The beast within': race, humanity, and animality

In Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow (eds.), Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, 161-178. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 2003

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018

This article takes its starting-point from an elderly Bardi woman's observation that elders 'used to frighten' younger generations with stories about various spirit beings. The beings she referred to are a group of malevolent beings inhabiting particular locations in her country, located in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia. Beginning with her observation that this is something that 'used' to happen, I consider the relationship between persons and different kinds of spirit beings amidst historical impetus for change. Political, economic, ecological, technological, and other impacts have occurred within the shifting context of progressive engagements with Western colonialism, capitalism, and the market economy, with implications for local ontologies. I suggest that these spirit beings are becoming less differentiated and consider the implications of this in terms of personhood and the constitution of the social, arguing that the disappearance of some of these beings is suggestive of a contraction of temporal and spatial extensions of personhood, with implications for relations with country.

This article focuses on the analysis of the geo-politics and body-politics of being, and perception as the key concepts in the decolonial option grounded in the spatiality and corporeality of our cognitive and perceptive mechanisms. Revived spatiality refers in this case not only to a physical space that we inhabit but also to our bodies as specific spatial entities – the privileged white male bodies or the damned, non-white, dehumanized and often gendered and sexualized bodies from the underside of modernity. The article presents a decolonial interpretation of the human/non-human binary aimed at rethinking the fundamental modern/colonial division into anthropos and humanitas and the subsequent animalization of large human groups. The main questions are then what does it mean to be animalized by and in modernity and what ways out are possible, desired and attainable for the dehumanized others? The main goal of the article is to further question liberal Western humanism from a decolonial perspective, without yet dropping this concept altogether, and considering instead another humanism model suggested by Sylvia Wynter. Contemporary critical anti-humanist and “other humanism” theories often find a much more accurate and immediate realization through artistic metaphors and activist art projects than traditional theory, problematizing the border between the human and the animal, the man-made and the natural, the individual and the communal. Therefore, the article dwells at some length on one such project balancing between art and critical anthropology – the works of the Northern Caucasus decolonial artist Taus Makhacheva.

Proceedings of the “Posthumanism and the Ecological Crisis” Conference, 2023

This paper examines Samit Basu’s speculative fiction Turbulence (2012) to situate postcolonial posthumanism within the novel and to deconstruct the concepts of speciesism and ableism. Turbulence depicts how four hundred and three passengers travelling on a British Airways flight from London to Delhi fall asleep and wake up to find themselves possessing superhuman abilities. Among those passengers are Sher and Mukesh, who possess powers that enable them to transform themselves into animals at their own will. The boundaries collapse one after the other, whether it is the human-posthuman, body-mind, or even human-animal. The complex relationship between the external animalisation of Sher and Mukesh and their thoughts and emotions that remain recognisably human suggests that these boundaries might not be as rigid and impenetrable as is generally assumed. They abandon the centrality of the human body and choose animal shapes to initiate changes in being and erode any binaries, separations, and priority accorded rationalities. The animal is no longer seen as the other in the posthuman context and is part of an environment that is non-hierarchical. The essay establishes this along the lines of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of animals as individuals with personalities who block their appropriation into victimisation discourses. This elevation of animals to the status of ‘individuals’ frees them from their status as Other and denies the humans their species supremacy. This paper uses postcolonial and posthuman theories to demonstrate how posthumanism crossovers with empowerment and colonial affective practices. Using a postcolonial posthumanist framework, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of human-animal relations.

At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentioned the native are zoological terms.

2003

Critical reading of the human-animal relation in the moral philosophies of Taylor and MacIntyre

Qualitative Sociology Review, 2007

Traditionally, sociology has spent much more time exploring relationships between humans, than between humans and other animals. However, this relative neglect is starting to be addressed. For sociologists interested in human identity construction, animals are symbolically important in functioning as a highly complex and ambiguous “other”. Theoretical work analyses the blurring of the human-animal boundary as part of wider social shifts to postmodernity, whilst ethnographic research suggests that human and animal identities are not fixed but are constructed through interaction. After reviewing this literature, the second half of the paper concentrates on animals in science and shows how here too, animals (rodents and primates in particular) are symbolically ambiguous. In the laboratory, as in society, humans and animals have unstable identities. New genetic and computer technologies have attracted much sociological attention, and disagreements remain about the extent to which humana...

Angelaki, 2019

Society & Animals, 1998