Tag: Anthropocentrism

In the Eyes of an Animal

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

By Ondine Sherman

Can gazing into the eyes of an animal change our lives? This piece emerges from my PhD research on the transformative potential of eye contact between humans and other animals, grounded in relational and ecofeminist theory. Scholarship suggests that eye contact can deepen human-animal connection, unsettle anthropocentric worldviews, and influence individuals to rethink their ethical responsibilities to animals. My qualitative research with Australian “Animal People” echoes the power of the mutual gaze.

Emmanuel Levinas argued that the Face of the Other “speaks”, and eyes possess their own language (Levinas 1961/1980: 66). Building on this, Lori Gruen notes that we may encounter animals and still not “look them in the eye”; once we do, our relationships can change (Gruen 2013: 223–31). Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka similarly encourage us to “look into the eyes of an animal, to recognise the person there – familiar, yet mysterious, an independent locus of meaning and agency” (2011: 40). These are invitations to take seriously the possibility that animals look back, and that this looking back matters ethically and politically. In this framing, eye contact is not just a visual event but an embodied, relational practice. Drawing on Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Vinciane Despret and Elisa Aaltola, such moments can be understood as practices of with-ness, attention, or attentive love. They decentre the human, effect an unselfing, and invite us into animals’ worlds, their umwelten (Despret 2004; 2008; 2016; Aaltola 2018; Murdoch 1971; Weil 2009).

To explore how animal-human eye contact may influence pro-animal values and behaviours, I spoke with twenty young Australian Animal People: those who self-identified as having animal rights values, were vegan (or aspiring to be) and engaged in animal advocacy. Participants described moments of eye contact as leading to their recognition of animals as subjects of a life and morally equal, “like people”. Their recollections were rich: the texture of a cat’s gaze, the shock of meeting a pig’s eyes, a perceived sense of being “seen” by a snail. Some encounters were highly emotive. One participant described standing in a pig factory farm and feeling “persecuted in the eyes of an animal”, suddenly seeing herself from the pig’s perspective and feeling ashamed to be human. Others highlighted animals’ expressions of consent, comfort or reluctance, learning to respect boundaries and consider animals as agents and subjects. Participants commonly used the language of equality: “no difference”, “just like another friend”, “like they were human”. One traced this back to a childhood game of peek-a-boo with a puffin, another to her dog’s gesture of empathy when she cried, and another, to snorkelling with wild fish and turtles. These moments challenged their binaries of “them and us”. In their accounts, empathy was not an abstract moral virtue but a response to a specific relational event. Sharing a common reality with an animal helped them to consider, if I do not want to suffer, neither would you.

Eye contact not only shifted perceptions, it motivated action. Participants connected animal encounters not only to their pro-animal values, but to their movements towards veganism, and commitment to advocacy.

Adding to scholarship, my research suggests that interspecies eye contact can be a powerful tool for reimagining human-animal relationships. Paying attention to these moments helps to decenter the human, dissolve hierarchies, and encourage philosophies of multispecies ethics and equality. These embodied encounters, which must take place within respectful and consensual spaces, can influence pro-animal values and behaviours and lead to a growing population of Animal People. Ultimately, this may contribute to an end to systemic animal violence and exploitation.

 

 

 

Ondine Sherman is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Voiceless, the animal protection institute, and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, specialising in sociology and Critical Animal Studies. She has published five books, including Vegan Living and the Animal Allies fiction series (Sky, Snow and Star) and is the editor of magazine, Animail (Australasian Animal Studies Association). Ondine is also a director at Thrive Philanthropy.

 

 

The Anti-Anthropocentric Capacity of Mainstream Vegan Discourse

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

By Louis Arthur Gough

 

Introduction

Anthropocentrism – the normative (in Westernised societies, at least) notion that the human animal is in fact transcendent of animality and superior to the rest of existence, specifically the professed ‘archetypal’ human subject (white, cis-male, heterosexual, neuro-typical, able-bodied, property-owning, etcetera) – constitutes a foundational delusion undergirding interconnected human to nonhuman animal, intra-human, and environmental oppressions and exploitations. Thus, as worded by Crist and Kopnina (2014), ‘[q]uestioning anthropocentrism… is a fertile way of shifting the focus of attention away from the problem symptoms of our time… to the investigation of root causes’ (pp. 387-388).

This questioning – or better yet, repudiating – of anthropocentrism is, I believe, veganism’s most crucial capacity. It goes without saying, however, that not all manifestations of veganism exhibit this capacity. In a recent study (Gough, 2023) published in Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of three leading (for better or worse) vegan advocacy organisations with the aim of appraising their anti-anthropocentric vigour. Given the inextricability of nonhuman and intra-human oppressions, and the requisite need to decentre the ‘archetypal’ human, the intersectional aptitude of said discourse was also scrutinised. As expected, the results – a selection of which I outline below – were mixed.

 

Anti-Anthropocentric Discourse

Much of the organisations’ output challenged the anthropocentric status quo. ‘Human narcissism’ – defined by Calarco (2014) as an ‘incessant attention to and rotation around exclusively human existence’ (p. 416) – was undermined by endorsements of veganism that centred nonhuman animals, nonhuman individuality, nonhuman interests, (potentially) beyond-human relationships, and nonhuman self-ownership in defiance of the egomaniacal fantasy that other animals’ bodies and secretions exist for human benefit.

The illusory human/animal dichotomy was also subverted. On occasion, the organisations refused the speciesist conventions of the English language, extended typically human-centric indefinite pronouns to include, for example, our nonhuman ‘neighbors’; whilst anthropocentrism’s moral hierarchy was undercut, most obviously, by a direct contrasting of the human pleasure and nonhuman suffering resulting from the production of so-called ‘animal products’. This latter effort, I argue, both foregrounds the ‘absent referent’ (Adams, 2015) and discredits human interest in the exploitation of nonhumans.

 

Anthropocentric Discourse

The reinforcement of these same expressions of anthropocentrism was, frustratingly, evident too. Whether through a health, human-oriented environmental, or self-absorbed ethical lens, the notion that we ought to stop exploiting other animals primarily for our own benefit sustained the narcissistic centring of human interests. As did the overshadowing of the direct victims of ‘animal products’ in favour of more ‘attractive’ – from a human perspective, of course – species impacted indirectly by mass nonhuman animal (ab)use. Also of note was the organisations’ deification of ‘compassionate’ vegan practitioners, out ‘saving’ the lives of myriad ‘voiceless’ nonhuman beings, which perpetuates what Lilia Trenkova (qtd. in Brueck & McNeill, 2020) calls a ‘toxic human savior complex’ (p. 315); and an emphasis on the apparent ‘human-likeness’ of victimised nonhuman animals, which plays into the very criteria underpinning much historic and ongoing oppression (human and nonhuman) in the first place.

Moreover, regular references to ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ amounted to missed opportunities to reject the insidious human/animal dichotomy, whilst the associated moral inequalities of anthropocentrism were left unchallenged by the organisations’ human-directed scales of moral urgency between cases of exploitation – whether based on the conditions of said exploitation, such as factory versus ‘family’ farming, or the perceived ‘intelligence’ of the oppressed nonhuman beings in question.

 

Intersectional Awareness & Incompetence

As with above, intersectional aptitude was inconsistent. Oftentimes, the organisations exhibited intersectional awareness by presenting nonhuman animal rights as a component – rather than the final component – of social justice. In this connection, attention was drawn to overlaps between human and nonhuman injustices, such as the ransacking of ecosystems and indigenous communities to support Western demand for ‘animal products’, and egregious worker exploitation within slaughterhouses.

On the other hand, uncritical representations of veganism as ‘easy’ overlooked the experiences of the economically and locationally restricted, whilst celebrations of ‘vegan cappuccinos’ exalted frivolous consumerism and in turn dampened veganism’s radical propensity. Intersectional potential was further blunted by the discriminatory and colonial character of specific demonisations of non-Western practices and – perhaps most frustratingly given the amount of criticism this strategy has received – comparisons between nonhuman and human oppressions which, by exploiting the latter in an attempt to underscore the former, do little to challenge either of them.

 

Conclusion

Persuaded by the Foucauldian position that discourse dictates the perceived respectability – and even intelligibility – of ideas and behaviours, this study treats discourse as inherently ideological, playing a fundamental role in the formation and perpetuation of social conventions. This includes the exploitation and consumption of nonhuman life. ‘Changing culture is centrally a matter of changing language’, Fairclough once stated (2000, p. 122), thus our fight against the interconnected oppressions of anthropocentric culture must – in significant part, at least – take place on the level of language. As Nguyen (2019) persuasively contends, ‘we cannot eradicate speciesism if we continue to tolerate it in the very words we speak’ (p. 121). An offshoot of a much larger analysis I am conducting as part of my PhD, this study endeavours to contribute to the rejection of anthropocentrism contained in rhetoric concerning a practice that is indispensable to our moving beyond the arrogant and delusion destruction of human supremacy: veganism.

 

Read the full article here in Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism.

 

References

Adams, C. J., 2010. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Twentieth Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum.

Brueck, J. F. & McNeill, Z., 2020. Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression. [s.l.]: Sanctuary Publishers.

Calarco, M., 2014. Being Toward Meat: Anthropocentrism, Indistinction, and Veganism. Dialectical Anthropology, 38(4), pp. 415-429.

Crist, E. & Kopnina, H., 2014. Unsettling Anthropocentrism. Dialectical Anthropology, 38(4), pp. 387-396.

Fairclough, N., 2000. New Labour, New Language?. London: Routledge.

Gough, L. A., 2023. Veganism’s Anti-Anthropocentric Capacity: A Critical Analysis of the Advocacy Discourse of Three Prominent Vegan Organisations. Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism, 11(1), pp. 9-28.

Nguyen, H., 2019. Tongue Tied: Breaking the Language Barrier to Animal Liberation. New York: Lantern Books