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“ The world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans.” -Eduardo Kohn

Essay 1 Towards an Anthropology of Birds: A Critical Review

In his latest work How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human

(2013), anthropologist Eduardo Kohn recounts a poignant incident that occurred on the

way to his field site in the Avila region of rural Ecuador. While traveling, a series of

landslides trapped the bus he was riding on, causing him to panic and his thoughts of

potential dangers to run wild. What was most disconcerting to Kohn was the alienation

he felt from everyone else—the other passengers were apparently carefree and

undisturbed by the event—and eventually his own body. He was no longer grounded,

but felt “a tenuous sense of existence without location (47)”, an experience he later

understood as being caused by the “suffocating weight of all the future possibles

opened up by the symbolic imagination (48).”

This sense of profound anxiety and crippling alienation from the world stayed with

Kohn until the next day when taking a walk by the Misahualli River he happened to spot

a tanager moving about in the brush. It was at the moment his binoculars focused on

the colorful bird that his anxiety dissipated, his sanity was regained, and he experienced

a shift—rather than feeling detached from his environment he was thrown back in it, re-

grounded in a larger semiotic world “beyond the human”, one shared with a diverse

number of beings. In his ethnography, Kohn uses this incident as a way to explore the

“psychically untenable…life negating…separation that symbolic thought creates,” and

thus the inherently flawed nature of analytic approaches that gather understanding of

the world through solely focusing on the distinctively human phenomena of the

symbolic—what we anthropologists view as the cultural or the social. Traditionally the

symbolic—often directly equated with language—is what is believed to separate and

distinguish humanity from all other animals. However, Kohn’s aim is not only to point out

the separation it creates, and thus its inability to account wholly for how we experience

our lives in the world, but to also point out what was evidenced when he was

regrounded with the help of a bird—that there are nonsymbolic representational

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modalities that affect and make up our lives, modalities that are in continuity with

symbolic or linguistic ones.1

While in recent decades there have been important movements towards accounting

for the nonhuman—pushes toward recognizing object agency (Bennett 2009), mapping

networks of diverse ontological actors (Latour 1999, Callon 1998), and challenging

paradigms of human exceptionalism (Haraway 1988, 2008; Daston 2005)—Kohn

argues that these posthuman critiques still maintain a fundamental dichotomy between

humans and a generic nonhuman. Although evolutionary studies have disrupted such a

dichotomy, understandings of multispecies worlds still neglect to fully consider shared

forms of communicative and semiotic processes. Minds and representation sit in

opposition to bodies and matter, thrown together through “analytic(s) of mixing” that

ultimately fail to account for different ways of thinking and being that are nested together

within a larger world. What was it about the bird that regrounded Kohn? How much does

this world “beyond the human” encompass or account for our human lives and

experiences? What are the implications for an anthropology that can’t account for this

“other stuff” that makes up our world?

An essay entitled “Towards an Anthropology of Birds” aims to engage ways of

redressing anthropology’s participation in such flawed analytics through exploring the

robust relationship between humanity and a particularly prolific and unique kind of

animal, one that has captivated and mystified us for thousands of years, the same one

that snapped Kohn back into the world. He offers the Amazonian tropical forest—with its

extraordinary diversity of species and myriad forms of relationality, communication, and

unique ontologies—as a resource, where life itself beyond the human and the semiotic

forms that constitute it are amplified and apparent. Birds themselves also offer us a

place to look—and to focus on—due to the special, numerous, and deliberate ways

we’ve entangled our lives with them, as well as the complex ways in which they are both

strikingly different and surprisingly similar to us. With over 10,000 species worldwide,

birds occupy a wide array of distinct niches. They display a seemingly incalculable

number of communicative and song learning practices that baffle and amaze us, and

that frequently defy scientific expectations and classification. However, not only do they

catch our attention by pulling us into the world and amplifying nonhuman life and its

semiotic forms, we’re also relating to them in radically new ways. As the cognitive profile 1 A more detailed analysis of Kohn’s stance on semiosis and living thought is explored later in the essay.

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of avian species continues to change scientists have begun to use birds and their songs

as models for human speech acquisition and developmental research, challenging

primates as the unrivaled nonhuman exemplar of higher intelligence and comparative

value. Familiar paradigms of evolutionary teleology and intelligence hierarchies get

disrupted and reordered as we begin to focus on what we share with birds and

nonhumans, as well as what is different but not inferior.

When one gestures “towards an anthropology” of something—towards women,

science, or in this case, birds—the motive is to address what was previously excluded,

unrepresented, or outside the parameters of anthropology. It works to redefine the field,

recalibrate methods, acknowledge disciplinary assumptions, and reconsider something

overlooked or misinterpreted. Thus, as a critical reanalysis, this essay aims to trace how

birds have been historically understood as objects and symbols in relation to humans,

and how that is beginning to change, both within the social sciences and a number of

innovative scientific research labs across the world.

However, it does not aim to just add birds to a list of traditionally “invisible” objects

that now need recognition, but to push further in addressing a fundamental crisis in

anthropology concerning our relationship to nonhumans—how can we account for both

coexisting and co-representing with other beings in the world? Thus, rather than solely

making a statement that birds and nonhumans should also be included as legitimate

objects of anthropological inquiry or demonstrating how we can use birds to “think

through” flawed paradigms and conceptual trends—though tracing this out is important

work—a critical component of this essay is to also talk about why this is about birds.

The analogies cannot be sloppy. The objective is not to see what about birds is human

or human like or to apply human ways of being on birds—but rather to explore the

complex ways we relate to them. How do the specific and unique ways they move,

relate, and sing in the world seem to distinctly undermine modern cosmologies and

paradigms? How might we conduct an anthropology of birds in which value gained

wasn’t primarily centered on what they mean to humans, but rather, how they

themselves represent and live in the world and how that might affect or relate to us?

However, before addressing these questions we must spend considerable time

exploring how birds have been treated in the literature in order to see what issues are at

stake, to recognize historical paradigms that persist or mutate and re-emerge, and to

know where to intervene. Although we will examine numerous treatments of birds, in

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areas as diverse as ethology, animal rights theory, and multispecies ethnography, we

will first spend considerable time discussing two different trajectories that lay the

foundation for these discussions : indigenous knowledge of birds through both symbolic

and ethnoscientific analytic frameworks, as well as the making of birds into specimens

and consumable, collectible objects of natural history.

Indigenous Knowledges

Birds have long appeared in the ethnographic record, primarily in early

anthropological work as a component of the epistemological practices of indigenous

cultures. Anthropologists have documented a culturally diverse appreciation for avian

species, demonstrating that birds are significant objects and symbols for a wide array of

societies around the world. In fact, ethno-ornithologists maintain that birds are

“distinctly important to humans”, offering as evidence the sheer number of stories about

birds which far exceed that of any other organism (Tidemann & Gosler 2010). Birds are

sources of meat for sustenance, feathers for currency and rituals, and viscera for

medicinal purposes. They appear abundantly in art and sculpture and are often believed

to hold healing properties and supernatural powers—for example, ethnographers

continue to document how in certain parts of Africa ostrich eggs are kept in homes to

protect them from lightening strikes while in South America the fat of several different

species is thought to cure a range of afflictions including tuberculosis, asthma, and

venomous snake bites (Tidemann & Gosler 2010: 9). While the more mundane uses of

birds-as-objects is well represented and extensively catalogued, much more time and

theoretical concern in anthropology has been centered on understanding the symbolic

use of birds and other nonhumans in indigenous belief systems. In particular, there are

two historical trends within the discipline that it would be fruitful to explore: the study of

totemistic practice and ethnoscientific interest in folk taxonomy.

Bird totems

Early in the discipline human relationships to animals and the natural world were

largely dealt with through the analysis of totemism and animistic myth (Malinowski 1926,

Frazer 2010 [1910], Levi-Strauss 1971, Radcliffe-Brown 1929, Evans-Pritchard 1956,

Durkheim 1995 [1912], Douglas 1957). When anthropologists first began to study the

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fundamental structures of “primitive” culture—such as kinship, religion, and

cosmological beliefs—they encountered birds as major players within analogical

narratives and practices of social identity. In analyzing Aboriginal societies in Australia,

Emile Durkheim (1912) encountered the crow as a clan totem, and worked to unpack

and demystify the relationship between the human phratry and their totemic species.

Whereas the Aborigines claimed that men of the Crow Phratry were crows, Durkheim

asserted the (all-too-obvious) contention that these men were not actually crows.

Instead, he argued that they shared a common spirit or social identity that bound them

together—thus, rather than being about what these clan members had in common with

crows, crows became a tool through which these members found commonality in each

other. In this sense, what seemed illogical—equating humans to birds—was actually a

powerful and transformative social force and mode of representation that functioned to

both establish and reinforce cohesion in the group.

Crows and other animals are swept up in human systems of ideas; they become

important or meaningful as symbols, emblems and totems. The idea of the crow is what

becomes effectual and dynamic while the actual bird becomes inexpressive and

valueless for ethnographic interpretation. Durkheim continually disregards anything

distinct, palpable, or specific about the bird itself and reminds his reader several times

that any actual resemblance between the human and the totem is an occasional and

negligible factor in the motivation of totemic identifications. Keeping up with this line of

thought he later writes that “it was not the intrinsic nature of the thing whose name the

clan bore that set it apart as the object of worship” (207). The actual crow has no value

to society in-and-of-itself as interpreted, it is only the symbolic representation of a crow

that garners religious meaning and plays a positive role in human relational practices. At

their most primal, humans are presented as symbolists—it’s exactly this that sets them

apart from the crows they believe themselves to be. What makes nonhumans and

nature meaningful is how the idea of them gets wrapped up in that all-too-human stuff of

language, religion, and kin relations.

When researching the Nuer of the southern Sudan, social anthropologist E. E.

Evans-Pritchard (1956) likewise encountered stories of humans that were also animals

and set out to unravel the metaphors and analogies that underlie those views. In

particular, he was interested in exploring the Nuer belief that human twins are also

birds. Because migratory birds fly up in the sky near the heavens they were associated

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with God and were understood as manifestations of spirit. Twins were also associated

with divine intervention, as humans normally give birth to young singly. Additionally,

Evans-Pritchard also believed the Nuer drew analogies between the multiple hatchings

of eggs and the dual birth of human twins (1956: 129). Thus, when a twin died their

corpse was laid out in the forks of trees instead of being buried. They also participated

in numerous religious practices throughout their lives as liaisons between the earth and

the heavens. In Nuer Religion (1956), he argues that this belief does not “express a

dyadic relationship between twins and birds, but a triadic relationship between twins,

birds, and God” [Emphasis added (1956:132)]. It is this last figure of the trinity that

identifies what both Durkheim and Evans-Pritchard were interested in unearthing and

elucidating—it is also what both connects and disrupts the other two. What becomes

important in understanding the relationship between humans and birds for this type of

analysis is neither an individual Aborigine, a kind of bird, or any direct interaction

between the two but rather the collective symbolic practices and social organization of

human communities. Relationships between humans and birds are understood through

comparative practices in which a God or some other symbolic representation

paradoxically distances the two beings while simultaneously drawing them together.

It is worth mentioning that those listed earlier in association with the early study of

totemic practices did not necessarily agree on the scope or role of totemism in

indigenous cultures—or even in its existence. Malinowski (1926), for example, stressed

the nonsymbolic reasons for totemism such as control over nature and things “good to

eat.” Franz Boas (1940 [1966]), and Claude Levi-Strauss2 (1969) argued that totemism

as an institution or social reality didn’t actually exist but was rather a construct of the

ethnographer. In fact, in Totemism (1971), Levi-Strauss discusses how the concept of

the social institution is an “artificial unity, existing solely in the mind of the

anthropologist”, highlighting the ethnocentricity of past ethnologists who, feeling dis-

ease in confronting practices that didn’t correspond to the dichotomy between man and

nature so fundamental to Christian thought, quarantined “primitive” social systems to a

proto-rational dawn (1971: 10). Moreover, according to Levi-Strauss, the relationship

between humans and nature was not arbitrary and contingent but rather had to do with

the “logical power of systems of denotation that are borrowed from the realm of nature”

2 While Levi-Strauss could just as easily belong in the tradition of ethnoscience and interest in cultural universals, he is instead included here for his contributions to the study of totemism.

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(1971: 13)—i.e. if Malinowski claimed that birds were good to eat, Levi-Strauss claimed

they were good to think. While this account, among many others, challenged a

functionalist take on totemism, nonhumans still stand as objects wrapped up in systems

of symbols and human thought that conferred order and structure upon the world.

Symbolic. Metaphoric. Analogical. Apart from the more pragmatic uses of animals,

these describe the kinds of one-way comparative practices that could occur between

humans and nonhumans in these accounts, as in most traditional ethnographic work.

The nonhuman becomes an “empty vessel” and its specifics and subjectivity are

arbitrary (or rather, nonexistent)—what is of value is how and through what means the

human bestows substance to this asymmetrical coupling. Analytic frameworks such as

these, in which nonhumans are no more than symbols or part of the environmental

context structuring human social life, have a wide and influential reach within

anthropology. Take for instance, Clifford Geertz’s (1973) renowned essay “Deep Play:

Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In his interpretation of this cultural practice, Balinese

cocks become symbols of masculinity, stand-ins for their powerful male owners, pawns

of cultural expressions and social identity. Geertz seems to echo the tone of these

earlier accounts in his ethnographic efforts to dig below the surface and demystify: “For

it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it’s men.” While the intimacies

between men and their cocks aren’t metaphorical—he details the practices of everyday

care and admiration that constitute their relationships—they are symbolic (1973:450). In

addition, he also writes that the “cockfight enables the Balinese to see a dimension of

his own subjectivity” (ibid). Geertz presents a complex analysis—one in which cocks

are implicated in not just symbolic practices, but affective and emotional ones as well.

Seeing cultures as “assemblages of texts” (1973:448) rather than functional organisms,

he offers a more reflexive take on the relationship between individual and society, as

well as between the ethnographer and her subjects. However, at the end of the essay or

rather, the end of the fight, the cock lies there lifeless, bloody, dead, excluded from

subjectivity or alternately, victorious and championed, drowned out by the voices of the

Balinese crowd.

Classified Birds

Rather than framing human relationships with birds and nonhumans primarily in

terms of symbolic analogies associated with mythico-religious thought, ethnoscientists

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have been interested in exploring them through the local taxonomic or folkbiological

classifications of native flora and fauna in indigenous communities (Conklin 1972, Berlin

1978, Bulmer 1973, Hunn 1982, Ellen 1993; for social studies of these practices see

Atran 1990). It is through studying these folk taxonomies that these scientists3 have

claimed to reveal universal cognitive features and forms of basic rationality that reject

the framing of non-Western societies and their beliefs solely in terms of cultural

idiosyncrasies. Pioneering ethnobotanist Brent Berlin (1978, 1992) has intensively

studied the folkbiological reasoning of Mayan people of Mexico for decades, developing

a methodology for analyzing universal patterns of categorization, as well as an agenda

for promoting anthropology as a legitimate scientific practice (Hirschfeld 1992). His

findings demonstrate that the naming of living things is largely similar throughout the

world and was also corroborated by zoological reports such as Jared Diamond’s (1972)

on the avifaunal knowledge of Highlanders in New Guinea. Folk categories generally

correspond to scientific ones—i.e. how we perceive and organize the world around us is

structured by a cognitive architecture that all humans share. Importantly, he sets himself

apart from the greater part of the discipline in insisting that we need to consider and

take into account how biological cognition affects the ways we think about the natural

world. Thus, for Berlin, plants and animals are presented to the human observer as

“perceptual givens that are largely immune from the variable cultural determinants found

in other areas of human experience (1992: 9).” Relationships with nonhumans are thus

not merely historically or culturally contingent, but become salient and visible through

our cognitive filters.

A small assembly of contemporary cognitive anthropologists continue to champion

the primacy of biological cognition and universal cognitive processes in understanding

human inference and relationships to human and nonhuman kinds. Working to explicitly

rethink and complicate symbolism as an all-encompassing explanatory theory of cultural

phenomena (Sperber 1975), these scholars have argued that it is unsustainable to

systematically demarcate “public symbols and private mental knowledge” (Bloch

2012)—thus, they argue that anthropologists must come to terms with how knowledge 3 I.e. While some ethnobiologists focused on the universal nature of cross-cultural classification, others were more interested in relativism and cultural context such as Ellen who now champions the necessity of local, indigenous knowledge for conservation practices. While this follows logically from a relativist perspective, I’m more interested here in the other. In addition to those interested in universalism or relativism are those such as Hunn who seems to be more interested in practical motivations behind classification which he felt were treated as secondary to general intellectual and cognitive schemas.

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is gathered and organized in actual, individual minds (Boyer 1993). Importantly, they

seem to collectively argue that humans come equipped with cognitive structures that

see living kinds as distinct ontological “chunks” (Atran & Medin 2008). While some have

explored these cognitive structures through interdisciplinary practices with

developmental psychologists, by studying racialist and essentialist thinking in children

(Hirschfeld 2006, Hirschfeld et al 2007, Gelman 2005, Carey 1985)—thus, a different

kind of “alien” culture—others have continued Berlin’s project of studying categorical

thinking via knowledge of local flora and fauna in faraway places (Atran & Medin 1999,

2008; Atran 1990; Medin 2005).

Notably, Scott Atran and Douglas Medin’s (2008) emphasis on considering “relative

contact with nature” when analyzing folktaxonomic reasoning, and their concern for the

“diminishing knowledge about nature” in Western and developing societies, highlights a

significant theme in this subfield that centers on the legitimacy of folk knowledge in the

face of “objective” and authoritative Science (Atran & Medin 2008: 2, Nader 1996). In

fact, in his earlier work, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an

Anthropology of Science (1990), Atran explores how science in fact emerged from and

is contiguous with common sense thinking. Folk knowledge or common sense beliefs—

what drives our spontaneous experience of a local world—are restricted to visible,

“readily accessible” realities (1990: 3). With the birth of modern systematics in the late

18th and 19th centuries intellectual interest in the natural world was moving away from

subjective, phenomenal reality towards objective, biological interests in genetics and the

“unforeseen” (1990: 10). Although modern science has explicitly distanced itself from

common sense, Atran argues that it is still founded upon and indebted to folkbiological

thinking. He works to offer a more balanced view, in which folk knowledge is neither

fetishized (which is all too often the case in contemporary ethno-ornithological

ethnographies, see *) nor underestimated in relation to more “advanced”—or rather,

differently focused—forms of understanding.

Additionally, in conducting cross-cultural experiments, Atran has shown that

similarities in ecological reasoning among American practical experts such as

birdwatchers and adult Mayans are significant because they are dissimilar from urban

American individuals who use taxonomic information to reason via formal scientific

paradigms (Atran et al. 2006: 98). For our purposes, Atran’s critical commentary on

scientific relational practices to the natural world are of interest here. Encountering

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alternative ways of relating to the nonhuman world through lay and indigenous

practices, he laments the loss of ecological awareness, the harm caused by

anthropocentric reasoning, and the inanity of scientific pursuits in the face of everyday,

mundane problems that come from both underestimating common sense knowledge

and a lack of exposure to the nonhuman world (Hirscheld: Atran 121). He calls to mind

important questions: Who can say what about birds? And what’s their motivation?

Apart from Atran, there are others interested in promoting folk or lay knowledge

as it relates to nonhuman life, from those interested in ordinary language philosophy

(Dupre 2006) to others interested in the importance of TEK (traditional ecological

knowledge) in developing viable conservation practices (Klenk 2008, Tidemann &

Gosler 2010), to those interested in the eco-political consequences of emotional and

religious attachments to nature (Milton 2002, Taylor 2010), to the contributions of citizen

scientists, such as amateur birders (Dunlap 2011). Although we might have detoured a

little too far into discussions of expertise, my aim was to demonstrate what’s at stake,

both historically and biologically, in the accumulation and interpretation of different kinds

of knowledge about nonhuman life such as birds.

While ethnoscience and practices of cognitive anthropology bring important

discussions to the fore—the way we perceive and organize knowledge about birds in

the everyday world and the ecological implications of those practices—attention is still

centered on the human. Rather than being focused on culturally dependent symbolic

analogies it instead focuses on the intersection between phenomenal reality, the human

mind, and cultural practices. Birds are still a means through which anthropologists learn

about the human—the emphasis is not on the birds, or the relationship, but rather

“animals of the mind” (Ingold 1994) via the individual human (as opposed to the

collective via the Durkheimian legacy). Birds are here caught in the crosshairs of

science and indigenous knowledge, ultimately the raw means for sussing out human

nature. However, rather than being an issue of anthropocentrism or a theoretical

critique, this is an issue of focus—focus here is on human cognition and how

evolutionary history with plants and animals helped mold it (Atran & Medin 2008).

Additionally, rather than taking a moral stance that indigenous or lay knowledge is better

equipped than science for understanding the world, these anthropologists trace their

continuity with one another. Moreover, these accounts urge us to consider issues of

distance and proximity when understanding our relationships to birds—Concerning out

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relationship to the natural world, what have we unlearned and moved away from? What

forms and kinds of knowledge do we bring to the table and how do they deviate from

and/or intersect with one another? What becomes relevant and why?

Birds as Specimens

Overview on Collecting

Imperialism sets the stage for this discussion on natural history and collecting

practices. Birds here become things and objects of wonder from exotic, conquered

lands. Within postcolonial literature, they are part of the dense, dynamic tropic life and

“excessive nature” (Raffles 2002) of the colonies that were encountered by explorer-

scientists when traveling foreign, savage, and uncultivated worlds. Birds, along with

insects and other easily transported objects of nature, became sought after as

commodities and as additions to museum collections of natural curiosities in early

modern Europe (Findlen 1994, Daston & Park 1998). During this time—and even earlier

during the Medieval period—these collections and cabinets of curios were associated

with the intellectual elite. However, by the early 19th century collecting had become a

popular, middle-class pursuit in England and America. Amateur Victorian naturalists,

such as Henry Walter Bates, journeyed to places like the Amazon at the behest of

wealthy benefactors and “armchair” scientists in order to extract insects, birds, and

mammals from the forests there, literally following paths carved out by prior military

expeditions. These preserved and catalogued animals would then be shipped back

home, where they were concentrated in metropolitan “centers of calculation” and

reinvented as specimens (Raffles 2002, Parry 2004).

Birds from the colonies, once part of the “brute materiality” of “nature

overwhelming”, were thus made into consumable objects—available for scientific or

taxonomic pursuits, as “tactile metonyms” in practices of region-making, as trophies for

individual hobbyists, as subjects of travel writing which eagerly engaged metropolitan

publics, and as both the practical means and symbolic representation of the social

climbing and scientific aspirations of amateur naturalists such as Bates (Raffles 2002,

Pratt 1991). The spatial aspects of the circulation and re-contextualization of birds as

specimens and collectable objects cannot be emphasized enough. The acquisition and

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transfer of natural objects from the colonies, the wild, the periphery to the center, the

crowded metropole, the all-too-human is inextricably linked to their value.

Bioprospecting practices and the collection of biomaterials continue to be important

topics for anthropologists and postcolonial scholars interested in biotechnological

regimes (Hayden 2003, 2007; Parry 2004; Franklin 2006; Rajan 2006) and U.S.

imperialism (Stoler 2006). Practices of contemporary bioprospecting refer to the

extraction and appropriation of biological resources and ethnobotanical knowledge from

indigenous communities of the global South largely by the pharmaceutical and life

science industry. Cori Hayden investigates how these bioprospectors often employ

“idioms of return” and vague benefit-sharing arrangements in their transactions to

exploit native peoples, arguing that they continue to proliferate empire through tactics

such as speculative deferrals, exclusions, and “delayed obligations” (2007: 740). These

programs—whether they are driven more by commercial interests in new medicines,

“pure” scientific discovery, or environmental reasons—also invoke familiar ahistorical

tropes like the “advancement of science” or “biodiversity for the good of all humanity” to

justify their practices. These logics also become relevant for domestic and international

practices of conservation and wildlife management as well—later in the essay we will

discuss the forms of violence that can be caused by these rationales, for now it’s

important to note that they are historically contingent and best understood through

imperial frameworks.

Sarah Franklin’s (2006) work on the new biological speaks to the durability and

flexibility of empire: as the genomic information of biomaterial becomes separate from

the actual material biological specimen, the “genomes of plants, animals, and micro-

organisms are now transferable and transactable in ways that were heretofore

unimaginable” (2006: 303). Prospecting, though having drastically changed its face in

the information age and despite claims of being a benevolent exploratory science, is

recognized and understood fundamentally as a practice of collecting (Parry 2004), an

“imperial formation” that is not a mere colonial legacy, but an active strategy that

extends, rewrites, and profits from an empire that has always been mobile and

ambiguous (Stoler 2006). Thus, as information about birds becomes separate from their

physical bodies, one must trace new forms of circulation while remaining attentive to

those familiar spatial strategies that mobilized the material specimens of an earlier

generation. Various kinds of imperial practices—with historical, spatial and technological

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dimensions—both explain and effect our relationships to birds. And while there have

been many things folded into and grafted on top of “collecting”—and while its

contemporary articulations might be viewed as innocuous, well-meaning or lesser forms

of empire—they continue to perform and replicate imperial strategies of power and

control.

Development of the Field of Natural History & Intimate Research

Although a discussion of the history of collecting and of the development of natural

history are not separate—in fact they are undeniably intertwined—they have been

parceled out from one another so that the focus here might be on the epistemological

and historical development of the field itself. And so, while there are those scholars

who have taken on humankind’s relationship to Earth since antiquity (Glacken 1976,

Atran 1990), in which the interpretation of nature was largely understood through

abstract principles, and those who have written on the early modern European

beginnings of natural history as mentioned earlier (Findlen 1994, Atran 1990, Reeds

1976, Daston & Park 1998), I’d like to concentrate on the period of late 19th century

British and American amateur naturalism, in which the development of the modern field

of ornithology began to take shape.

In the late 18th century Count Buffon, an influential French naturalist, set a new

course for the study of natural history with his novel ideas on the relationship between

man and nature. Realizing the “limitations of abstract thought” and neither being

motivated by the practical use of natural objects, he instead invested in detailed

descriptions of the historical and environmental changes the Earth and its inhabitants

had undergone (Glacken 1976: 656). Although his notion of natural history required a

systematic approach to the description of the environment and animals—what would

become the hallmark of modern natural history—it was still heavily invested in popular

ideas of the time, such as the belief that civilized man needed to tame, domesticate,

and perfect nature. Interestingly, it is the places he deems the most disagreeable and

useless—thick forests, dense thickets, and fetid swamps, where “wild nature was

hideous and dying” and man was absent (Glacken 1976: 663)—that were to become

foremost destinations for later generations of naturalists and birdwatchers.

Apart from an emphasis on focused and attentive descriptions, one of the definitive

features of natural history is its historical and continued reliance on field and craft

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knowledge by means of amateur participation and contribution. In particular, ornithology

is exemplary in this regard. Within the development of natural history, the high visibility,

diverse number of species, and aesthetic appeal of birds lent themselves to becoming

inimitable candidates for the collecting and cataloging of nature. In the 19th century, as

the study of birds was becoming a legitimate and institutionalized discipline, respectable

and sound science was still only that conducted in a lab. Thus, until the early twentieth

century ornithology was heavily invested in collecting practices and reliant on amateur

naturalists to submit specimens and other evidence from the field for scientists to study

in hand.

In fact, most field guides of the time, along with information on species identification,

included advisement on how to shoot birds and turn their corpses into “skins” [for

example, see Elliot Coue’s (1887) Key to North American Birds 1887]. In his book on

the history of the American field guide, Thomas Dunlap describes the process of turning

a bird into a specimen: “The collector cut the skin from breastbone to vent, took out the

internal organs, scooped out the eyes, removed the brain through the bottom of the

skull, treated the remaining soft tissue with solutions to harden them, then dusted the

skin with powdered arsenic to keep the bugs at bay…After that, he tied a label to the

feet showing where and when the bird was killed, and put the skin into a drawer,

periodically treating it with insect powder from the druggist. Otherwise, insects would

consume skin, feathers and all” (2011:19). Apart from offering information on specimen

making, these early field guides lacked much other practical use—the laborious and

extensive listing of the minute features of feather patterns proved unsuitable for actually

identifying birds in the field. However, this was all to change in the near future, as

amateur birdwatchers were soon to gather, write and publish their own identification

guides and accounts of the lives of birds.

Naturalists have not merely supplied professional ornithologists with specimens, but

have historically contributed to the growing knowledge of bird life. This collaboration

between amateurs and expert scientists largely coincided with a paradigmatic move

away from collecting—spurred on by conservation-minded scientific practices—towards

observing the behavior of birds out in their natural habitat. Following the publication of

Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection (1859) and the turning away from

theology to explain our relationship to the earth (for an example of natural theology see

John Ray’s 1691 The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation), a new

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generation of British naturalists were heading out into nature, gathering evidence of bird

behavior. British field studies came out of a particularly prolific and generative collective

of birdwatchers at that time interested in “discovering the wonders of animal life”

(Burkhardt 2005: 69). These naturalists were neither interested in killing birds or in

merely recording raw facts or observations. Rather, they looked to participate in and

contribute to important theoretical conversations on animal behavior and evolution,

theories that now stressed the continuities between animals and humans (Darwin

1871). With his seminal paper “An Observational Diary of the Habits of Night Jars,

Mostly of a Sitting Pair: Notes Taken at Time and on Spot” (1898), Edmund Selous

corroborated Darwin’s theory on the role of female choice in sexual selection, disputing

the prevailing scientific community that rejected such a “far-fetched” notion from the

comfort of their armchairs. This emergence of attention on intensive field studies of

avian life did not stop at Selous. Many other naturalists followed: Henry Eliot Howard

demonstrated the importance of individual difference and the recognition of the mental

life of birds, Frederick Kirkman concentrated on comprehensive, detailed life stories of

bird species, and Julian Huxley unapologetically emphasized a psychological point of

view in interpreting bird behavior, highlighting the subjective, emotional side of avian life

(Burkhardt 2005: 74-114).

Historian Richard Burkhardt (2005) notes that it was exactly because they were

outside of the professional field of science (but actually out in the field studying birds)

that these naturalists were able to gain foresight in establishing facts on bird life that

accurately challenged conventional knowledge. For example, he writes that Selous’ own

alienation from contributing to the official doctrine of natural history—which

subsequently followed his pronouncement supporting female choice in sexual

selection—“enabled him to make some uncommonly penetrating observations about the

way that scientific thought was permeated by prevailing social assumptions regarding

male dominance, female passivity, and the superiority of Western civilization over other

cultures” (Burkhardt 2005: 90). Later Kirkman was to echo this sentiment, when writing

to Howard he stated: “The reason so little was known about the sex displays of the

various species was that so few ornithologists seem to have learnt that these details are

best to be found by getting up early and standing still” (Burkhardt 2005: 99). Ideas,

methodologies, and knowledge generated from these field studies are all based on the

radical notion of spending time with living birds in order to learn about the natural world.

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And while these practices are hardly anti-science or anti-intellectual, rather these animal

watchers borrowed from and hoped to contribute back to science, neither were these

practices devoid of affect. Naturalists were beginning to interact with birds in new ways,

admiring them, braving harsh conditions and sitting quietly in blinds for hours to access

and observe them.

In the U.S., birdwatching first emerged as a pastime in 19th century industrial

America as a way to escape city life and reconnect to nature. In fact, it was largely

conceived as a respectable Victorian hobby for genteel society women who encouraged

each other to take a healthy interest in their “bird neighbors” (Dunlap 2011). In addition

to expressions of friendship and respect of independent life it has also historically

included sentiments of pity, charity, and stewardship. Some of the earlier self-published

field guides offer a look into how bird life was becoming a contested space through

which political claims to manage and value biotic life were explicitly made. In these

guides, birders were enlivened to appreciate the agreeable, hearty song of the robin

who reflected the values of a self-respecting American citizen in its “marked bias for

society” and to loath the harsh call of parasitic species such as the cowbird who, as it

abandons its eggs in the nest of others, were labeled as the “socialists” among birds

(Dunlap 2011; Grant 1891). While current ornithological practices have largely dropped

such overt moral sentiments, ethical dilemmas concerning birds—such as the culling of

one species to save another—remain in the forefront of conservation science.

Birding has and continues to become a popular hobby across North America and the

U.K. Birdwatchers still contribute to the work of expert ornithologists through citizen

science projects in which they become reliable witnesses for science4, recording

distributions of species and animal behaviors that often reconfigure established

knowledge on bird life (For work on amateur involvement in the making and

development of natural science see Lynch & Law 1999, Star & Griesemer 1989, Ellis &

Waterton 2004, Gieryn 1999, Latour 2004, Callon 2003). In fact, for the same reasons

birds became ideal subjects for the study of natural history, they became ideal animals

for amateurs to observe—not only because they are uniquely accessible, diverse, and

4 For example, consider Cornell’s online data source “eBird” which collects observations from amateurs on the presence, absence, or abundance of birds in a given area in North America. Local experts flag and review unusual sightings to keep distribution data reasonably accurate. Data accumulated within eBird—visualized through various graphs, charts, and maps—becomes an important source of information for conservation scientists and ornithologists interested in the decline or relocation of critical species, changing distribution patterns, etc.

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numerous, but also because their songs and their ability to fly has captured the human

imagination since our beginning. While there is much we can say about the complex

relationship between birders and the birds they seek out, there are four dimensions of

birding practices that stand out and deserve mention: 1) the way multiple knowledges—

local, scientific, affective—are incorporated, organized and circulated alongside one

another, 2) how birders retrain and modify their own bodies to locate and communicate

with birds, 3) how relationships and encounters with birds are mediated through various

technologies and texts, from binoculars to sonograms to field guides, 4) a sustainment

of wonder and the search for beauty in these practices. Birders entangle their lives with

birds and employ multiple forms of knowledge and many different kinds of tools to

understand them and bring them closer. However, this drawing near is balanced by

practices of distancing and restraint they engage in out of respect and care. Birders

relate to birds through these practices of distancing and drawing near—and it is through

the constant renegotiation and cultivation of these practices that they form ethical

sensibilities that diverge from traditional science and others out of contact with nature

(Atran 1990).

While birders have always accumulated and circulated their own practical knowledge

of birds, they have also always relied on the taxonomic discourse of professional

ornithology for their field identification practices. In fact, birding practices have been

understood as “name-producing encounters” (Schaffner 2011, Law & Lynch 1999), in

which identifying a bird by its proper species name becomes a necessary and essential

task when birding, such that failure of this foundational act would often hang like a dark

cloud over an outing—and even hours afterward—precluding other forms of

engagement with birds. Even movements within the birding community of the past few

decades, such as “birding by general impression” which deemphasizes the important of

morphological minutiae in the identification of birds in favor of intuiting the gestalt of a

species, are still heavily invested in practices of naming. While the taxonomic detail of

field guides is of great necessity in identifying birds, so is spending huge amounts of

time out in the field observing them, learning from others, and gaining the experience

needed to bird by general impression. The point here is to further demonstrate how

amateur and expert practices—or scientific and non-scientific—are not incompatible or

diametrically opposed to one another. Rather, they offer different ways to represent and

relate to birds, and the recognition of the one in the other rather than their denial

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(expertise in amateur birding and the affective in scientific practice) works toward a

more robust and generous understanding of birds.

While there are those scientists that still conduct strictly taxonomic work, many

ornithologists are now going into the field to conduct research themselves, and are also

experiencing a merging of their expert and personal lives. Although this “blurring of

private lives and research boundaries” (MacClancy & Fuentes 2013) and

epistemological discussions of lab versus field (Kuklick & Kohler 1996) have been

expressed most prominently in the work of primatologists (Fuentes 2010, Goodall 1990,

Smuts 2001), those working with birds experience it as well (Kroodsma, Pepperberg).

Donald Kroodsma, renowned field biologist, notably juxtaposes the “the drunken

monologue” of a juvenile Bewick’s wren with his 18 month-old daughter’s babbling,

writing how both take bits of sound out of context and string them along nonsensically

(Kroodsma 2007: 42). These kinds of experiences and entanglements become even

more profound and telling when we set them against the current scientific climate in

which we’re learning more and more about the cognitive capabilities of birds and our

species’ similarities to them. Our relationship with birds is constantly evolving as we

continue to perform and reevaluate—through various forms, practices, knowledges, and

technologies—both our proximity and distance to them. Tracing these socio-historical

trajectories, such as the shift from collecting specimens to that of observing behavior,

also evidences the importance of acknowledging the contingencies of our relationships

to birds.

Thinking back to Kohn’s incident with the tanager the moment his anxiety

dissipated—would a specimen have elicited the same response? What is it about the

life, the movement, the gestalt of birds that these naturalists have stumbled upon? What

is it saying to us? Thus far we have spent a great deal of time discussing the meta-

frameworks of symbolism, imperialism, and expertise, and how these have both

historical and continued relevance to how anthropology understands birds and our

relationships to them—posing the question “Who can say what about birds?” While this

question continues to shape our understanding and discussion of them (most

prominently in the following section on conservation), a shift in thinking is soon to

explored in which birds themselves become acting subjects and anthropologists begin

to wonder what kinds of beings birds actually are (Ingold 1994).

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Protected Birds

Conservation

Along with the move towards animal watching came efforts to protect birds and their

habitats. In the late 19th century in the decades after the Civil War, concern for the

conservation of birds emerged from both naturalist and hunting communities in reaction

to the high volume of wild birds killed for commercial purposes. In particular, wetland

species such as the snowy egret and the roseate spoonbill were nearly decimated as

thousands and thousands were slaughtered for their elegant breeding plumes which

were used as fashion items5 (Birkhead et al. 2014, Dunlap 2011). While natural history

societies across the United States were organizing committees and national campaigns

for conservation, Dunlap (2011) argues that the success of and power behind the

movement was largely due to women’s grassroots efforts and appeal to values and

social status. Dunlap offers a snippet from a campaign article of the time which refers to

ladies who still wore wild bird feathers as “wearers of molted garments”, as someone

who “with hat cocked over one eye, pink tie, scarlet waist and sagging automobile

coat….haunts the cheaper shops…and in summer rides a man’s wheel, chews gum,

and expectorates with seeming relish” (2011:32). The same reason that birds became

ideal subjects for the study of natural history and animal-watching is the same reason

they became the subjects of some of the earliest conservation movements—the

abundant presence of birds and then their subsequent and pronounced slaughter and

decline flagged a problem with a growing nation’s relationship to nature. Birds continue

to be important indicators for healthy environments (Birkhead 2014: Mayr) and keystone

species in conservation.

The ideology behind conservation practices is reminiscent of Count Buffon’s

position—it is centered on justifications to intervene and alter the environment.

However, whereas Buffon believed that it was man’s civilizing and domesticating nature

that gave the earth value, conservation is instead grounded in the belief that culture is

distinct from and ultimately a threat to an external, pristine, untouched, ideal nature

(West 2008, Guyer & Richards 1996, Ingold 1994). Increasing concern over

5 Adorning hats and other accessories with the feathers, wings, bodies, and heads of birds began in the fashion houses of Europe before coming to America.

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environmental change and heightened attention to ecological risk in the 20th century led

to the formal development of the field of conservation biology (Lowe 2006). In the past

few decades, as anthropology turned its gaze back home, reflecting on its own

ethnocentric practices and questioning traditional sites of ethnographic inquiry, scientific

laboratories and other expert communities became topics for investigation rather than

resources (Latour 2009). Anthropologists of science have aimed to critically examine

the sociocultural context of Western science, highlighting the historically contingent

nature of scientific practice—for example, the particular framings of nature/culture they

rely on—as well as what is privileged or excluded within these authoritative knowledge

systems (Nader 1996). Those working in science studies have also directed attention

towards controversies, arguing that scientific facts are not simply “out there” to be

discovered but emerge through the social practice of science and involve lots of

political, representational, rhetorical, and technical work (Shapin & Schaffer6 1985,

Latour & Woolgar 1986, Latour 1987). Because conservation biology works to explicitly

to solve environmental problems and is understood largely as a practice of conflict

resolution (Thompson 2002), it makes an ideal site to explore science-in-the-making, to

see how science and facts about bird and other animal life are actively made.

Anthropologists have understood conservation as operating under a crisis-

oriented mode of thinking (Guyer & Richards 1996, Lowe 2006). In addressing such

questions as “What makes a species worth saving?” (Thompson 2002), practices of

triage in conservation biology are akin to “imperialist nostalgia” in which species

become meaningful once they are in crisis or on the brink of extinction (Lowe 2006). In

the 1980’s, conservation began moving away from the management of wildlife towards

a new mode of biological organization which emphasized the maintenance of

biodiversity (Lowe 2006). From the beginning, the concept of biodiversity was seen as

politically contingent, introduced by the American biologist E.O. Wilson to “protect a

specific academic interest (in whole organisms) from the radical reductionist currents in

molecular biology then threatening to rule the roost” (Guyer 1996: 5). Because

biodiversity aims to protect the variety of biotic life on earth and sees its objects of study

as threatened, it is heavily invested in the species concept, which—depending on how it

6 While Latour and Shapin & Shaffer both agree that scientific facts emerge through social practices of scientists, there is some disagreement over the nature of the “facts.” While Shapin & Shaffer would stress how the correct instruments and scientific work discovered objective facts, Latour takes a stronger position, deconstructing the concept of Nature as an external reality and arguing that scientific facts are not merely historically contingent but performed.

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defines and categorizes populations of animals—can both open or foreclose new

opportunities for conservation (Guyer 1996, Lowe 2004).

Thus, modern taxonomic practices in ornithology have serious consequences for the

protection of birds (Sibley 2009). Birdsong has in fact become an important criterion for

speciation, distinguishing among morphologically identical populations of birds, denoting

“invisible” genetic difference. The shift towards biodiversity coincided with a species-

splitting trend in ornithology—since 1983, 148 species have been split, while only 9

have been “lumped” together (Pyle 2012). Practices of taxonomy have become

inseparable from conservation—for example, the splitting of the Western flycatcher into

two distinct species, Pacific-slope and Cordilleran flycatcher, based on slight variations

in their song patterns, qualified each for their own conservation ranking and eligibility for

help and funding. The emergence of biodiversity thus mobilized and reoriented

biological science around its particular problematic (Lowe 2006), while also organizing

new ways of relating to birds in which counting them and tracking their loss became of

the upmost importance (West 2008).

The urge to split within ornithology demonstrates not a major theme, but rather a

foundational premise in anthropological investigations of environmental science and

policy—that political and epistemic practices are inseparable from one another, or, put

another way, biological representations and conceptualizations of nature are not only

biophysical but also socio-political facts (Choy 2008, Latour & Woolgar 1986, Fortun &

Fuijmura 1996, Mol & Law 2002, Lowe 2006). This work is also informed by the

Foucauldian notion that scientific knowledge and categories make our lives—and in this

case within conservation practices, make the lives of birds (Rabinow 1996, Foucault

1980, Rose 2001). Mol & Law (2002) importantly highlight how conservation strategies

are “technical and scientific simplifications used as a basis for action”—and Foucault

(1980) and Latour (1993) attest to how purifications such as these are productive.

Lorraine Daston (2007) and Ian Hacking (2004) have tackled the emergence of

scientific objects, and Hacking in particular, through his concept of dynamic nominalism,

addresses the looping effect that takes place between the emergence of a concept—

such as an endangered species—and the self, entity, or force that occupies that

concept. Lowe (2006) highlights the importance of the species category—of the

charismatic, endangered animal, such as the Bald Eagle or the African Elephant—in

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mobilizing and affecting people to become aware, get involved, or donate, because in

her words “no one wants to save biodiversity.”

Several anthropologists have written on forms of rhetorical violence concerning

birds and other biotic life that have real and palpable consequences (Raffles 2011,

2014; Song 2000; Helmreich 2005; Robbins 2007). Hugh Raffles has commented on

the conservationist practice of labeling certain plants and animals as non-native. He

maintains that understanding biotic life in terms of geographical origins of species draws

on the same notions of a pure and immobile nature discussed earlier, one that “draws

an arbitrary historical line based as much on aesthetics, morality, and politics as on

science” (Raffles 2011). Hoon Song (2000) recorded similar practices in her article on

the recent emergence of live-pigeon shootings in a rural mining community in

Pennsylvania. She describes the residents as understanding pigeons through

frameworks of pest control—associating them with contagious diseases and urban

moral degradation, logics Song argues come from discourses of anti-semitism and

whiteness. Both Robbins (2007) and Helmreich (2005) offer ethnographic inquiries into

rhetorics of alien invasion, Robbins in deconstructing the American obsession with

eradicating lawn “weeds” and Helmreich through scientific invocations of invasive

marine organisms in Hawaii. Practices based on these flawed logics have significant

effects in the world, such as the withdrawal of protection from the Migratory Bird Treat

Act for nonnative species such as the Mute Swan and the European starling or the

pollution of the environment from residential runoffs of toxic herbicides.

In addition to those interested in the moral economy of conservation in America,

numerous scholars have explored issues of postcolonial and transnational science

when ideas—in particular, forms of instrumental reason—“shift continents” (Guyer &

Richards 1996, Haraway 1989, Lewis 1973, Hayden 2003, Cohen 2000). In the case of

cross-cultural environmental practices in particular, ethnographers have written on

biodiversity in the contexts of Africa (Guyer & Richards 1996, Thompson 2002),

Indonesia (Lowe 2006, Jepson 2010, Tsing 2005), China (Choy 2008), and Papua New

Guinea (West 2008). These ethnographers document the renegotiation of biodiversity

that takes place in these postcolonial contexts, the complex interface between the local

and the global in which “making, saving, and destroying resources are utterly mixed up”

(Tsing 2005: 28). Joan Fujimura (1992) argues that biodiversity embodies a “deliberate

and useful vagueness”—despite its efforts to appear ahistorical it is exactly this flexibility

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that makes it so political. When biodiversity shifts continents there is a complex

interface between foreign scientists, local elite and indigenous peoples, between

outside agendas, postcolonial nation-states, “imperial debris” and local scientific

practice. There are several interesting points that this work on transnational biodiversity

contributes: issues of scale and techniques of comparison within environmental practice

(Choy 2008, Tsing 2005), “processes of foreign recognition and confirmation” (Lowe

2004, Lewis 1973), commodification of nature via ecotourism (West), intersection of

science and nation (Lowe 2004, West 2008), fantasy of the frontier (Guyer & Richards

1996, Tsing 2005), competing claims and philosophies of nature (Thompson 2002,

Choy 2008, West 2008, Lowe 2006, Tsing 2005, Guyer & Richards 1996), connection to

capitalist forms (Tsing 2005, Choy 2008), and the marginalization of those (indigenous

peoples) closest to nature (West 2008, Lowe 2004).

Beyond those studying the biopolitical aspects of conservation are those who focus

on the practical necessity of using indigenous knowledge or traditional environmental

knowledge (TEK) to facilitate conservation practices (Ellen 2007, Scott 1996, Nader

1996, Klenk 2008, Thomas 2010). Work ranges from ethno-ornithologists interested in

the environmentally-based spiritual guardianship of native bird species by the Maori

(Lyver & Moller 2010) to those writing pragmatic proposals in forestry who understand

science as one interpretation of nature and argue that environmental policies should be

a matter of public deliberation (Klenk 2008). Perspectives such as these challenge the

authoritative role of biodiversity in understanding and intervening into nature. However,

rather than merely dismissing science they argue that it is but one of multiple ways of

relating to the nonhuman world and for determining how to intervene on its behalf

(Latour 2004). Anthropologists have thus worked to contextualize biodiversity, to

demonstrate its socio-historical and political dimensions and illustrate how birds are

made into different kinds (aliens, vermin, victims, etc.) to which we respond. It is these

frameworks, discourses, practices that we draw from in negotiating our relationship to

them.

Rights of Birds

The aim of this section is to discuss the ethical treatment of birds and non-humans

and to feature animal rights theory (ART), considering how it might align with or depart

from anthropological understandings. Classic ART is based on a revised humanist

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perspective—that animals themselves matter and we are obliged to extend them moral

consideration. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (2001 [1975]) is seen as the

foundational text of the animal liberation movement and argues that the sentience of

animals—their ability to feel pain and suffering—gives them morally relevance. Another

influential moral individualist Tom Regan (2004 [1983]), takes a rights-based approach

in pointing to animals’ subjecthood as the criterion for ethical concern. Thus, within ART

what makes animals matter—i.e. what grants them moral consideration—are human-

like capacities that science can prove some nonhumans also possess. Concerning

these thinkers, philosopher Alice Crary (2012) writes that they “ invite us to regard the

thought, internal to classic humanisms, of a sharp break between human and animal life

as sort of a factual error that the natural sciences equip us to correct. They suggest that,

once we have in view the type of evidence of continuities between the lives of human

beings and animals that natural science furnish, we are well positioned to make a case

for regarding animals as direct sources of respect and attention.” Thus, ART bases its

arguments on the claim that the natural world is value and ethically neutral and it is

exactly this for which it has been taken to task (not it’s passion or perceptions which

many scholars share).

Several philosophers have challenged the theoretical foundations of ART, artfully

decrying their indebtedness to modern naturalism and instead promoting what is known

as “broad naturalism” (Crary 2012, Derrida 2008, Diamond 1978). These advocates of

broad naturalism challenge the epistemic privilege of natural science, maintaining that it

cannot confirm moral relevance from its position external to ethics. Derrida focuses his

provocation on deconstructing these modern paradigms which assert human language

as autonomous and unrivalled, breaking down the dichotomy of the (human) response

and animal (reaction), arguing that humans can’t respond by their definition either.

Diamond and Crary argue that moral and political imagination is essential in addressing

this issue, that the “difference between humans and animals is more an object of

contemplation than observation” (Crary 2002: 17). In line with this work, Ian Hacking

(2001) draws on Humeian notions of sympathy and the emotional life of animals in

developing his concept of “sympathetic resonance” in making an interesting contribution

to the animal issue. He focuses on the changing relationship between humans and

animals that began with the disappearance of the multispecies barnyard, writing that “for

the first time in human history a significant…part of our species is living alone”, out of

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contact with animals (2001: 714). Hacking argues that we need to be in touch with the

entire range of animal emotions—not just pain or fear as discussed by the animal

liberationists—pointing out that we don’t relate to animals through categories of rights or

interests, but rather we respond through bodies. Within a framework of ethics and

politics, these philosophers regard moral imagination—imaginative efforts, cultivation of

sensibilities, emotional resonance etc.—as crucial to understanding animals’ lives.

There has been a recent push from the field of political science to revamp ART

(Youatt 2011, Donaldson & Kymlicka 2011). In their text, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of

Animal Rights, Donaldson & Kymlicka distance themselves from classic ART which

promotes negative rights to life and liberty—i.e. the right not to suffer—instead focusing

on positive relational obligations that arise not through the capacities of animals, but

rather our historical and geographic relationships to them. They also distinguish

themselves by engaging in citizenship theory to target the systematic exploitation of

animals, divvying up animals into three categories that correspond to varying degrees of

inclusion with a body politic: domesticates who receive full citizenship, liminal animal

denizens who receive partial, and wild animals who are understood through models of

vulnerability and sovereignty. However, while Donaldson & Kymlicka also distinguish

themselves from ecological approaches who focus on the health of ecosystems—for

example, they would fundamentally oppose justifying the culling of any animals to save

an endangered species or to save an ecosystem—by accurately pointing out how that

perspective is historically contingent, they neglect to acknowledge the contingencies of

naturalist and humanist frameworks from which they themselves draw. In her book

When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway engages traditional ART, developing an

anthropological approach that challenges their devotion to moral absolutes and ethical

abstractions. She instead argues that we must understand ethical relationships between

humans and non-humans in everyday encounters. Unlike ART’s unbending,

predetermined stance, for example on veganism, she cultivates a sort of flexibility that

reveals the reality of asymmetrical living—killing and experimenting on animals (I.e.

Instrumental human-animal relationships) should not be a priori denied nor accepted—

but rather, decisions and answers to these situations are located in mundane reasons,

reasons that be can never be sure aren’t “wicked” (2008: 76).

In an effort to demonstrate how these theoretical and disciplinary conversations are

of practical relevance to birds lives, it might help to discuss a “mundane” situation in

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which the ethical treatment of animals is at stake. In his article on the ethics of foie gras,

political scientist Rafi Youatt (2011) discusses a recent debate in Chicago concerning

the citywide ban of this fine-dining staple. Animal activists have long fought against

traditional and industrial productions of foie gras, in particular the practice of gavage, in

which captive ducks or geese are forced to overeat for 4 to 5 weeks to produce an

extremely enlarged liver before being sent to the slaughterhouse (2). Interestingly, he

details how both the animal advocates and the foie gras defenders based their

arguments on the biological capacities of ducks—while animal advocates grounded

their argument in duck’s capacity for sentience, foie gras defenders argued that they

were merely capitalizing on ducks’ natural capacity to overeat which justified their force-

feeding. Drawing on a Foucauldian framework of biopolitics, Youatt argues that rather

than using the capacities of animals to see which power relations are acceptable we

should instead start by seeking to “understand how power produces subjectivities

across species lines” (I am here reminded of Haraway’s statement that “species reeks

of race and gender”). Importantly, he astutely grasps how the meat production

processes, rather than denying animal sentience, in fact “work by acknowledging,

managing, and disciplining” it so that it works to their advantage (for examples of “taking

advantage” see Temple Grandin, an autistic livestock consultant who developed curved

cattle corrals for industrial farmers). Youatt also campaigns for the importance of

understanding pain not in terms of passivity, but as something “inhabited agentively”

and points to moments of resistance by ducks. Referencing Haraway, he makes a

similar conclusion that rests on the important of face-to-face encounters—that while it

isn’t always clear how or in what situation ducks should be killed, they should not be

“killable”. Anthropological engagements with ART have thus worked to maintain

interspecies difference rather than making birds fit into preconceived, abstract

categories based on standards measured against the human. They work to interrogate

contact zones and messy situations, imagining what “touch across difference” might

look like and how anthropologists might contribute to moral understandings of animals

that are constantly being renegotiated and never done (Haraway 2008).

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Bird behavior and song

Interestingly, while in the previous section we’ve examined the dangers of basing

moral considerations of animals on biological capacities, we now turn to focus on the

work of cognitive ethologists, whose research on birds and their capacities actually

works to challenge normative scientific paradigms and intelligence hierarchies. Ethology

can be understood as the study of animal behavior in its natural setting—whether this is

out in the wild or in large biological farms or aviaries. From its beginning, the study of

animal behavior has been intertwined with a simultaneous interest in speculating on

human nature—in particular our evolutionary and developmental history. Early behavior

studies in 20th century America (Craig 1908, Whitman 1892) challenged political

theories of evolution inspired by German neo-Darwinist ideologies by focusing their

research on the observable facts of animal life and by understanding those behaviors

within the context of the whole life history of a bird (Burkhardt 2005: 52). Behaviorists of

that era, whether they were from America or Europe, had at least one thing in

common—they were passionate animal lovers and believed the experiences they had,

often since childhood, of forming relationships with animals was linked to that of being a

good observer, and thus doing good science (Burkhardt 2005). By the second World

War, the United States had begun to largely shift focus to studying learned (as opposed

to instinctual) behavior in a single animal species—the white rat—in laboratory settings

(Burkhardt 2005). Karen Rader (2004) has demonstrated the contingent nature of the

standardization of the laboratory mouse, documenting how scientists “blackboxed” the

political and social context of what made research successful—seeing contemporary

values as self-evident and timeless—thus rendering “invisible the very nexus of politics

and practices that defined…which intrinsic qualities of the mouse were ‘useful’ in the

first place” (13). Her discussion of how and why certain animals are chosen—for

example, the careful balancing of finding an animal that was enough like us to make

comparative assumptions, but not enough like us to “ethically prohibit” experimental

practices—is helpful in thinking about the making of subsequent model organisms

decades later, such as the chimpanzee and even more recently, the zebra finch.

Ethology really began to flourish and coalesce as its own discipline in Europe, in

particular Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. Continental ethologists decried

American over-reliance on the white rat, continuing to focus on the observation of

Bowman 28

animals in natural settings. Konrad Lorenz was the first scientist of animal psychology

that truly defined the parameters of ethology, arguing that just like morphological

features, animal behaviors could be used to classify animals. He drew much inspiration

from theoretical biologist Jakob Von Uexkull (2010: 1934), who, understanding animals

as active, perceiving subjects in worlds of their own making via distinct motor and

sensory capacities, has also influenced the development of the modern field of

biosemiotics (see Deacon 1997, Emmeche & Kull 2011), as well as Kohn’s (2013)

anthropology “beyond the human”. The sensorial capacities of birds are of particular

importance within ethology. Lorenz believed that “ birds (were) especially suitable

subjects for behavioral analysis… birds are very similar to humans in the senses they

employ in dealing with the external world. They are first and foremost visually orienting

animals. Beyond that, they rely upon auditory cues, especially for hearing the

vocalizations of birds of their own species. Because we humans have similarly well-

developed senses of sight and hearing, this makes it relatively easy for us to identify the

cues to which birds respond (as opposed to, say, the olfactory cues in which dogs take

such interest)” (Burkhardt 2005:147). Because both birds and humans primarily rely on

hearing and vision, in certain respects we are perhaps better equipped to access their

worlds over other animals.

Rather than drawing understandings from the field, Lorenz preferred to keep and

breed various species of birds and geese, gathering knowledge “intuitively” through his

lifelong experience of raising birds (Burkhardt 2005). For instance, in his article

“Observations of Jackdaws”, he explains how he was able to learn about bird behavior

as the jackdaw’s social reactions were directed at him rather than other conspecifics.

Consequently, it is no matter of great surprise that he is widely known for his articulation

and discovery of the principle of imprinting. While Lorenz saw himself as a “farmer” who

was thus uniquely capable of making comparative insights between humans and

animals, he saw his friend and lifelong colleague (and leading figure of classic

ethology), Niko Tinbergen as a “hunter”, whose dedication to extensive field work gave

him ecological insights in the lives of birds. Tinbergen (1989 [1951]) preferred an

objectivist approach, often wary of his friend’s comparative pronouncements, focusing

instead on the physiological rather than psychological causations of behavior. Of course

Tinbergen had good reason to be wary—during the war Lorenz worked as a scientist for

the Third Reich, writing accounts of bird behavior that compared the deficiencies of

Bowman 29

domestic pigeons to the physical and moral degeneration of certain human communities

under the condition of civilization (Burkhardt 2005). Thus in the application of biology to

society, while ethology has made numerous positive contributions—that involve

observing and recognizing human-like behaviors in animals that tear down

anthropocentric paradigms and beliefs—it has also struggled in its comparative

practices and in finding a balance between description and analysis. However, beyond

this more particular and controversial history, the different approaches of these two

scientists speak to how different scientific practices—field, biological farm, lab, etc—

involve different kinds of relationships to birds that affect theoretical beliefs.

Modern ethological practice continues to face comparative challenges that are

associated with studying human-like behavior in animals. Their work is now largely

centered on issues of social intelligence and Theory of Mind (Emery 2004, Emery et al

2007, Clayton et al 2007, Pika & Bugnyar 2011, Bugnyar 2013), and predominantly

utilizes observational and experimental research on Corvids7 to engage in

conversations which are mostly dominated by primatologists (Tomasello & Call 1997,

Povinelli 2003, de Waal 2007 [1982]). Nick Humphrey’s (1976) contention that social

intelligence is the driving force behind the evolution of the intelligent mind has occupied

animal behavioral studies for the last few decades. Importantly, the Social Intelligence

Hypothesis (SIH) led to the development of Theory of Mind (ToM), articulated by

Premack & Woodruff (1978) in which they argued that their language-trained

chimpanzee could mind-read, i.e. had the ability to reason about the psychological or

mental states of others—a hallmark of humanity. While this strong definition of human-

like ToM is generally not accepted today (Call & Tomasello 2008, Tomasello et al 2003),

most working in animal behavior consent to varying degrees and kinds of ToM in

primates and other intelligent animals (Tomasello et al 2003,8 Tomasello & Call 1997) or

at least pre-cursors (Humphrey 2007). However, there are still firm skeptics that

adamantly deny such a cognitive ability in any non-humans (Povinelli 2003).

Thus, the early formation of SIH was heavily primate-centric. In fact, biological

anthropologist Benjamin Beck (1982) wrote an article on the “chimpocentrism” of

cognitive ethology in which he argued that “the emphasis on chimpanzees…has

7 Family of passerine birds that includes crows, ravens, scrub-jays, etc. and is known as one of the most intelligent families of birds besides parrots. 8 For example, chimps don’t understand false beliefs but perform successfully in other ToM tasks.

Bowman 30

diverted attention from other taxa”, and that, based on his own field studies, identical

cognitive processes underlie herring gull predatory shell-dropping and chimpanzee tool

use. Furthermore, he argued that terms used to describe cognitive processes in the

field, such as purposefulness and selectivity, were vague constructs in need of

clarification. More recently, a handful of ethologists have been working to accumulate

strong evidence that birds perform equally as well as primates on these cognitive tasks

and appear to “use the same cognitive toolkit: causal reasoning, flexibility, imagination,

and prospection” (Emery 2004: 1907). These ethologists employ experimental

paradigms—such as those based on food-caching practices—to challenge numerous

scientific claims that are believed to describe abilities exclusive to primates. In studying

the caching practices and deceptive behaviors of the scrub-jay—in which birds re-cache

food when others aren’t looking if they themselves have stolen before—Clayton et al

(2007) dispute the belief that larger brains are necessary in developing complex

cognitive strategies and counter-strategies. Based on experiments conducted on crow

tool-use, Emery (2004) disrupts the idea that the evolution of intelligence is always

associated with a primate-like brain—or put more politically, with one with a close

evolutionary relationship to humans—in arguing that while apes and birds demonstrate

convergent mental evolution their brains evolved divergently as birds lack a prefrontal

cortex. More recently, Emery & Clayton (2008) continue to challenge other abilities

understood as “pinnacles of primate cognition” by showing that birds conduct long-term

alliances with other members of their group and understand third party relationships.

Thomas Bugnyar (2013, 2011) has also uniquely contributed to these discussions

through his research based on detailed studies of ravens in the wild. His work

challenges the scientific beliefs behind the SIH which correlate the development of

increasing group and brain size with intelligence, arguing that ravens demonstrate

similar cognitive capabilities but have unstable and flexible social groups (and of course,

lack a growing neocortex). Ravens and other corvid groups are characterized by

seasonal changes, fission-fusion dynamics (Heinrich 1991) in which individual birds

come and go quite regularly, and long-term pair partnerships (Bugnyar 2013).

Additionally, Pika & Bugnyar (2011) have evidenced that referential and/or declarative

gestures that were once designated only as part of the primate lineage and seen as the

foundation to engage in language (Tomasello 2008) are performed consistently in wild

raven populations.

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While continental research is more geared towards understanding the intelligence of

birds, within American ethology birds occupy a unique position in behavior studies

because of their ability to sing and importantly, its comparative potential to language

and the development of vocal learning in human infants. Consequently, there is

abundant interdisciplinary collaboration between birdsong science and developmental

psychology—in fact, there are several scientists currently working on bird-baby parallels

(Doupe & Duhl 1999, Kiggins et al 2012) and some have even organized songs labs

that conduct in-house comparative research on infants and birds (West & King 1983,

1985, 1988; Goldstein & Schwaab 2009). Peter Marler ’s work on birdsong (1970)

represents early and foundational attempts in demonstrating the relevance of animal

psychology for the study of human development. Rather than focusing on human

language as unique, or in teaching birds human sounds, Marler was interested in

parallels between human speech and song development of wild birds. Petrinovich

(1972) continued to pursue the biological factors of language development, stressing

the value of developing biological (rather than theoretical) analogies such as that

between “the principles governing development of dialects in songbirds” and the

“governing early stages of infant articulation and phonation” (259). The work of Michael

Goldstein & Jennifer Schwaab and Andrew King & Meredith West offers some of the

most promising contemporary research in the tradition by shedding light on the

importance of social context and social mediation in the development of bird

vocalizations. King & West (1983, 1988) demonstrated that non-vocal female cowbirds

affect the development of song in juvenile males by communicating using minute

wingstrokes, thus concluding that “songbirds, like humans, may need to experience not

only sounds, but the consequences of their vocal endeavors” (1983: 705). Goldstein &

Schwaab (2009) continue this interest in socially-distributed intelligence, but themselves

focus more on the applicability of animal paradigms and song learning models in

developing an ecological approach for understanding patterns of interaction in the

development of socially-guided learning in human infants. Both couples are in fact

involved in using birdsong models for understanding and treating social cognitive

disorders. Here, the application of ethology on human development and health is often

more direct—with birdsong experimental paradigms serving as theoretical perspectives

in learning about the human.

Bowman 32

Finally, there are those interested in further exploring interspecific and conspecific

social complexities within the theories and practices of animal behavioral studies. West

& King (1990) and Pepperberg (1999, 2009) have written on the linkages between

mimicry in birds and social interaction. King & West (1990) conducted research on

relationships between social (human) tutors and their starlings, finding that socio-

environmental conditions facilitate or hinder mimicry—specifically that mutual,

interactive companionship, as opposed to tape tutoring, was an essential motivator in

getting birds to mimic. Irene Pepperberg (2009) has dedicated her life work to studying

imitation9 in African gray parrots, developing the social interaction training method.

While for most of her career she was rebuffed by the scientific community, Pepperberg

has continually proven that her parrots perform speech patterns that have

conventionally been understood as uniquely human. The work of these scientists goes

against traditional forms of experimentation which isolate and confine birds, arguing that

communication and learning is fundamentally a social process for animals. Additionally,

they also speak to how affect and intimacy—rather than being absent in practices of

good science—can be a necessary part of them.

On a related note, several anthropologists have examined the importance of

understanding interspecific societies and practices within a mutual context (Latour &

Strum 1987, Ingold 2000, Lestel et al 2006). In studying the convergent evolution of

distantly related species —such as Hare & Tomasello’s (2005) work on dogs and

humans—behavioral scientists have often studied the evolution of species separately,

neglecting interspecific associations and dynamics. Lestel et al (2006) takes up an

interest in these hybrid communities and in accounting for the shared lives between

humans and animals. They brilliantly articulate how we need to “develop a concept of

human/animal relations based a priori not on the paradigm of the separation of human

and animal natures, but on that of their complementarity, on the paradigm of

convergences between the two, of life shared by intentional agents belonging to

different species. From a behavioral standpoint, we need to understand how humans

and animals cooperate and change each other (socially, of course, but also cognitively

and physiologically) in the course of shared actions wherein each may call upon

different skills.” Biological anthropologists Agustin Fuentes (2013) and Erin Riley (2006)

9 Note that Pepperberg uses the concept of “imitation” rather than mimicry to point to the vocal recombinations and vocalizations that reveal phonological awareness and cognitive complexity in nonhumans.

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offer a similar perspective in their work in ethnoprimatology which examines the human-

alloprimate interface and the entangled biographies of primates and their primatologists.

Additionally, Tim Ingold (2000) echoes this sentiment in calling for an anthropology of

engagement that would tackle human-animal relationships within a single, “mutual”

context. Others have focused on reworking and adding to the concept of social

complexity. In arguing that baboons exhibit political behavior, Strum & Latour (1987)

shift to a performative definition of the social, arguing that baboons “actively negotiate

and renegotiate what their society is and what it will be”, thus maintaining that there is

no categorical difference between human and baboon society, but rather one of scale.

Bateson (1972) and Moffatt & Giere (2003) continue to point us outside of the human

mind and anthropocentric frameworks, Bateson in arguing how we mustn’t understand

animal language based on our own (using the totally “alien” digital expressions of

dolphins as an example), and Moffatt & Giere in developing the concept of distributed

cognition in which “cognition may be distributed throughout a system comprising of both

humans and artifacts.” While so far we have focused on how science must account for

social interactions and the rich social lives of birds and other animals—thus bringing the

social into the lab or the field—we now turn to discuss how anthropology has worked to

bring the animal into the social.

Birds beyond the human

Anthropomorphism

The recent rise of cognitive ethology and renewed discussions of animal mental

states has lead to a resurgence of interest in anthropomorphism within the social

sciences. Understood as an error in judgment incompatible with sound scientific

practice (Daston & Mitman 2005), anthropomorphism conventionally refers to the

misguided application of human thoughts and emotions onto animals by the “tender-

hearted” or feebleminded (Sober 2005). Traditionally, practices of anthropomorphism

have been frowned upon for historical reasons—as backwards, sentimental and at odds

with modern experimental and lab-based paradigms—as well as methodological ones—

how can we ever actually know what animals are thinking? (Daston & Mitman 2005).

Anthropologists have rejected these practices as automatically suspect, arguing that on

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the flipside practices of “anthropodenial10” (Sober 2005, Daston & Mittman 2005) and

usage of the human as the primary referent (Mitchell 2005) in studying other species’

lives and worlds is a much more alarming error. Some of the most exciting work coming

out of post-symbolic anthropology is that which has tackled the methodological question

as an ontological problem. Because modern thought is based on the purified separation

of nature and culture (Latour 1993), we saw how earlier symbolic anthropologists

interpreted non-Western practices of anthropomorphism as cultural metaphors and

thus, rather than taking them seriously effectively deflected and neutralized their

ontological claims (Ingold 2000). These alternative claims understand animals as

persons and ontological equivalents to humans (see work on Amerindian cosmologies

by Viveiros de Castro 2004, Descola 2006, & Kohn 2013)—a perspective

anthropologists now argue we have much to gain by considering.

While several point to the practical and heuristic utility of engaging in responsible

anthropomorphisms—such as the generation of testable hypotheses within animal

behavior studies11 (Daston & Mitman 2005)—they also gesture towards its

transformative potential in cultivating environmental responsibility (Scott 1996) and

more “horizontal” and ecological understandings of the world that uncover “resonances

and resemblances” with nonhumans (Bennett 2009). Importantly, Tim Ingold (2000)

argues that aside from the potential of figurative comparisons across categorical divides

to affect objective and ethical realities, practices of anthropomorphism reveal “the

underlying level on which humans and non-human animals share the same existential

status, as living beings or persons. In other words, the use of metaphor should be

understood as a way of drawing attention to real relational unities…” (xxiv, Emphasis

added). Here you can see the shift in focus towards examining how we can live with

animals rather than using them to think through our own lives. Practices of cognitive

ethology support what has already been trending in the social sciences—that birds and

animals are capable of much more than we previously knew, that learning more about

animal cognition (in particular here non-mammalian cognition) forces us to reevaluate 10 Additionally, in response to charges of anthropomorphism from developmental psychologists, American ethologists conducting comparative work on birds and infants have charged their accusers with adultomorphism, in which certain cognitive abilities are unquestionably granted to non-speaking infants despite the fact that similar methodological issues are at stake in both fields. 11 In this way anthropomorphism allows you to see what’s actually there. Instead of assuming animals to be machine-like non-subjects (and categorically unlike humans) and then adding capacities on after they’ve been properly proven, many suggest that starting from a place where they already resonant with humans allows for more creative engagements with more generative potential.

Bowman 35

our own “higher” faculties, and that the dissolution of the categorical separation between

humans and animals is a necessary element to sound scientific practice. More

generous, or rather, more humble interpretations of the avian mind are thus more

generative in the pursuit of understanding what a bird’s life is like.

Agency of Birds

Before continuing to explore any more of the posthuman literature its necessary to

have a proper discussion about the ontological turn in anthropology in order to consider

what’s at stake in this move. Since the late 20th century anthropologists have begun to

rethink traditional conceptualizations of the relationship between the subject and its

environment. In its commitment towards a continued, serious engagement with

reflexivity and new sites of inquiry anthropology began to extend agency further and

further away from an essential, bounded human subject. While feminist and Neo-

Marxist traditions have focused on fractured and divided subjects (Hall 1986,

Visweswaran 1994, Mahmood 2001, Abu-Lughod 2002), those inspired by Actor

Network Theory (Callon 1998, Latour 1993) and STS and science related topics turned

towards non-human agency. These theorists severed agency away from the (human)

subject as they were no longer seen as acting independently within or against cultural

contexts. Rather, they were co-constituted and emphasis was placed on actions and

practices in networks comprised of a wide array of human and nonhuman actors. While

some have dropped the use of agency altogether—as its too implicated within notions of

human exceptionalism—others such as Jane Bennett have instead focused on

conceptualizing the distribution of agentic capacity across a range of ontologically

diverse actants or what she calls “a radical kinship of people and things” in her

distributive theory of agency (2005: 463). Latour (2004) and Mol (2002) have focused

on embodiment and the enactment of objects in practice, while others have written on

moments of co-formation that emerge between bodies and things during amateur

practices such as rock climbing (Hennion 2007) or gaming (Schull 2005). Thus, this

literature demonstrates the inadequacy of thinking solely in terms of hidden “truths” of

social determinism. Interactions with birds are not predetermined through subject/object

Bowman 36

relationships.12 Instead our focus is shifted to techniques, adaptabilities, improvisations,

and gestures—what defines relations between animals and humans is the activity itself.

Multispecies Ethnographies & Techno-assemblages

Anthropologists have begun to produce fascinating ethnographic work concerned

with documenting and investigating the shared lives of animals and humans, framing

relations between humans and nonhumans in terms co-formation and co-operation.

These ethnographies cover a vast array of interesting topics, from critical reflections on

the domestication of plants and animals (Mullin & Cassidy 2007, Tsing 2012) to fungal

and furry interspecies companionships (Tsing 2012, Haraway 2008) to cultivated

detachment between scientists and meerkats (Candea 2010) to the entangled

biographies of humans and insects (Raffles 2010), as well as microbes (Helmreich

2009, Paxson 2008). A major focus of this work is the mundane material

interdependency and everyday encounter between humans and other beings. Another

is the co-participation of nonhumans in our social and political worlds—as well as the

necessity for anthropologists to engage with and account for biotic materials and

biological processes (for example, see Tsing’s 2012 discussion of symbiosis). These

ethnographers catch our attention, pointing us towards the bacteria in our gut, the trees

we rely on to breathe, plants we eat, the model organisms we use to study disease.

They demonstrate how thoroughly we rely on other species and how we’ve never been

human, but always hybrids. Through these ecological frames, human intentionality

becomes less definitive and privileged, and attention is focused on how we should “live

in response” to these complicated histories (Haraway 2008). Additionally, there are also

those who write within the Anthropocene, a period in history named for the massive

geological impact humankind has made on the earth (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), whose

work revolves not around the flourishing of interspecies life, but rather extinction and

“the reverberations of categorical loss in social life” (Sodikoff 2012). Frederic Keck

(2014) and Celia Lowe (2010) examine interactions between humans and sick birds

during the Asian avian flu pandemic through the lens of biosecurity and preparedness.

12 While Latour (1993) has argued that these “hybrid monsters” have always been around, that “we have never been modern”—it seems necessary to mention that because birds have been understood as natural objects and because we label birds and make bird kinds these have very real effects in the world (such that, for example, “endangered” birds are given care or “invasive birds” are killed)—in this sense we have most definitely been modern.)

Bowman 37

Contemporary biogenetic and technological advances add further complexity to a

discussion of posthuman multispecies assemblages. These techno-shifts have yielded a

proliferation of pronounced hybrids and important reorganizations of kinship relations.

As the “fact of life” becomes malleable itself, anthropologists working within kinship

theory have begun to reimagine forms of relatedness in response to new reproductive

technologies (Rapp 1999, Strathern 1992, Franklin & McKinnon 2002), virtual worlds

(Boellstorf 2010, Miller 2011, Rapp 1999), genetic disabilities (Silverman 2008, Rapp),

and ontological moments of contact (Silverman 2008). In examining the fact of the

biological itself—its flexibility, instability, and mobility—this work is interested in

questioning what counts as a social relation, and who or what is it between? This

becomes especially intriguing when we take into account Haraway’s (1997) discussion

of the OncoMouse, a patented organism hosting human breast cancer genes, or

Margaret Lock’s (2001) book on organ transplants, and start to really grasp the rejection

of a bounded biological subject. Additionally, in writing on informatics, Kim Fortun

(2012) stresses the environmental risks—climate change, chemical pollutants—un-

seeable without technical prosthetics. These prosthetics and environmental information

systems can alert us to ways we impact birds and other biotic life, and are thus

thoroughly mixed up with our relatedness to them. On the reverse, birds and their

bodies are also indicators of the presence of invisible toxic pollutants and environmental

change—as their songs are corrupted by PCB in the Hudson River or they drop out of

the sky by the hundreds, they can affect the way we relate to and act in the world.

Consideration of non-human agency, technological advances, capacities and

capabilities of birds, sharing of biographies, and the reorganization of social relatedness

come together in such a way that new forms of relationality between birds and the

humans become possible, that kinship between them is constituted both in spite of and

in terms of biological and ontological difference.

Alternative Cosmological Perspectives

It’s within this review of “ex-cultural” anthropology that Kohn finally enters, as part of

a group of scholars involved in rethinking disciplinary methods to account for how

people differ not only in their culture but in how they fundamentally construct relations

between humans and nonhumans. These debates concern those interested in

“provincializing naturalism”, demonstrating the “ontological poverty” of modern thought,

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and integrating alternative (nonmodern) ontological logics—in particular Amerindian

cosmologies—into anthropological analytics (Viveiros de Castro 2004; Descola 2006,

2013; Kohn 2013). Generally speaking, Amerindian cosmologies are characterized by

the belief that both humans and nonhumans are selves that share a culture—that rather

than understanding nonhumans as similar in body and different in spiritual and mental

features (modern naturalism & evolutionism), they instead understand them as similar in

spirit, but different in their physical nature (Descola 2006, Viveiros de Castro 2004). In

fact, Amerindians maintain that humanity was the “original condition of humans and

animals” and that animals are “ex-humans” or humans in a different way. Rather than

understanding this “perspectivism” or multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro 2004) in terms

of its practical utility or as proto-science or as a mechanism for social cohesion, these

scholars take it seriously as a logical ecological alternative.

Rather than speaking more broadly on Amerindian cosmology, in How Forests Think

(2013), Kohn attends to Amazonian “other-than-human encounters” (7), focusing his

energy on revamping anthropological analytics by exploring how human

representational forms are situated within and emerge from a broader, nonhuman non-

symbolic universe. In this framework, all beings live with and through signs, and living

thoughts presuppose selves who produce them. Rather than conflating representation

with (human) language, Kohn—heavily influenced by Charles Peirce’s work on a living

semiotic world—details the ways in which we share semiotic propensities with other

species and ourselves rely on nonsymbolic modalities (2013: 15). Thus, in considering

multispecies relationships he methodologically privileges “amplification over comparison

or reduction” (22), considering, for example, the trans-species pidgins between dogs

and humans in Avila. Kohn argues that these trans-species communicative strategies

rest on a kind of balancing act in their effort to both go beyond the human—in

incorporating nonsymbolic communicative modalities of animals—while maintaining

difference. Additionally, unlike many who work on ontology, Kohn does not shy away

from discussions of history and power, entangling Avila’s colonial history in with his

analysis of the construction of interspecies relationships: “ We must be attendant to the

danger-frought, provisional, and highly tenuous attempts at communications—in short,

the politics—involved in the interactions among different kinds of selves that inhabit very

different, and often unequal, positions” (150). Thus, human-nonhuman communicative

Bowman 39

relations are not merely about ontological difference (with equal being-ness), but also

involve political strategies and power hierarchies.

Interestingly, Kohn recounts an incident in which he was sitting with two women—

Luisa and Ameriga—while they wondered over the fate of their missing dogs (170-178).

During this moment a squirrel cuckoo flew over the house and squawked “shicua,” and

while Luisa simply repeated “shicua” her friend announced “ ‘Shicuhua it says’ ”, thus

interpreting it as a portent—an example of a more general concept of animal omens—

and staying less faithful to the actual sound. Kohn contrasts the two responses and their

implications, maintaining that Luisa, “rather than forcing thought to yield its return” within

human systems, “allowed the thoughts of the forest to resonate somewhat more freely

as they moved through her” (177). The way Luisa listened and rejected stabilized,

symbolic meaning led to unexpected ecological associations in her later recollection of

the story—the same kind of spontaneous, self-organizing chains of thought akin to

Freudian slips. Kohn writes of this phenomenon: “we might see these associations as

thoughts in the world—exemplars of a kind of worldly thinking, undomesticated, for the

moment, by a particular mind and her particular ends” (178). Kohn points to the

ecological relations made visible in Luisa’s approach to hearing birdsong through a

focus on other-than-human representational modalities, allowing us to begin thinking

about the additional meanings we add to signs like Ameriga did.

One cannot discuss Kohn without mentioning his association with Terrence

Deacon’s work on critiquing the comparisons of human and animal language. Like

Konrad Lorenz, Deacon is also influenced by Uexkull’s (2010 [1934]) notion of the

subjective construction of the environment by animals and humans. In The Symbolic

Species (1997), Deacon takes issue with the sloppy and misguided metaphoric use of

the concept of animal “language”, arguing that animal communication is not merely a

simple language nor a different kind of language to “crack”, but rather something

entirely different and often completely beyond our human abilities. He attacks

evolutionary paradigms that understand human language as the end point to a linear

“Great Chain of Being” or the apex in a hierarchy of intelligence, arguing that the

development of language is rather an evolutionary anomaly and far from associated

with the inevitable progress of greater or more extreme communicative and vocal skills.

In fact, he points us towards other species that have more complex vocal abilities

(namely birds) than we do and also refers to the fact that many primate species—our

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closest living relatives—are nearly silent species. What ultimately distinguishes

language from animal communication is symbolic reference. In light of Kohn’s book, we

can thus see here the intersection of their interests in examining human

representational forms as one kind of semiotic modality among many others and their

work towards on the decolonization of the interpretation and understanding of

communication in terms of language alone.

Conclusion

In studying the interactions between meerkats and scientific researchers in the

field—interactions that were based on cultivated forms of detachment rather than

engagement—Matei Candea (2010) argues that one needn’t necessarily go to out-of-

the-way places to find nonmodern relationalities and alternative ontological logics.

These relationalities and logics—these hybrid natureculture monsters that we sweep

under the rug within strategies of modern purification and naturalism (Latour 1993)—

when recognized and considered, challenge traditional notions of what a social relation

is, gesturing towards a potential for new kinds of relationships between humans and

nonhumans to emerge. Birds seem a potentially ripe participant in these new paradigms

that account for the co-production of our world with nonhumans. Working our way

through the relevant anthropological literature we have considered the many ways

anthropology has both hindered and furthered the development of an understanding of

what the life of a bird is actually like, and how that life is wrapped up into ours, or rather,

how knowing that life drags us in the world. We have also discussed how various

techniques of relating to birds—comparisons, intimacies, mutual contexts, isolations,

metaphors, imperial strategies, etc.—constitute particular forms of ontological

engagement and denial. In that respect, we might say that making birds subjects of

anthropology and bringing together all these ethnographic methodologies and theories

work to challenge our own disciplinary analytics in new and exciting ways.

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