Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective (Routledge, 2000)

“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.

1. “Human social divisions are present in conflict with wildlife” (20 emphasis in original).
   1. This refers to everything from basic subsistence systems to displacement of rural populations in a globalized context
2. “[H]uman divisions are evident in conflict over wildlife” (20 emphasis in original)
   1. 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.
   2. “Secondary conflict over wildlife can also be generated by the primary conflict with wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
   3. Animal culling can become an agent of popular protest.
3. “Human conflicts are sometimes projected onto wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
   1. An animal comes to represent a human-human social conflict. The marginalized Other is sublimated onto the animal.
   2. 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.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002)

Concerning discussions at the 2000 IWC about Japan’s refusal to stop whaling, Matthew Scully stakes a position against cultural relativism:

While we are dealing with different people, different cultures, and different standards, we are still dealing with the same whale. Whales, when they swim into Japanese waters, do not assume a different nature, transformed at that instant from beings with moral claims into moral nonentities whose individual suffering or collective extinction suddenly become meaningless. Morally, a whale is one thing or the other. It’s not whatever we decide it is at any given moment in any given culture. (298)

This position is entangled in problems of ethics, international law, and cultural relativism. The apologist for Japanese whaling will typically assert that the international community has no right to tell the Japanese to stop whaling because whaling is historically embedded in the fabric of Japanese culture. The premise upon which this claim rests draws its authority from the history of imperialism. European or American styles of Western liberal democracy—saddled as such histories are with the baggage of imperialist and colonialist practices that continue into the present day (everything from Orientalism to the current situations in the Middle East or settler colonialism in North America and Australia)—have no ethical right to infringe upon non-Western cultural practices, so the argument goes.

In the context of an argument around animal abuses in the current legal framework of the international community, Japan’s attack on the cruel legacy of imperialism is fallacious. However, if we consider the inherently fraught history of imperialism and the law, we do encounter a further wrinkle in the Western position if we consider the flaws embedded within something like contract law. That is, we get entangled in the immediate problem of the difference between treating an animal as a living thing that innately deserves to live a cruelty-free life in the realm of morality and the ethical-legal status of an animal as property in the case of something like a pet or a farm animal. So there’s this difficult problem of what the whale “is,” so to speak, at a juridical level; I think the claim that goes implicit but ultimately inexpressible in Scully’s assertion that “Morally, a whale is one thing or the other”—regardless of the national border it crosses at any given moment—is the articulation of that moral status itself. We can set up any number of juridico-legal frameworks to posit an ethics that works in the service of what is moral, but the whale’s status as a moral thing will always exceed the symbolic order of this sort of ethics—Wolfe (2003) attends to the problems inherent to contract law and animal rights in his critique of Cavell and Hearne; Derrida (1998), following Lévinas (1961), address this as well, with respect to response and responsibility as qualities that fall under the more general category of ethics and morality.

In saying this, I don’t want to just surrender to an aporia, or make a weak utopian gesture toward an indeterminate moment in the future where the legal system or ideology will ultimately untangle this problem through the teleological march of history. I’m simply making the claim that, in the here and now, we do not have the words or the legal mechanisms in play to make a decision about whaling without first breaching our ethical codes. Again: The whale’s moral status exceeds this sort of understanding.

But I suppose a pragmatist would disregard this dimension of the problem as too abstract and bring it all back to the simple fact that the Japanese and the Norwegians continue to kill whales despite the international community’s protests and threats of sanctions. The Japanese will continue to slaughter whales because it is their prerogative to do so, end of story. But this brings us back to the web of legality; we can threaten sanctions but such sanctions don’t go anywhere because the self-serving logic of bureaucracy effectively blocks any real action. So we’re back to my premise; that real action or the real moral status of the whale remains unspoken and unspeakable before the symbolic order of the law as that which speaks through the bureaucratic apparatus. The Japanese breach the law but they still work within it insofar as they attend the IWC each year and continue to play along with the formation of committees and more sub-committees and ultimately adhere to the infinitely delayed threat of sanctions that won’t ever really add up to anything beyond a warning.

So how do we cut this Gordian Knot? If the concrete assertion of the whale’s moral status lies in actions like breaking international law and forcefully stopping the whale hunt, what does that sort of event mean? What does it gesture toward? Is this a positing of the indefinite against the forces of the present? A momentary rupture in the symbolic of ideology that expresses the extra-semiotic, like an act of terror? Is this why environmentalists or animal activists, when pushed past a certain threshold of action, will be harangued as eco-terrorists? Is terrorism the Real? Or, if it’s too much to venture into Lacanian territory (though Zizek is probably fair game for this diss), let’s call this a moment wherein the symbolic order of ideology hits a temporal and spatial limit; this isn’t to say that we’ve momentarily raised the veil on morality as some universal Platonic or Kantian property (as this isn’t really the place for ontology in the realm of speculative philosophy), but we could say that the present architecture of ideology hits a limit at which its cracks begin to show and we can act on our knowledge of the unspeakable qua morality despite the fact that that unspeakable as such must necessarily remain obscure. To evoke a version of Lévinas, knowledge of the other’s presence remains infinitely outside of me, as it must, and this imperative of the infinitely outside implies our shared imperative of ethical responsibility to each other.

Concerning ethics and the ambiguity of morals, Scully is unequivocal. He asserts the ultimate moral imperative as the dominion of a Judeo-Christian god. We can refer to this as a form of Neo-Platonism, I suppose, insofar as Scully posits a universalism in the form of the Good that pre-exists and supersedes human intervention. Indeed, his attack on Peter Singer’s position comes about from this premise. Given that Singer denies the existence of any moral authority outside of people themselves, it is left up to those people to draw the moral and ethical boundaries upon which we should act. For Scully, Singer’s “theories are not an appeal to morality or justice in any recognizable form, but a redefinition of justice” (327) because justice itself cannot constitute any sort of a priori category. The upshot here is that people must create and accept a moral code that is “produced ex nihilo” from Singer’s brand of preference utilitarianism; Singerian ethics becomes a primium mobile of sorts. Scully cannot accept this because his own moral paradigm infers an a priori preexisting morality, a claim he justifies through the pragmatic and common sense assertion that, all things being equal, most people have an intrinsic aversion to killing other living beings, and that intrinsic aversion isn’t calculable through any sort of utilitarian ethics; it’s just there in the way that we think. Implicit in Scully’s claim is that this everyday sensibility should be enough to dictate our moral choices while at the same time leaving room for a monotheistic God as the authorial locus of our ingrained morality and as the final reference point for any moral ambiguity. It’s up to us to do our best to find the best answer to difficult moral dilemmas that cannot be answered according to human logic, but with the faith that the answer itself is part of the great mystery of creation that exceeds human faculties.

At the risk of dredging up a variation of Marxian poststructuralism in which the subject gets lost in its own enunciation of itself by way of a symbolic order that both overdetermines and is overdetermined by that very subject, I confess that I am, nevertheless, interested in a third term that is left excluded in both of the universalist and preference utilitarian positions. Specifically, there remains the question of morality as both exterior to yet contingent upon subject-object relations. That is, morality doesn’t pre-exist us in the crude Platonic sense, but at the same time, just because it depends upon the subject-object relation for its articulation doesn’t mean that morality simply constitutes a placeholder for convenience vis-a-vis a Singerian ethics. That is, the relation itself produces a new term, what Levinas calls the radical exteriority of infinity, which, in turn, is couched in the idea of infinity. Scully proclaims that “With Professor Singer we step into the abyss, denying that moral truth exists and we must answer to it” (333). This is true, but where Scully thinks that Singer steps off into nothingness, I think that Singer doesn’t go far enough into the abyss, the so-called Derridean abyssal limit. The Form of Morality that informs Judeo-Christian strains of Western humanism is assumed to simply exist on a positive plane. Derrida, after Lévinas, would find here an aporia wherein morality is simultaneously external and internal to a subject that must efface itself before the Other, and the form of that relation itself is such that morality springs from the subject-object relation while at the same time exceeding it. Just as the self must efface himself before the other, morality must both exceed and limit itself to the two subject positions that it produces and from which it is produced. The real pressing ontological question here is not morality or subject-object relations; all of these things are concretized categories of a more abstract relation concerning any pair to be deconstructed at a general level (but, of course, the concept “pair” can only exist if there are subjects and objects to fill it). So the basic Derridean schema is one of infinite effacement before the Other. While ontology begins for Lévinas at my encounter with the Other, Derrida dwells in the ruptures that ontology begets.

With that said, rather than dwell in a crystalline structure of infinite abstractions brought about by the complexity of aporias atop other aporias, it is perhaps more productive to simply accept this abstract complexity as an unknowable given and focus instead on the complexity of the real-life, practical relations before us. For Lévinas, the subject starts at his responsibility to the other. Effacement to some extent does not matter because a deconstrucive schema won’t really get us anywhere insofar as how we act in the world that we see before us, and this latter condition, to many ethicists, is what is really important. Derrida, admittedly, is tricky on this because a text such as The Animal that Therefore I am works in the classical Derridean model of effacement but it also does so much more (or maybe less, given that the paradigm of aporia looms over the whole thing like a spectre). The text is haunted by aporia, but it also does a pretty rigorous job of critiquing the anthropocentric egoism of Western philosophy while submitting philosophy itself to deconstruction. So it is through his deconstructive method that we’re exposed to the anthropocentric violence of Western thought, and it at this limit that we face our responsibility both to ourselves and to others precisely because of our inability to really know what lies beyond us.