the political pages: in 2014, for instance, an endangered Siberian tiger named Kuzya crossed the frozen Amur River into China, prompting an international incident – after consuming some Chinese chickens. Kuzya inspired an even less diplomatic Russian-born tiger named Ustin to cross the border into Chinese territory and go on a sustained goat-killing spree. Ustin and Kuzya were not just any tigers – they were rescued as orphaned cubs, taught to hunt by Russian officials, and released into the wild by President Vladimir Putin himself. Since these tigrine wanderings, there have been outraged calls in Chinese social media for Putin’s tigers to be hunted and killed. Others have declared it a Kremlin spying mission through the GPS collars on the beasts. A Chinese official noted worriedly that the Russian tigers clearly had plans to cross the border again – but the sub-text is clearly a fear of the Russian Bear following the tigers’ example.

This chapter is intended to introduce the critical theme of animals, nationalism and national histories by offering both a brief overview of the existing historiography (to convey the main arguments and debates) as well as offering an illustrative case-study to understand these approaches at work. In this way it is intended to introduce newcomers to ‘animal–human history’ to a particularly important topic, as well as act as a reference guide and companion to the existing literature on this topic.

This chapter first discusses our historical understanding of nationalism, and then examines the literature on what we think of as the ‘Good Animals’ of nationalism. It explores the historical dimensions to the choice of ‘national animal’, defined as any creature that over time has come to be politically identified with a nation-state. The chapter draws on conventional understandings of nationalism (formal state-directed programmes), but also draws on Billig’s influential model of banal nationalism, the quotidian construction of a nation built on a shared (albeit constructed) sense of national belonging among humans, which often deploys non-human animals – both symbolically and materially.¹ The literal clash between animals and the rhetoric attached to it is examined by looking at the research at the intersection of nation and class, race, gender – to which this chapter adds ‘species’. As will be demonstrated, such rhetoric over ‘Good Animals’ is banal but far from benign.

The chapter then explores the ‘Bad Animals’ of nationalism. Certain animals have been understood as ‘bad’ by and for the nation-state. The chapter looks at how some key historians have discussed the construction of ‘vermin’ as a national problem. There has been an all too easy slippage, at some historical junctures, eliding human and animal ‘vermin’. The chapter subsequently turns to the clash between ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ animals: specifically, the politics of the alien versus the native animal. The chapter shows how humans can be forced into the category of the Bad animal too. The relationship between the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’ animal is explored through an analysis of the relationship between the ‘native’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘nation’. The chapter looks at roles the ‘animal-citizens’ play in the story a nation tells about itself. A metaphor about methodology taken from ecological sampling is apposite here in explaining the case-studies used: one throws a wired square called a quadrat at random onto the ground and then one scrutinises whatever species fall underneath it. Similarly, this chapter throws quadrats over a few global hotspots using various case-studies in order to understand how nationalists have deployed animals. Lifting the quadrats, we look at practices of breeding, slaughtering and eating animals and find wild and domestic animals, the tamed and the untamed, including the kinds of animals with which we opened this chapter but many others too – rugby-playing gazelles, penguins, skuas, trout, rhinos, whales, beavers, polar bears, kangaroos, and even Nazi cows.

Herderian herds

Can animals be nationalists? The question is not as absurd as it might seem. From some evolutionary theorists has arisen the argument that national or ethnic attachment is a form of evolved altruism among group-living animals. Usually such large agglomerations occur among mammals ‘in the form of herds … in which the average individual gains directly from joining the group. Rarely does membership in such a herd involve costs comparable to the self-sacrifice of those willing to die for their national pride’.² It has been argued, however, that if there is a biological basis for group strife it should be understood within the context of humanity’s quest for identity. Nationalism exists as extensions of the normal human (or animal?) desire to protect the group – the strong ‘affective need to delimit a social cosmos of conspecifics with whom he can share interpretations of his socially constructed world’.³ Nationalism and its hypertrophies (like xenophobia or racism) thus seems (to many theorists, such as Perry Anderson) a very human construct – but this position has been attacked by controversial populists such as Robert Ardrey and more serious researchers, such as Konrad Lorenz and Lionel Tiger; Ardrey and others were essentially using ‘animal nationalism’ to argue that humans were hardwired to seek territorial control.⁴

In navigating this debate one remembers uneasily the warring chimpanzee tribes described by pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall. She witnessed a four-year civil war for territory involving kidnapping, rape, and murder.⁵ The ‘Gombe Chimpanzee War’ that Goodall described raged from 1974 to 1978, a violent conflict between two groups in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. The Kasakela (in the north) and the Kahama (in the south) had previously been a single, unified community, but the chimps dispersed into northern and southern factions. Hostilities erupted in January 1974, when a raiding sortie of six adult Kasakela males killed a young Kahama male. By 1976, the war had gained full-throttled momentum with groups of Kasakela unleashing almost daily cross-border incursions into Kahama territory. Over the next four years, all of the Kahama adult males were killed by the Kasakela males. Of the Kahama females: one was killed outright, two went missing mysteriously, and three were kidnapped, beaten and raped by the Kasakela males. The Kasakela then took over the Kahama’s erstwhile territory. Alas, the war (like many human wars) was for nothing. With the Kahama gone, the Kasakela’s range now bordered the more populous and powerful Kalande, who quickly forced the Kasakela to relinquish their newly conquered territory. Scientists and the public were initially astonished by Goodall’s fieldnotes – as chimpanzees had been seen as inherently gentle creatures. But similar outbreaks have been recorded over time and the broad consensus is now that chimpanzees (like humans) aggressively defend territories against outside groups and struggle for dominance over neighbouring groups,⁶ basing their decisions to attack strangers on strategic assessments of the strength of their largely male coalitions.⁷ In fact, the uneasy feeling about parallels between the two species grows because of the familiarity of chimpanzee warfare: we recognise their silent patrols and tactical attempts to isolate and undermine their enemies – because they parallel our own. There were the usual casualties of war and war crimes: adults and babies were cannibalised during and after mêlées. Killing thus emerges for them – as it does for us – as a consequence of having ‘turf’, living in separate groups, and the vicissitudes of volatile power relations. It is questionable whether this can be defined as nationalism – although a lively literature has arisen defending the animal roots of human nationalism – this naturalisation of nationalism serves to legitimise in many quarters the aggressive defence of national borders. Nevertheless, whether or not they can be nationalist (in even a crude sense) themselves, this chapter will show that animals play a very lively role in a nation’s foundation and edifice, both materially and, particularly, symbolically.

‘Nationalism is a dangerous animal’⁸

The very first human to use the word ‘nationalism’ was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who understood it as a vigorous attachment to one’s own nation, based on (at least etymologically) a birth group or a blood-related group, which could (he lamented) also turn into chauvinism against other nations.⁹ Most subsequent philosophers have embraced the cosmopolitan narrative of a shared history and identity. Perhaps only Herder has offered the most enduring philosophical intervention in the other direction, as he conceptualised the nation as a major unit of social analysis or, indeed, as the basic ‘unit’ of humanity.¹⁰ Isaiah Berlin later interpreted this as purely cultural nationalism, but there are elements of political nationalism useful in our analysis.¹¹ Herder associated nations with particular terrains, marked by climate and topography – national landscapes.¹² Even when people were dispersed or migrated, he still thought them linked to their original homeland, which imprinted onto their sensibilities as children, permeated their thought and language and thus got passed down ‘from generation to generation’ even if people left that landscape by emigrating.

Despite Herderian notions of enduring generational transfer, nation-states are an historically relatively recent phenomenon: they are not eternal, despite their claims to the contrary. Ernest Gellner argued that, although nationalists pretend that nations were always there, ‘in the very nature of things [as it were, in Herderian terms], only waiting to be “awakened” … from their regrettable slumber, by the nationalist “awakener”.’¹³ As Ernest Renan reminds one: ‘Nations are not something eternal. They have begun, they will end’.¹⁴ He could have added: not anytime soon, though. Nationalism is not a spent force: as Serbia/Bosnia, the newly liberated republics of the Soviet Union, South Sudan, Scotland, Brexit and innumerable other examples demonstrate. While globalisation and mul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Animals and the practice of history
• PART II Problems and paradigms
• PART III Themes and provocations
• Conclusions
• Index