Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
suffering innocence, a suffering outsider group (such as African-Americans); its
rescue as a chance at redemption.
Such ideas about animals as food, pets or wildlife together reveal the subtle ways
in which participants identify with other outsider groups, both human and non-
human. Their willingness to tolerate dog-eating among Southeast Asian
immigrants, for example, reflects their own experience as an oppressed, marginalised
group in American society, and their sensitivity to racialisation based on colour and
culture. Similarly, their sympathy for suffering wildlife and their claim that people
should help wildlife in distress, just as people should help each other regardless of
colour, hints at their solidarity with animals as brethren due to their outsider status.
But the history and experience of oppression among African-Americans also creates
imperatives to survive in the face of adversity. Thus, when animals are critical to
survival, they will be hunted, trapped, slaughtered and served up in ways that may
become potent cultural symbols of strength and perseverance. And, when they
compete with humans and thus deprive them of needed resources, animals can
expect harsh treatment if not extermination.
Thus certain practices are appropriate for specific social, cultural and,
significantly,
ideological
constructions, and are mediated by the values and attitudes
inherent within such constructions. Suffering wildlife or pets legitimise sympathy
and rescue, while the suffering of 'food' animals is considered an unfortunate but
necessary externality of insufficient consequence to change behaviour—although
over time such cultural constructions can break down or dissolve as circumstances
change. In any one time or place, however, our analysis reveals that people are bound
—by shared affinity, need or disgust—to particular sorts of animals understood on
the basis of historically rooted social constructs. Such human—animal connections
will vary in both subtle and startling ways across the diverse cultural groups living
side by side in the contemporary metropolis.
