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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
Bowman 24
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
Bowman 25
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.
Bowman 33
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
Bowman 34
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,
Bowman 38
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
Bowman 40
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.
Bowman 41
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