CONFERENCE:
Animal Magnetism: The Pushmi-Pullyu of Consocial Life

Friday, April 4-Saturday, April 5, 2014
Rhode Island Hall, Room 108

This conference explored the tensions, the "push and pull" of human/animal relationships from a variety of vantage points and cultures both ancient and modern. This was the final conference associated with Brown University's Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, "Animal Magnetism: The Emotional Ecology of Animals and Humans."

The conference is free and open to the public. No pre-registration is required.

SCHEDULE

PARTICIPANTS & ABSTRACTS

Laura Brown (Cornell University)
“How We Love: Animal Affects in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture”

Female-centered poetry depicting human-animal intimacy enables us to take a direct look at the role of the animal in generating literary innovation. The images that are developed and promulgated in the eighteenth-century subgenre of lapdog poetry—the first systematic modern representation of animals in English literature-- inspire what emerges in literary history as a very unusual depiction of love. Pursuing this depiction forward suggests that these emergent, new images of how we love have a growing, extended impact on the representation of affect.

Clint Carroll (University of Minnesota)
"'Killing Our Brothers': Indigenous Environmental Politics and the Minnesota-Wisconsin Wolf Hunt"

In January 2012, federal officials delisted wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan from the threatened and endangered species list, delegating wolf management to tribal and state authorities. Without consultation with tribes, Wisconsin and Minnesota lawmakers soon announced plans to authorize a wolf hunt during the fall. Regional American Indian tribal governments and individuals opposed the policy, with one Bad River Ojibwe citizen saying, “Killing a wolf is like killing a brother.” I analyze the Minnesota-Wisconsin wolf hunt in light of Indigenous Ojibwe opposition and the environmental politics of settler colonialism, and argue for direct engagement with Indigenous nations on issues of natural resource management policy based on the federal trust relationship and the implementation of Indigenous values toward other-than-human beings.

Cristiana Franco (University for Foreigners of Siena)
“Anthrozoology and the Classics: A New Agenda for the Study of Animals in Ancient Societies"

Recent studies in Anthrozoology suggest that human beings are in fact genetically programmed to respond attentively to certain animal existences (zootropia) and to promote a broad range of interspecies interactions. Humanities scholars are more and more willing to take account of the ‘animal factor’ in history. The point is not simply to study the history of animals, but to conceive of animal subjects as actors in a nature-cultural history and to acknowledge our debt to other species in terms of co-evolution and cultural exchange. Animal agency in history is not easy to recover. Yet this paper presents a case study – the dog in ancient Greece – that shows how it is possible to restore the spaces of freedom and resistance to social and educational pressure that the animal exerted. Focusing on the relationship in terms of bond, interaction and emotional investment illuminates some of the most striking representations of the dog in ancient Greek texts.

The Jenks Society for Lost Museums (Brown University)
"The Animals of Rhode Island Hall: The Collected Stories of Prof. J.W.P. Jenks”

John Whipple Potter Jenks, founder of Brown University’s lost museum of natural history and anthropology once housed in Rhode Island Hall, was passionate about both hunting animals and conserving them, studying them in the field and displaying their taxidermic remains in his museum. In his roles as teacher, curator, field naturalist, conservationist, and natural theologian, Jenks exemplified the many ways man interacted with beast in the late nineteenth century, at the very moment natural history was giving way to the emerging field of biology.

Steven Kosiba (University of Alabama)
“What an Animal Is...and Is Not: Sacrifice and Taxonomy in the Ancient Andes”

This paper explores the ritual practices that manifested taxonomic understandings of personhood and animality in the ancient Andes. It presents recent archaeological and ethnohistorical insights into the political role of sacrifice—specifically, the theatrical rites during which Inka rulers and priests fed things, animals, and humans to specific places called wak’a. In caring for these wak’a, the Inkas blurred ontological boundaries between the “human” and “non-human,” while establishing bonds of mutuality and kinship relationships that defined what it meant to be a person. In so doing, they created the social value categories of a taxonomic order in which kinds of persons were inextricably linked to kinds of places, materials, animals, and humans.

Annie Potts (University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand)
"Ngā Mōkai: The Traditional Pets of Māori"

The keeping of animals as 'pets' in New Zealand began with the arrival of the first human inhabitants of these islands around 800 years ago. The early Polynesian settlers brought with them from their ancestral lands domesticated kurī (dogs), valued for their company, as well as their hair, bones and meat. They found in New Zealand native birds able to be tamed: tūī and huia were cherished for their abilities to mimic, while kākā served a dual purpose as entertaining pets and as decoys helpful in attracting others of their kind during hunting trips. In this seminar I explore traditional Māori narratives and everyday practices involving such pets (ngā mōkai). The term ‘mōkai’ itself was employed by ancient Māori to refer to certain domesticated animals (such as decoy birds used by hunters to capture other birds). ‘Mōkai’ was also the word for a human slave (for example, someone taken captive during an intertribal war). This dual usage of the term suggests something important about human-companion animal relations in pre-European Māori culture: namely that they were highly ambivalent and complicated, encompassing a range of attitudes from exploitation to love, sometimes simultaneously. In this seminar I will also discuss how early interactions between European explorers and Māori iwi (tribes) often involved nonhuman animals, and resulted in important changes in each culture’s ideas about and treatment of certain species.

Karl Taube (University of California-Riverside)
“Of Birds, Bugs and Butterflies: Aesthetics of the Soul and Paradise in Ancient Mesoamerica”

Among the Classic Maya, one of the most developed mergings of animal and human are the spirit beings known as Wahy, an aspect of the soul related to concepts of dreaming, the night and forest wilds. Graphically portrayed and explicitly named on Late Classic Maya vases, these Wahy spirits are typically appear as dangerous, unwholesome beings blending both human and animal characteristics, including such creatures as jaguars, bats, predatory birds and insects as well as putrescent gods of death and disease. Because of the rich corpus of visual and textual material available for research, they and the wholly unpleasant underworld realm of Xibalba have dominated much of our recent understanding of Classic Maya concepts of the soul and afterlife. However, in ancient Maya thought, there was also the breath soul, which frequently appears as a bead, flower, or quetzal plume before the face of gods and nobles. Rather than dark and dank Xibalba, this breath soul pertains to a bright solar paradise of precious birds and flowering plants. In this study, I focus on the symbolism of the quetzal as a symbol of not only the floral diurnal paradise, but also the soul as well in Classic Maya thought. In addition, I describe the presence of a very similar complex at the roughly contemporaneous site of Teotihuacan, located in Central Mexico (ca. a.d. 250-600). However, in sharp contrast to the Classic Maya, the Teotihuacanos and later Aztec also considered butterflies as embodiments of the soul, whereas in Classic Maya art they only appear in the context of Teotihuacan-related imagery. With their segmented and rigid exoskeletons, insects were solidly part of the morbid Way complex rather floral paradise among the Classic Maya. Nonetheless, butterflies as well as quetzals and other precious birds do appear in portrayals of paradise at Early Postclassic Chichen Itza (ca. a.d. 900-1250), where they wear bracelets and necklaces to denote their supernatural nature as human souls, a tradition that continued to the contact period Aztec.

 

Gary Urton (Harvard University)
"Age Grades and Species: An Andean Theory of Relations Between Humans and Animals"

Two years of close encounters by the author with animals in the countryside and people of different ages and ayllu affiliations in the village of Pacariqtambo, Peru, in the 1980s, led to the articulation of a theory of human/animal relations centering on age grades and species formation in this highland village. This presentation looks back on the bases for the articulation of that theory in the past and reflects on its relevance, salience and implications today.