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Winter Course '10: Humanities 102/211
"The Good Society and the Question of Species"

Instructors: Susan Pearson (History), Laurie Shannon (English), Mary Weismantel (Anthropology, Spanish & Portuguese)

Susan Pearson
 Professor Pearson is an historian of nineteenth-century America with special interest in the cultural politics of reform, rights discourse, the development of American liberalism, and the history of human-animal relations.
Laurie Shannon
Professor Shannon works on early modern literature and culture, especially topics in Shakespeare, political thought and citizenship, natural history/animal studies, and the historical arenas of science, law, and medicine. Her first book, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, and her current book project, The Necessary Animal: Zootopian Politics in the Environs of Shakespeare, both explore the evolving terms and conditions of social/political membership.

Mary Weismantel
Professor Weismantel has written on a wide variety of topics, ranging from food to adoption, and from contemporary popular culture to ancient ceramics.  Two threads connect her work:  a sustained interest in theorizing materiality, and a lifelong interest in the Andean region of South America.  Her areas of expertise include race and sex.

Frontispiece of Journal of Researches by Charles Darwin
A search for “the good life” -- in and through optimal forms of a “good society” -- registers as a persistent concern across time and place. Social visions range, of course, from the pragmatic to the utopian and from the progressive to the traditional. Since the classical period in the West, however, working definitions of “society” have limited the engagements we term “social” to relations between and among human beings alone. While Aristotle characterized humans as “political animals,” his extremely influential remarks denying animals a socio-political life may serve as one of the most explicit examples of rejecting the possibility of social participation across species. To cite only a very recent echo of this view, philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested that “human politics is distinguished from that of other living beings in that it is … tied to language” and based “on a community not simply of the pleasant and the painful but of the good and the evil and the just and the unjust.” For the most part, however, such exclusions of non-human animals from conceptions of “society” and political life simply go without saying. But as even these exclusionary formulations show, from the very beginning there is no “human” society without first taking up the question of animals, by whom “the human” is measured and the boundaries of social membership are set.

Against this persistent philosophical claim that society and the goods attached to it belong only to people, a number of developments challenge the “human-exceptionalist” account of social life. One is posed by non-Western and pre-capitalist societies, where notions of sociality, and of humanity, do not share the Mosaic premise of a fundamental divide between a Godly Man, and the lesser beasts. The notion of a shared kinship with animals prevalent, for example, in Native American epistemologies, resonates with Darwinian and post-Darwinian ideas in the West, where evolutionary science posited a kind of relatedness across species -- not least by revealing that the idea of “species” fixes arbitrarily what are actually shifting and fluid biological states. Pursuing this insight, scientific research has eroded the notion of language as an exclusively human faculty and emphasized powers of signification and communication in diverse animal kinds (ants, birds, whales); it has traced the social dynamics characterizing the group lives of animals (bees, wolves, chimpanzees) and illustrated the grounds for human social life in those examples. By situating our quest for “the good society” within a larger cross-species, transhistorical, and cross-cultural context, we not only open up new definitions and questions; we also find ourselves re-defining the very grounds of our inquiry.

For example, this is a course in the Humanities -- a domain of knowledge whose very title raises new issues once we begin to question the fixity of the boundary between human and non-human. And so this course will do more than just add animals to our definition of “society,” or the merciful treatment of animals to our notion of what it means to be “good.” It will show how considering the relationship between humans and animals changes fundamental premises that underlie much scholarly inquiry, such as oppositions between “nature” and “culture,” or between the “humanities,” the “social sciences,” and the “natural sciences.” This course will bring together the perspectives of three disciplines in which these reconsiderations have been taking place: history, literature, and anthropology. In each of these, we will look at the ways in which animals have been imagined and represented in myth, literature and art; the actual traces of animal lives and deaths; the social geographies of human/animal interaction, within societies past and present; and the complex interplay of those imaginary and lived social worlds.

Against the long-held presumption that only humans have language and only language makes society, this course will examine the horizons of possibility -- for both social life and “human” knowledge -- that are opened, in Donna Haraway’s words, “when species meet.”

 


Engraving of Aristotle seated. Published
in an 1894 general history book.

Readings will be selected from among:

Genesis and other selected readings from the Bible
Ackerley, J.R. My Dog Tulip
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal
Anderson, Virginia. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America
Aristotle. De anima
Cassidy, Rebecca. The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket
Coe, Sue. Dead Meat
Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals
Coleman, John. Vicious: Men and Wolves in America
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am”
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and selected letters
Durkheim, Emile. Social Classification
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. The Nuer (chapter on cattle)
Grandin, Temple. Animals in Translation
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto; When Species Meet
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations”
Ingold, Tim. What is an Animal?
Kohn, Eduardo. “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement”
Levi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism
Montaigne, Michel de. “The Apology for Raymond Sebond”
Nussbaum, Martha. The Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership
Philo, Chris. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations
Pliny the Elder. Historia Naturalis (History of Nature)
Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”

 

  
     

Northwestern University
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences