“One of the main contentions of this book,” states John Knight in the introduction to Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective, “is that many people-wildlife conflicts can be understood as people-people (or people-state) conflicts” (2). From this premise, he continues, the essays in the book focus on themes such as pestilence discourses, conservationism, symbolism, and shapeshifting.
The book pays particular attention to the deep history of animal displacement by human settlement (6-7). Citing Leach (1992) and Richards (1996), Knight remarks that a narrative “of an original conquest over wild animals is evident in many local rites and myths relating to land reclamation or pioneer settlement” (7). However, conflict resolution and settlement patterns vary from culture to culture. These variations, in turn, generate further variations in human-animal narratives across a given cultural history or mythology.
The book sets out to make a distinction between “subjective” and “objective” instances of wildlife pestilence. The distinction is fairly straightforward insofar as the authors want to investigate some of the reasons why certain animals in certain contexts are constructed as pests (8). Knight’s claim here is that the “case studies” that make up these sections of the book “challenge the self-evident status of pestilence discourse by setting them in their wider social context and analysing them alongside the cultural symbolism of the animal in question” (9). This is an important intervention, but I find that the argument doesn’t do enough to complicate the formal structures of the binary it highlights, the question of whether it’s either animals that are disrupting some sort of human interest or the odd moment where a group of humans see themselves as pests that have disrupted the animals. That is, I’d like to know more about the premises within a given social group’s own collective mythical structure—it’s narrativization of itself—that lends these sorts of discourses their particular quality. What are the qualities that contribute to a particular construction of an animal as a particular type of cultural object in a particular context? What sort of cultural norms motivate a forest officer in British India, for example, to constructs the tiger as vermin, and then decide that the tiger deserves to be punished even though humans have driven it to act as it does? What are the conditions under which these authors construct their own representations of both themselves and animals as well as the relationships between them, and under what conditions are audiences receptive or unreceptive to these constructs? What might such an analysis tell us about our ongoing relationship with non-human animals in the popular narratives through which we encounter them?
Knight also considers the way that pestilence discourses change with social and economic development. While a pre-industrial farmer might be forced to maintain non-destructive concessions for animals who steal from their crops, industrial pesticides establish this expectation of complete elimination of the animal. It is in the context of such historical development that an animal once treated with a sort of resigned tolerance comes to be seen as an unnatural problem (10). Indeed, the drift of pestilence discourse dovetails into something that resembles hygiene, the eradication of an unwanted presence that simply “doesn’t belong here,” the animal as “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’ famous formulation of dirt. I wonder what this means when we hit the threshold at which wild nature exceeds human control, an extra-something outside the boundaries of what we deem appropriate or recognizable? A question I would like to posit here to Knight is whether it might be the case that we do not only exclude animality from cultural discourses, but that we preemptively foreclose lifeworlds that escape our ability to reason.
Then there is conservationist discourse, particularly the trope of the “protected pest,” a paradoxical situation in which animals associated with “excess and proliferation” need to be protected (11). This gets still messier when conservationists seek to displace local people while protecting the animals that were disrupting those people in the first place. Knight observes that mainstream wildlife conservation relies on a “dualistic view of nature and society” whereby nature is cordoned off as a discrete sphere to be protected from human intervention or resource exploitation. Consequently, in a rural or Indigenous context, local people are scapegoated and sometimes displaced. Ramachandra Guha sees this phenomenon as a form of authoritarianism that creates a “lebensraum” for protected animals that can then go ahead and invade vulnerable communities (Guha 1997: 16). To this we can also add Kay Milton, who maps the “nature-culture” boundary alongside the species boundary. The nature-culture boundary is basically the construction of a discrete sphere of nature as outside human intervention. This leads to all kinds of problems when certain animal populations are themselves deemed unnatural because they disrupt the preconceived order of nature within a preservationist/conservationist paradigm.
The exclusivism of the preservationist movement has prompted the emergence of “participatory conservation,” which emphasizes participation from local populations. Because participatory conservation unquestioningly proceeds from a utilitarian strategy in the same vein as preservationism, its logic begs certain questions, maybe none more salient than the assumption that all species have to be useful, or that they have to serve a recognizable function within the social context into which they are incorporated (Knight 13). This brings us back to the initial problematic of species boundaries, where everything has to fit into a symbolically coherent circuit.
If animals are made to perform a given position within a society’s symbolic structure, any instances of disorder or deviance from that structure situates those animals as pests, as surplus or unnecessary excess. This excess is read in terms of space, where space is understood in both the material and the abstract sense. Animals that cross certain geographical, social, or symbolic/spiritual boundaries renders them anomalous or problematic, maybe even uncanny (see Tambiah 1969: 450-451; Condominas 1994: 116-117; Jackson 1975: 398-399; Fiddes 1991: 142-143; Glickman 1995: 527-528). NB Simon Leach (1964), who talks about the role of “vermin” in animal symbolism and boundary crossing. This should shed some light on the tiger as vermin discourse.
Expanding on his premise that “much wildlife pestilence is not reducible to an elemental conflict between people and wildlife, but is also the site of conflict with other people” (20), Knight outlines three key relations.
- “Human social divisions are present in conflict with wildlife” (20 emphasis in original).
- This refers to everything from basic subsistence systems to displacement of rural populations in a globalized context
- “[H]uman divisions are evident in conflict over wildlife” (20 emphasis in original)
- People-wildlife relations are predicated on human interest, and human interest is predicated on social and cultural context. To take a simple example, a wild herbivore can be food for the hunter but vermin to the farmer. This leads to conflict amongst humans as well as between some humans and animals, especially power conflicts and displacement.
- “Secondary conflict over wildlife can also be generated by the primary conflict with wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
- Animal culling can become an agent of popular protest.
- “Human conflicts are sometimes projected onto wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
- An animal comes to represent a human-human social conflict. The marginalized Other is sublimated onto the animal.
- Or, to flip it around, the animal becomes the representation of the state favouring animal interests over those of human struggle.
Further reading:
Condominas, G. We Have Eaten the Forest. New York: Kodansha, 1994.
Descola, P, and Palsson, G., eds. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1996.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.
Fiddes, M. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.
Glickman, S. “The Spotted Hyena from Aristotle to the Lion King: Reputation is Everything.” Social Research 62.3: 501-537.
Guha, Ramachandra. “The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World.” The Ecologist. 27.1: 14-20.
Leach, E.R. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” New Directions in the Study of Language. E.H. Lenneberg, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1964.
Tambiah, S.J. “Animals are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit.” Ethnology 8.4: 423-459.
we are the precariat 