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commentators will doubtless see problems with such wordings, spotting the dangers
of both anthropomorphism and hylozoism, and accusing us of misconstruing what
should be meant by 'agency' in serious academic research. Since such issues are so
relevant to how we are framing our collection as a whole, and to the 'animal-centred'
geography surfacing in many chapters, let us now insert a second subsection that,
while interrupting the flow of our narrative, is currently very pertinent.
'What is the agency of animals?' and related matters
It can be argued that many animals have their own 'territories' (see below), that they
live in certain environments to which they have adapted, and which they have
helped to mould in some way over time. It can also be argued that many animals do
have the capacity to transgress the imagined and materially constructed spatial
orderings of human societies, but can we then talk about some animals having the
capacity to
resist
these orderings? To ask such a question does indeed raise the
thorny issue of animal agency, given that the concept of 'resistance' is generally
taken to entail the presence of conscious intentionality, seemingly only a property of
human
agency in that only humans are widely recognised to possess self-
consciousness and the facility for acting on intentions with a view to converting
plans into outcomes.
20
Such a claim returns us to the broader theme, as aired above,
of distinguishing humans from animals. It also forces us to meet the claims of
philosophers about the supposedly special status of the human being as a self-aware
entity, the only such entity, possessing the mental 'wiring' allowing inner thought
and the related development of language (e.g. Hegel 1975:48-51; Rousseau 1973).
At the same time, notions of this kind clearly link to a long-standing human belief
in a basic distinction between what is often termed the 'civilised' or 'rational' being
who can think and act in the world (the human), and what are often identified as the
base passions and instincts which allegedly obliterate a being's potential for agency
(the primal basis of the animal, present within humans, but most obviously
displayed in non-human animals) (Horigan 1988; Ingold 1994b).
21
From this
distinction arises the widespread use of terms such as 'animal' and 'bestial' to
describe groups of people perceived to engage in anti-social, possibly inhumane,
activities. Indeed, all kinds of cultural cross-codings have historically been
constructed between some humans and some animals. Sometimes human groups
may be regarded as lesser or marginal to other more dominant groups, and may
thereby be associated with animals (or the bestial in general) also viewed as lesser or
marginal or as inhabiting marginal spaces. For example, white colonists sometimes
associated native American Indians with wild animals such as the wolf, ones which
were seen as pests or even 'vermin', and this is a point made by Brownlow (this
volume; and also Ryan, this volume). Many groups may erroneously be coded by a
dominant culture with non-human pests and vermin, and it is obvious that all kinds
of metaphors of threat, contagion and pollution come to surround such associations
and cross-codings of peoples and animals. Occasionally, of course, the identification
of people with certain animals can be more 'positive': consider their uses in totemic
