The social scientific study of culture has traditionally focused almost exclusively on human communities. Non-human animal behaviour has been considered the domain of ethology, which usually looks for species-wide behaviour patterns explicable in terms of evolutionary biology, rather than the particularities characteristic of cultural diversity.
Several reasons are underlying this asymmetry. One is ontological: Nonhuman beings are often assumed to lack the cognitive traits required for the social learning characteristic of culture. Another reason is epistemological: Even if animals are capable of cultural organization, how can human researchers hope to access the associated matrix of meanings, given our cognitive differences and the difficulty of cross-species communication? There is also an axiological reason: As humans, an understanding of the cultural behaviour of our conspecifics is of great value to us, and perhaps the details of non-human culture are not.
Each of these justifications for ignoring animal culture in social science has been challenged, and in this course, we will explore these challenges. We will look at philosophical debates about animal culture's possibility possibility and epistemic accessibility. We will also examine whether the ethnographic tools used in social science to study human culture can be fruitfully extended to the domain of the nonhuman.
The course is designed as a seminar focused on reading and discussion rather than lectures. The schedule of topics and readings is below.
Unit 1: The Problem of Language and Meaning
An immediate challenge in any attempt to extend qualitative social science methods to the study of non-human animals is that these methods cannot be fruitfully applied to non-linguistic communities, as they rely crucially on examining linguistically embedded meanings. In this unit, we explore some of the philosophical foundations of this worry. Is it possible that some of the basic requirements of ethnographic analysis – the existence of meaningful thought, the possibility of communication, the ability to understand social interaction – can be satisfied without language?
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, extracts Donald Davidson: “Rational Animals”
Daniel Dennett: “Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology” Colin Allen: “The Geometry of Partial Understanding”
Dale Jamieson: “Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds”
Dorit Bar-On: “Crude Meaning, Brute Thought (Or: What Are They Thinking?!)” Eva Meijer: When Animals Speak: Towards an Inter-Species Democracy, extracts Grant Ramsey: “Culture in Humans and Other Animals”
Unit 2: The Foundations of Social Science Methodology
In this unit, we look at philosophical discussions about the appropriate methodology for studying culture, with an eye towards whether standard conceptions of the foundations of social science methodology can be adapted to the study of non-human communities. We also discuss the divergence between cultural and biological anthropology and attempts at rapprochement between the two.
Martin Packer: The Science of Qualitative Research, extracts
Peter Winch: The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, Chapter 2 Clifford Geertz: “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture” John Tooby and Leda Cosmides: “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”
Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley: Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture, extracts
Unit 3: Posthumanism
The default perspective of modernity centres the human as both the primary subject and object of social knowledge. In this unit, we look at some seminal attempts to chart a course beyond the humanism characteristic of modernity and expand our conception of the social to incorporate a wider range of agents.
John Berger: “Why Look at Animals?”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, extracts from Chapter 10
Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, extracts Donna Haraway: When Species Meet, extracts
Unit 4: More Than Human Ethnographies
Armed with the conceptual arsenal developed in the previous units, we discuss extending the ethnographic methodology to the non-human domain. This unit will examine the scope and limitations of the multi-species ethnographic research tradition and the extent to which researchers can (or need to) avoid anthropomorphism in their study of non-human cultures.
Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Think: Towards and Anthropology Beyond the Human, extracts
Kristin Andrews and Brian Huss: “Anthropomorphism, Anthropectomy, and the Null Hypothesis” Raymond Madden: “Animals and the Limits of Ethnography”
Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor: Ethnography After Humanism, extracts Henry Buller: “Animal Geographies II: Methods”
John Hartigan Jr: “Knowing Animals – Multispecies Ethnography and the Scope of Anthropology”
Matthew Adams et al: “Notes from a Field: A Qualitative Exploration of Human-Animal Relations in a Volunteer Shepherding Project”
Harry Wels: “Multi-Species Ethnography: Methodological Training in the Field in South Africa” Anindya Sinha et al: “Affective Ethnographies of Animal Lives”