History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 1-12

Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

A WAY WITH ANIMALS

DAVID GARY SHAW1
PREPARING HISTORY FOR ANIMALS

Since its distant beginnings, thinking about history has never been about animals.
It couldnt have been. It is a problem we can only even grasp now. History has
been about things we can understand as having affected our choices and destiny
or about human achievement, what we did and suffered.2 To remember ourselves
through our ancestors, perhaps to learn from the pastthese were historys
motivations. But that we was always just a way of saying those enough like
us to count. The we sets limits. It is our gang, a social group, whether a king
and his crony vassals, the senate and people of Rome, the subjects of the Middle
Kingdom, or all humanity. History started as a social perspective on the past, and
at its core were two concerns: the individual exploit within the common endeavor
and the collective action of a group of individuals. Recall Vicos thought that the
world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are
therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.3 For this
fundamental reason, Vico thought, we were at home in understanding social life,
language, history. It was the world of nature that was difficult if not quite beyond
usand animals seem to lie in that neck of the woods.
There is a fine fellow in Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer. He
has been seen as a version of Christ, as a vain and proud but much loved husband.
Certainly he was commanding and skilled. His voice was sweeter than the piping of the finest organ on Sunday.4 But he was shaken by premonitions of doom,
and susceptible, as the beautiful often are, to the flattery of the clever.5 Meaning
bursts from his story, especially once he was trapped by the wily fox and became
a prisoner as well as a probable meal. Chanticleer is, of course, a cock.
He seems a thoughtful rooster too, worried about providence, debating the
history of oracles with his wife. He could have had a good conversation with
Achilles horses, the immortal Xanthos and Balios, who told Achilles his fate,
1. The thinking behind this article was enriched especially by exchanges with Kristin Asdal, Colleen
Boggs, Ethan Kleinberg, and Laura Stark, the last of whom also read and commented on it in draft.
2. Erica Fudge, A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals, in Representing Animals,
ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 6, on a history of animals: such
a thing is impossible.
3. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, transl. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1968), 331.
4. The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 600. I translate: his
vois was murier than the mirye orgon on masse-dayes that in the chirche gon.
5. Fortunately, the clever are even more susceptible to the flattery of the beautiful.

david gary shaw

yet were keen to exonerate themselves and blame the gods. Were it up to them,
they would run as the wind and keep him safe, and how they cried in sympathy
when their human heroes died!6
Real chickens and horses seem different. Personification is the literary term
that crosses the line for rhetorical effect, anthropomorphism its social-science
cousin, and they both mark the great divide between animals and people. We
understand Chanticleers talk and mind because he is written as a person. The
philosopher Wittgenstein provocatively said: If a lion could talk, we wouldnt be
able to understand it.7 For most of human history, we have understood animals
as persons only when we make them out to be humans, albeit in sheeps clothing. It is precisely these assumptions that have been changing across academic
culture, slowly over the last thirty years, building on wider cultural shifts that go
deeper into modern history.
Key to understanding animals current place is perhaps seeing how our ideas
about the proper subjects of history have changed. The slow movement toward
taking animals more seriously is a function of a dynamic weaving of contrary
social and intellectual tendencies over some time. On the one hand, as Susan
Pearson reminds us below,8 the effect of Darwinian thoughtwe might say Erasmus Darwins thoughtwas partly to accelerate claims about the (nonreligious)
sameness of people and animals, arisen from one living filament, which could
then be understood as part of a material continuum.9 On the other side, the spiritual or sensible nature of animals and their susceptibility to suffering drew them
experientially closer to humans, even for those who denied animals souls. EuroAmerican culture, somewhere in the nineteenth century, was struggling, both
becoming disenchanted (through naturalism, science, and liberalism) and spreading a new sort of enchantment (through liberal religion, Romantic pantheism,
early environmentalism, and a sort of gnostic spiritualism). Animals roles as
pets, coworkers, entertainments, and food disturbed old ways. It was as early as
1826 that the Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to Animals was established.10
Even earlier, say from the late eighteenth century, Gods special relationship
with reason declined. The nineteenth-century liberal cultural turn didnt so much
undo religion as free reason from its alliance with it. Much Christian religion
became more overtly and proudly affective, deepening its special relationship
with love and experience. Perhaps to be reasonable was human, but for a growing
number of Europeans and Americans to be worthy was to be able to feel and to
6. The Iliad of Homer, transl. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
425. I thank Sarah Graham-Shaw for pointing me to this incident.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 235e (#327).
8. Susan Pearson, Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History, History and
Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 91-108 (this issue).
9. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 3rd ed. [1794] (Boston: Thomas and
Andrews, 1809), 397: would it be too bold to imagine that all warm blooded animals have arisen
from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality.
10. See Brian Harrison, Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England, English Historical Review 88, no. 349 (1973), 786-820. During the eighteenth century a powerful combination of
evangelical piety, romantic poetry, and rational humanitarianism gradually alerted the public to the
plight of animals (788).

a way with animals

suffer. On such ground, whether Universalist, Methodist, or rational utilitarian,

the links among all feeling things could be posited. In other words, some rationalists and some religious enthusiasts joined to worry about animals, even while
they disagreed about the human and the divine.11
Common creaturely feeling was not the only basis on which some people
started to question the animals nature. The general expansion of academic and
research work in biology and the developing agricultural sciences played a large
role, and their impact accelerated heavily from the mid nineteenth century.12 One
suspects that elements associated with growing urbanization, such as the decline
of direct exposure to animal husbandry, animal slaughter, and the rise of petkeeping, might have played a part too.13 Thus when ethology began to emerge
as a distinct field from the 1930s, the stage was set for the sort of systematic and
intimate knowledge of animals that marks many of the articles in this issue.14
New knowledge about animals, new attitudes about people, and old doubts about
gods changed what people could be and how animals looked. So, if history is
what we can understand because we made it, part of the preparatory process of
seeing animals as historical has included understanding much better what animals
are like, especially in their similarities to the human. To some extent, we have
domesticated our understanding of animals and can increasingly incorporate
them into our world as like us, as akin, as kin.
As crucially, historical research has steadily expanded its topics. To start, the
fact that historiography developed in the nineteenth century as fundamentally
implicated with nationalism helped. If the odd horse registered as historically
interesting it was typically as part of the turn to national heroes.15 Over time,
however, and in more radical hands, the revolutionary age in Europe and the
Americas (17741919) worked to validate the nation rather than the kingdom
and that meant especially the people. And while it was assumed that adult men
were the nations leaders and actors, the organic totality of the nation included
women and the family. All sorts, all statuses were relevant too: Junker Bismarck
and his loyal peasants.16
11. See John Passmore, The Treatment of Animals, Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2
(1975), 195-218; Alice Kuzniar, A Higher Language: Novalis on Communion with Animals, German Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003), 426-442. See the source collection Animal Rights and Souls in the
Eighteenth Century, ed. Aaron Garrett (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2000).
12. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1971);
Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural
Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 18401880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
13. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); Katherine C. Greer, Pets in America: A History (Chapel-Hill:
University of North California Press, 2006). See also Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 53-62.
14. Richard W. Burkhart, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
15. David Gary Shaw, The Torturers Horse: Agency and Animals in History, History and
Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 146-167.
16. See Daniel Woolf, Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity: Reflections on the
Historiographic Organization of the Past, in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches
to Historiography, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Franz Fillafer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006),
71-103; Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present, ed. Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and

david gary shaw

Thus the growing interest in social history, rooted in the prewar period but
powerful from the late 1950s, decisively contributed to the new nation, as it
explored the roles and lived experience of people of all social types, including
those neglected in traditional political power narratives. In other words, social
history brought its concerns for historys sufferers right to the conceptual edges
of the feeling animal. The simultaneous interest, characteristic especially of the
Annales School and its admirers, in economic and material life helped too. Animals or parts of animals fed the economy.17 So, a landmark 1930 study on the fur
trade led its economist author to begin with a brief chapter on the natural history
of the beavers themselves.18 Environmental and ecological histories from the late
1960s on, such as The Columbian Exchange and Plagues and Peoples, moved
early toward animals.19 More generally, historyin its powerful political, social,
and cultural variantswould develop from an interest in the elite as the nations
leaders to a greater consideration of the wider population, including its sectional
and oppositional character. Historys subordinated peoples mattered more and
more, whether the subjects of empire or slavery, the workers in factories, or the
subordinated second sex itself.20 The life of the poor joined the thoughts of the
rich and each helped to open a space in which historians might eventually glimpse
animals. With respect to animals, this was a long and accidental process, but the
social targets of historythe who that matteredhad grown, and the interest and
importance of people who appeared to have little traditional power was a lesson
not easily unlearned and potentially applicable to other sensible beings.21
From the mid 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that animals deserved a larger
place in history at least because people in the past thought animals were important. Keith Thomass Man and the Natural World appeared in 1983 and included
substantial discussion of early modern British attitudes toward animals, just as
Harriet Ritvos The Animal Estate focused in diverse detail on Victorian attitudes.22 In France, Robert Delorts 1984 Les animaux ont une histoire remains
striking and something of a harbinger of a more radical because truly animalcentered perspective.23 The growth of interest was decisively signaled by the
Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 2012); Eileen Ka-May Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of
Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 17841860 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2008).
17. Perhaps the best icon of this approach is Fernand Braudel, Civilisation Matrielle et Capitalisme (XVeXVIIIe sicle), vol. I: Les Structures du Quotidien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), 259-270
focuses on animal power, having dealt with human power first.
18. Harold A. Innes, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History
[1930] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3-6.
19. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Press, 1976).
20. Contemporary with the rise of Annales was Simone de Beauvoirs book of this name: Le
Deuxieme Sexe (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1949).
21. Interestingly, much of this story was anticipated in the strangely prescient satirical paper by
Charles Phineas, a researcher in veterinary history at Boxer College, Household Pets and Urban
Alienation, Journal of Social History 7, no. 3 (1974), 338-343.
22. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
23. Robert Delort, Les Animaux ont une Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1984).

a way with animals

selection in 1997 of Animals and Human Society as Princetons Davis Center

for Historical Studiess annual theme.24 Since 2000 especially, there have been
many historical works on animals around the world and across most historical
periods. 25 Virginia DeJohn Andersons Creatures of Empire in 2004 was a sort of
landmark in early American history,26 and a recent study linking key social movements (witchcraft) to political movements (the English Civil War) to a specific
animal (Prince Ruperts dog, Boy) is a token of the impending normalization
of the animal within historiography.27 The animals historiographical place is
not just a fashion; it will persist, revealing of both the present and past. It also
raises key methodological and theoretical questions that this theme issue hopes
to advance.28
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

These articles reflect a willingness to place the animal at the center of historical
concern, something enabled by the growing influence of posthuman and animalstudies perspectives that should embolden historians.29 Two clusters of theoretical issues recur often in this issue. The first centers on the question of what the
animal is, historically; the second relates to the question of how do we come to
know it, historically.
The first continues the story that Ive sketched above. Animal and human have
never constituted a simple binary, and whom we mean by animal is as disputed as what we mean.30 In exploring this conceptual problem, Thierry Hoquet
demonstrates the persistent and dubious effect of crude generic categories on
current thinking and action. His skepticism about the term animal is compelling partly because of his exposure of the scientific and religious quandaries that
Enlightenment natural history displayed, especially in the rich BuffonCondillac controversy. How to fit the human and the animal into one framework was
already hotly contested.31 In her complementary article, Susan Pearson discusses
24. This eventually generated the volume edited by Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester
Jordan, The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002).
25. A key example is Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern
English Culture (New York: St Martins Press, 2000); for a recent sampling, see Beastly Natures:
Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2010).
26. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27. Mark Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Ruperts Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during
the English Civil War (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2011). I thank Bruce Masters for
bringing this book to my attention.
28. We certainly arent the first to reflect on the theoretical issues. Animal studies and posthumanism are theoretically quite self-conscious, but for historians working here, see Fudge, A Left-Handed
Blow; Hilda Kean, Challenges for Historians Writing Animal-Human History: What is Really
Enough, Anthrozos 25 (supplement) (2012), s57-s72.
29. The influence of Donna Haraway is particularly notable, including in this theme issue.
30. See, for other perspectives on this, Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel, Does the Animal Exist? in Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures, 17-37, and Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits:
Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 149-189.
31. Compare, too, Mahesh Rangarajan, Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of

david gary shaw

nineteenth-century debates in early academic linguistics and biology, as how to

understand and relate (deaf) humans and (mute) animals was contested. Theories
about the essentially human trait anxiously overlaid questions about the animal.
But the larger point that Hoquet pushes and that I would suggest haunts
the issue is that the definition and usage of the word animal has never been
straightforward. It has changed significantly through history in a variety of overlapping registersscientific, agricultural, literary, colloquial, domestic, legal,
and theologicalthat we continue to need to discern and analyze. Strikingly, we
dont today have a single word for the animal creatures that interest us most in
history. We might think those we care about historically are the intimate species,
borrowing from Brett Walker,32 but does that mean forgetting the secret agents
that fill our guts, sometimes laying us dead through disease? The terms pets
and domesticated animals are useful, but much of our theoretical conversation
is still bedeviled by the sort of generalization that makes Hoquet urge us to adopt
the individual as the only honest validating term.33 Certainly, the difficulty of
assimilating bats to humans was perhaps the reason Thomas Nagel chose that
beast to stage his epistemological crisis.34 Whatever we do, we need to retain the
sense of distinctiveness and difference that actually confronting an animal makes
immediately clear.
The animalhuman division has long been linked with that of culture and
nature. It is, as Chris Pearson notes, one of the contested conceptual spaces, by
which animals might be kept from their place in history.35 Mahesh Rangarajan
makes clear that this distinction is quite foreign to South Asian history, so if
historians arent prepared to criticize the elision of animal and nature, human and
culture, they might well be reinscribing it as well as exporting it to quite different
contexts.36 Walker suggests in effect that nature absorbs animals and humans to
overcome the divide.37 From the other angle, however, it can be considered that
animals are in fact rich in culture. They might even be capable of something
like art, as Hoquet suggests.38 If so, culture and nature might survive as relevant
historical categories but no longer in line with any animalhuman border.39 At
least for some animals, it looks as if they are putting a foot, like humans, onto
Gir Forest, Gujarat, India, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013), 109-127 (this issue) for varying South Asian systems of categorizing animals. See Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
32. Brett Walker, Animals and the Intimacy of History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52,
(2013), 45-67 (this issue).
33. Thierry Hoquet, Animal Individuals: A Plea for a Nominalistic Turn in Animal Studies,
History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013), 68-90 (this issue).
34. Thomas Nagel, What is it Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974), 435-450.
35. Chris Pearson, Dogs, History, and Agency, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, (2013),
133.
36. Rangarajan, Animals with Rich Histories, 111.
37. Cf. Walker, Animals and the Intimacy of History, 48. See, for integrating an environmentally
focused approach, Edmund Russell, Environmental History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
38. Hoquet, Animal Individuals, 79. Jared Diamond, Animal Art: Variation in Bower Decorating Style among Male Bowerbirds, Amblyornis inornatus, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 83, no. 9 (1986), 30423046. See Damien Jayat, Les Animaux ont-ils une Culture? (Paris:
EDP Sciences, 2010).
39. I thank Colleen Boggs for highlighting this issue for me.

a way with animals

the side of culture. But do we want a framework that encourages us to consider

the variable quality of complexity of cultures, whether simian, canine, or human?
Part of the challenge of delineating animal and human arises because we
are increasingly aware of theories that stress, not methodological or nominalistic individualism, but interdependence, interactivity, and system. Many such
theories also deny the existence of definite boundaries between one animal, one
thing, and another. There are many sources of this movement. For instance, the
materiality that environmental history has always assumed is particularly apt for
stressing connection, and, understandably, environmental history has been an
important long-term animal-aware field. Of course, interdependence often means
one thing eating another, the ultimate confusion of subject and object and the presumed elimination of difference and individuality. In Walkers article, the meat
on offer is human, whereas Rangarajan essentially tells the tale of South Asian
lions dietary preferences, which he sees as a form of adaptation to the great
pressures of ecological history.40 Ultimately he shows the lions developing their
twentieth-century aversion to eating people. Our sense that environment always
impinges on and affects human life through an ecological web provides a very
broad conceptual and geographical framework in which to closely link animals
as historical players.
Walkers focus on intimacy finds a sort of resonance in Vinciane Desprets
article, in which the nonhuman animals dominate through their interactions with
the world.41 Even insects find their role, symbiotically and with others. Conversant with theories that stress ontological and material interactivity such as assemblage theory (Deleuze) and actor-network theory (Latour), Despret disrupts some
assumptions about domination and warns us against adopting overly reductive
ontologies for understanding animal life. She offers one way forward for radically decentering the human. If such can be achieved for theorizing animals in
the present, it might become a launching pad for a posthuman history as well.42
Clearly, the sense of interconnection and blurry boundaries around animals
raises questions about who acts in history. Although scholars have been including animals as objects in history in some respects for a very long time, we are
now discussing the revolutionary question: to what extent are animals historical
actors? Indeed, agencys prominence in these articles and in the conference we
held to discuss them took even those of us who wrote about the subject somewhat
by surprise. If we had never thought of agency before, animals and history might
have made us invent it. What is going on?43
Arguably, possessing agency brings to the fore the very purpose and point of
history. For some, to deny agency seems almost to deny historical significance.
Indeed, one reason for expanding historys subjects to include the whole of
human society was to demonstrate that agency could exist even where political
40. Rangarajan, Animals with Rich Histories.
41. Vinciane Despret, From Secret Agents to Interagency, History and Theory, Theme Issue 52,
(2013), 68-90 (this issue).
42. See Ewa Domanska, Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies, Historein 10 (2010),
118-130.
43. Brantz also noted agencys place in making animals in history problematic; see her Introduction, in Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures, 2-3.

david gary shaw

power was small.44 Where there was a mind, there was an actor. The debates
about animal minds were central in nineteenth-century considerations of animal
language, as Susan Pearson shows. To have language was to be the sort of thing
that mattered. Still, in the 1920s the social psychologist and philosopher George
Mead thought that animals lacked the self that let them exist historically and thus
to become much more than objects.45 To some extent, agency and its acting self
is a shibboleth of historical significance: if you cant perform it, you cant matter.
Agency is also about effect, however. Actors make things happen.46 Holding
onto this aspect of doing-with-an-effect, but stepping away from notions of self
and intentionality, allows Chris Pearson, for instance, to find a middle space in
which dogs could act significantly in the First World War, in some ways similar
to my discussion of warhorses in Napoleonic Europe. Backing away even further
from intentionality, Despret insists smoothly on the idea of agencement, a rapport of forces, the bringing togetherconstantly renewedof one thing and
another. There is no agency that is not interagency.47 Some associations matter
more than others, of course, and so I argue in my article for special cases, which
I call unities, in which animals fuse with people into new agents. Clearly, this
theme issue includes divergent notions of agency, but the common implications
are that agency is an interdependent structure or dynamic in which neither self
nor intention is required.48 Incorporating animals into history as agents remains a
goal for some just because to be an agent is to become a proper, customary focus
for historical concern.
Less debatable is the fact that animals make a difference; teaching ourselves
to look for that difference throughout history has to be the lesson learned going
forward, even where the shock of intimacy might make us want to look away.
Intimacy, interagency, unities: the subtext of this theme issue is the uncanny
proximity of animals to history, to humans. They are always there, just out of
focus. The barriers between us are touchy. Jacques Derrida and his cat stare
each other down, naked, their roles and positions a matter of (mutual) perplexity.49 Purity cant wholly avoid pollution. The cats mouth is full of surprisingly
nasty germs, animals in their own right perhaps, legions of them at war, poised to
touch. From their existence, we can see that there is a systemic complexity that
might take the historical role of animals in diverse and surprising directions. The
effects occur, somewhere in the biosphere, even when intention is left far behind.
Within these frameworks of interdependence, it will often be hard to know what
44. In challenging the use of the term, Walter Johnson went so far as to call agency the master
trope of the New Social History. See On Agency, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003), 113.
See also Andy Wood, Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire
Valley c.15961615, Past & Present 193, no. 1 (2006), 41-72.
45. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 136.
46. See my paper for efforts to draw an outline of the conditions of agency: Shaw, Torturers
Horse.
47. Despret, From Secret Agency to Interagency, 44.
48. This is not to say that they might not be present or transformative of the sort of agency that
occurs.
49. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Mary Louise Mallet, transl. David Wills
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

a way with animals

the power relations are. Once fused in an actor network, is the animal still the
subordinate to the human or is history their common creation, their mutual, sometimes coordinated action?
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONCERNS: SOURCES, SCIENCE, AND PERSPECTIVE

There are many methodological challenges in doing history well with animals,
but I want to raise two that are sometimes interrelated, and that are both connected to the epistemological question: how do we know about animals in history?
I dont particularly mean will the sources mention them? Often they will, as
several of these articles show, and an early nineteenth-century British racehorse
or the Duke of Wellingtons horse Copenhagen will be better attested in the
archives than almost any contemporary nineteenth-century agricultural laborer or
her husband or child.50 As several of the articles in this issue show, our methods
are able when our questions are insistent.
Yet, in writing the history of peoples experience or motivations, we can quietly fall back on the historians favorite theory: common sense. In other words,
there is a presumed sameness to humans that allows us easier access to them,
through some form of sympathetic or analogical understanding. We can get away
with a lot of speculation about motivation, for instance. There is help through
extrapolation. First-person narratives sometimes authored by socially modest
people are found in many geographical contexts and many centuries, providing
glimpses into the psychic, emotional, or symbolic worlds of past individuals and
then their cultures or social groups. Scholars then transpose their insights from
one context to the next. Their historical experience and historical perspective are
in principle accessible to us because they are similar to us.51 For animals, however, Chaucer and Homer just wont do as guides, and there are no first-person
accounts.
The anthropomorphic fallacy threatens. The word anthropomorphic was
used exclusively about gods until well into the nineteenth century when its application to animals developed.52 The error of making gods derive from people then
became the sin of making animals seem like people. Now that we are done ignoring animals, how do we avoid just putting ourselves in them?53 How do we start
to know what it was like for them? When documents thin or fail, other forms of
knowledge prevail.
Support from natural science becomes quite attractive at such points. Many
of these articles make at least some attempt to face the problem of understanding animals by turning to the wide variety of supporting scientific theory and
example. For instance, Despret explores (and criticizes) the perspectives and spe50. See Shaw, Torturers Horse.
51. Of course, dispute over this claim has to some extent dominated theoretical debates throughout
history and the humanities for much of the last forty years, but practically this is less evident in this
issue.
52. anthropomorphism, n.. OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.
oed.com.ezproxy.wesleyan.edu/view/Entry/8449?redirectedFrom=anthropomorphism& (accessed
November 1, 2013).
53. See Shaw, Torturers Horse, for some discussion of this problem.

10

david gary shaw

cific achievements of ethological thought, and Fudge deploys Temple Grandins

innovative and empathetic insights from animal science and her own autism to
explore the phenomenological horizon of bovine experience. For Chris Pearson
as well the target is to gain access to animal behavior, for which he turns to
canine psychology, often really a branch of cognitive psychology. Susan Pearsons account nests nineteenth-century proto-scientific linguistics inside our own
Darwinian evolutionary assumptions, whereas Hoquet ranges widely, arguing,
for instance, that even current biological knowledge is itself improved by an
individualizing turn.54
The turn to particular sorts of scientific knowledge does have its risks. Sciencestudies specialists are often worried that science gets taken at face value, as if
it had no history, no political commitments, nor implications.55 Faced with the
strange novelty and difficulty of accessing animals, historians might indeed seek
scientific finalities that the humanities never offer; but sometimes a positivistic
approach to science slips in to anchor history. This is a tendency, however, not
only in animal or environmental history but also in the newer ambitious ventures
of Big History and Deep History, approaches that also work to go where the trail
of human writing and even artifacts do not as reliably lead.56
At the same time, this turn toward scientific theories and material evidence to
answer our questions about animals in history is a notable instance of the return
to the real within historiography.57 Some might answer after allpossibly Walker
in his article58that it might be the radical poststructuralist critique of science
and the skepticism or constructivism of the linguistic turn in the humanities that
are themselves now behind the times. Right or wrong, access to the animal might
be one of the reasons that historians are willing to adopt and adapt more scientific conclusions in their work. If so, they must face the challenge of using that
science well and that might be a very large task, one for which interdisciplinary
collaboration will likely prove necessary.59 The fundamental challenge remains
even where the science might be uncontested, as Fudge at least is very aware:
things change, cattle change, and psychological and animal sciences might only
have the durability of social science when applied to essentially social situ54. Despret, From Secret Agency to Interagency; Fudge, Milking Other Mens Beasts; C.
Pearson, Dogs, History, and Agency; S. Pearson, Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds; Hoquet,
Animal Individuals.
55. See, for instance, for its proximity to our particular subject, Kristin Asdal, The Problematic
Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History, History and Theory,
Theme Issue 42 (2003), 60-74.
56. See, for example, Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction
to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Andrew Shryock and Daniel
Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011).
57. This refers to historians large and growing interest in materiality, geography, things, the body,
emotions, time, presence, but declining interest in words, ideas, and concepts.
58. Walker, Animals and the Intimacy of History, 48.
59. Big and Deep History both have more collaborative turns built in, but on the need for and
nature of interdisciplinary work, see Eric Baratay, Les Socio-anthropo-logues et les animaux,
Socits 108, no. 2 (2010), 9-18.

a way with animals

11

ations.60 Science might seem to save us from anthropomorphism by handing us

over to anachronism.
CONCLUSION: HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM FROM THE ANIMAL POINT OF VIEW

In their attempt to understand animals as feeling and acting beings, the articles
in this theme issue are anchored in many diverse theoretical and disciplinary
sources. Indeed, deciding if there is an animal point of view and whether
humans ought still to be considered exceptional are two of the themes that run
most insistently through the issue.61 We need, of course, to remind ourselves that
the historical questions are necessarily sometimes warped: whether or not we
today think humans are just other bits of the biosphere, we cannot lose track of
the fact that what people thought in the past and how they acted because of those
thoughts must speak in our historical work alongside our own assumptions and
definitions. The human exceptionalism that lingers might be that of the past and
it might be a historiographically necessary loiterer.
But turning back to Vicos idea, we might at least insist, especially after reflecting on the articles in this issue, that we have usually made our history not by
ourselves alone, but with our intimate allies, our assemblages, with interagency,
and among unities, that is, with uncanny animals, the historical animals, whose
presence historians should find and write into their accounts. To understand the
history people have made really does require animals, and the articles in this
theme issue suggest that we are well on our way to diverse and effectiveif not
wholly reconcilableways of integrating many animals into history and going
some way to understanding them too.
At this moment, history and theory have generally been turning away from the
symbolic and the linguistic. Trends are toward sensation and presence, to materiality and space, to the body and its affect. Yeatss rag and bone shop of the
heart is a jarringly apt metaphor for this turn to the real. Animals fit this frame
and this moment. Animals in history have made clear material contributions to
the environment and economy. They call for attention even more because of the
massive importance they had to the people in the past. But we also want to theorize the animal in history because it helps us think even harder about who, these
days, the we of history is. Certainly, the centrality of the human generally is
not being overthrown here, but modulated, reconceived, just about challenged.
Wesleyan University
Editorial Note

This theme issue began with a mini-conference, Do Animals Need a History? held at
Wesleyan University in March 2013. The arrangements and organization were practically
managed by Julia Perkins, and I repeat here what all the attendees said at the time: the
60. Fudge, Milking Other Mens Beasts,
61. This move is reflected too in Eric Baratay, Le Point du vue animal: Une autre version de
lhistoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012).

12

david gary shaw

conferences success, including reorganizing on account of Hurricane Sandy, would have

been impossible without Julies work, wisdom, good humor, and professionalism.
In addition to the authors included in this theme issue, attendees included editors of
the journal, members of the Wesleyan faculty, and some fine commentators who made
significant contributions to the papers improvement and to all our thinking. They were
Kristin Asdal, Colleen Boggs, Susan Crane, Ewa Domanska, Brian Fay, Sandra Swart,
Kari Weil, and John Zammito. They did a terrific job at illuminating, provoking, and
sweetening. I thank them.
In addition, I want to thank Wesleyan colleagues Andrew Curran and William Johnston for fruitful suggestions about participants and my other History and Theory editorial
colleagues Brian Fay, Ethan Kleinberg, and Vijay Pinch both for their general support
and specific advice on people and ideas. Last, I thank Associate Editor Laura Stark, who
helped me over the last two years with the overall conception, developmental editing, and
detailed planning of the conference and this theme issue.