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societies, and to a lesser extent in such things as heraldry or their adoption as
symbols by nation-states.
Assumptions and ramifications which render the human strictly separable from
the animal may appear at first sight entirely 'reasonable', but on closer inspection it
transpires that they flow from a particular set of discourses which began to gain
currency in Europe from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards. Such
discourses formalised a specific notion of agency rooted in a particular conception
of the human and its supposedly distinctive qualities, attributes and capacities
(Daston 1995). The implication is that this knowledge, as a bulwark of Western
science and philosophy, stems from a quite circumscribed historical—geographical
context, and does not necessarily have the universal provenance commonly assumed
(Latour 1993:120). With the taking seriously of 'other' knowledges—notably non-
Western 'indigenous' knowledges or ethnosciences—which provide a less dualistic
account of the differences between humans and animals, many people (outside the
West, but in it too) have started to deconstruct seemingly obvious claims about the
privileged status of the human, in contradistinction to the animal, as
the
source of
agency in the world. Many other societies and cultural worldviews have been
prepared to see capacities for agency distributed much more widely across the many
different things of creation—humans, animals, spirits and the elements all included
—thereby disrupting what Westerners have normally taken to constitute the
properties of consciousness, self-awareness, intentions, thought and language. This
readiness to suppose that such properties of being are also possessed—to some
extent, in some form—by many non-human animals
has
now been transmitted into
the scholarship of a few Western academics, however, resulting in sustained research
and writing on animal consciousness, self-awareness, decision-making, emotions,
and the like (Dawkins 1993; DeGrazia 1996: Chap. 7).
In certain respects a sophisticated intellectual innovation such as 'actor-network
theory' (ANT) also takes us in this direction, since ANT questions any neat
attribution of specific capacities to specific things in the world (e.g. Callon 1986;
Callon and Law 1995; Latour 1993).
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ANT prefers to conceive of such capacities
being distributed much more widely, perhaps unpredictably, across many different
kinds of things associated with (what are conventionally taken as) rather different
orders of reality (the natural, the cultural, the discursive, the economic, the
psychological). Such orders of reality (e.g. nature and society) are hence no longer
seen as readily delimitable realms and causes, and instead become viewed as more or
less stable and durable outcomes, effects or products of struggles, enrolments,
translations of interests and processes of purification involving often vast networks of
'micro-actors' both human and non-human. This is not to suggest that ANT
ignores differences in the world (cf. Laurier and Philo 1999:1064-1069), and
writers such as Serres or Latour are prepared to identify differences between human
societies and those of, say, baboons.
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To be more precise, they propose that the key
difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, in that for
humans, unlike for baboons, objects are employed to solidify social bonds. Objects
in use thus serve to stabilise present human relationships or to maintain the effects of
