Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
(Baudrillard 1994:139, 141, note 4)
The chief themes of this collection have now begun to emerge, and it should be
evident that the prime aim of the following essays is to explore the conjoint
conceptual and material placements of animals, as decided upon by humans in a
variety of situations, and also to probe the disruptions of these placements as
achieved on occasion by the animals themselves. It is to record many of the animal
spaces specified in one way or another by humans, but also to spy on something of
the beastly places made by animals themselves, whether wholly independent of
humans or when transgressing, even resisting, human spatial orderings. At the same
time, it is to weave these themes through inquiries tackling a whole range of human
—animal relations associated with different worldly contexts. More specifically, it
involves documenting all manner of encounters between humans and animals,
partly as shaped by the former's economic, political, social and cultural
requirements, but also encounters in which animals affect humans. It might be
added that there are various modes of human—animal relation and encounter
which are
not
tackled here as much as they might be, the most obvious perhaps
being the sexual, and as yet the new animal geographers have neglected the spaces
and places of bestiality (thus failing to link across to recent research on sexuality and
space: see Bell and Valentine 1995).
35
The further ambition of the collection
proceeds from the familiar claim (after Lévi-Strauss 1968) that animals are 'good to
think with', and that 'stories' of animals are especially valuable in helping their
human tellers and hearers to develop their own moral identities and psychological
interiorities (Shepard 1993; Tambiah 1969; Tapper 1994). Hence, by telling
numerous different 'stories' about the roles of space and place as integral to human
—animal relations, the essays below will provide much substance for reflection,
particularly in the sense of suggesting the ethical charge that is carried by
all
situated
human—animal encounters (a claim elaborated by Jones, this volume; but see also
Watts, this volume, for cautions about
too
'individualising' a take on such ethics as
they translate into debates over animal 'rights').
Moreover, there is a sense in which we would like readers to catch the drift of the
above quote from Baudrillard,
36
wherein he proposes that an inescapable feature of
animals is their activity within territories—their beingness within these territories,
which are the vital supports of their own animal lives, their 'cycle[s] of parentage
and exchange'—and emphasises this quality of animal territoriality in the face of all
'human' understandings of both territory (as something conditioned by capitalist
constructs of private property) and animals (which should not be sentimentalised,
given voice or supposed to have a 'psychic life').
37
In this respect Baudrillard appears
to oppose elements of the anthropomorphism advocated above, but it might be
countered that we are actually agreed in refuting anthropocentrism while allowing a
hesitant anthropomorphism, speculating that some animals may have some qualities
akin to humans
alongside
much that will be different, other and unavailable to
human ken. Whatever, the implication is that humans should respect this 'law' of
territory bound into animal lives, and thereby strive to cultivate the
'pratique
