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Human-Animal Relations in the Era of Postdomesticity
From: Columbia University
| By:
Richard W. Bulliet |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In the past several decades, a new era has dawned in human-animal relations, according to Richard Bulliet, professor of Middle East history and the history of technology at Columbia University. He calls it "the era of postdomesticity."The idea of postdomesticity grew out of Bulliet's work on the history of human-animal relations, which in turn began with the publication of his Dexter Prize-winning book, The Camel and the Wheel,  on the history of transportation technology. Following the publication of that work, in 1975, Bulliet (right) began research, which still continues, on the cross-cultural history of donkey symbolism. His work joins a body of scholarship that has emerged in the United Kingdom about human-animal relations. According to Bulliet, "Americans are only now beginning to follow this lead, as, indeed, America has consistently trailed Britain by one to three decades in the transition from domesticity to postdomesticity." |
Fathom: What is postdomesticity? |
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| Bulliet explains postdomesticity, how being removed from the farm leads to an increase in imagined sex and pornography. | |
Richard Bulliet: "Postdomesticity" is a term that I've invented. It is a term that came to me several years ago, after something like 20 years of thinking about human-animal relations of one sort and another. I wrote a book many years ago about the history of camels, but it all came together when I began to look at the history of domestic animals and realized how much of that history we no longer are in touch with. We do not have contact with productive animals. We just physically do not hang out around sheep and pigs and cows and so forth. And secondly, we won't talk about the way animal products enter the economy. |
If we do talk about them, it's with revulsion. Battery hens, veal factories, swine manure ponds--I mean, it revolts us to think about these animal products. You describe a slaughterhouse, and people become nauseated. If you were to suggest to parents that we're going to take the kids on a field trip to the slaughterhouse, you would lose your job. We are trying to sustain a mental barrier against these animal products that we are in fact dependent upon. So, it's the dependency on animal products combined with the taboo on thinking about how the animal products come to market, combined with the physical disjuncture between productive animals and our own human society. These are the defining characteristics of postdomesticity. |
Fathom: What does postdomesticity lead to? |
Bulliet: Among other things, it contributes to what I call "the pornographies of blood and sex." I don't want to ascribe this solely to animals, but I believe that the separation of most humans in their childhood years from any exposure to animal sexuality or to predation or animal slaughter has led to a sort of hypertrophied interest in sex and blood in adolescence. This interest, unlike in the era of domesticity, is focused on the imaginary depiction of sex and blood, rather than on the real thing. |
In domesticity, when people were exposed to pig slaughter, chickens having their heads cut off, or animals on the farm copulating, from childhood on, you associated sex and violence with the real world. Now we have created a situation where we associate these scenes with the imaginary world and there is a very powerful separation from the real world. |
There is a general sort of recrudescence of things from predomesticity. I think we're beginning to go back to look at animals in a sort of a mythic, aesthetic and affective way, rather than a utilitarian way, and that's the big change. It's a whole cluster of things. |
In postdomesticity, we deliberately postpone any exposure to slaughter, bloodshed and animal sex as long as we can. The result is that instead of having visceral reactions to sex and blood sated in childhood, children in a postdomestic society encounter these things first in adolescence or preadolescence, and they have a more powerful reaction. |
This reaction is compounded by the fact that when they encounter it it's almost entirely in imaginary form, in pictures, in movies and in stories. Children don't actually see an animal being slaughtered when they're 15, but they will go to a horror movie and see a human being slaughtered. They don't see people having intercourse, but they will get their hands on a videotape and see a depiction of it. |
We have gone from a culture in which imagination was taboo in sex, so that masturbation, the handmaiden of imagination, was regarded at the turn of the century as something that led to insanity. |
In domesticity, there is a tremendous amount of sex with animals. You talk to people from village societies and pastoral societies even today and they say, "Oh, yeah, sure." The boys have intercourse with donkeys, occasionally intercourse with sheep. It's not uncommon; it's not even particularly shameful. |
But now, in postdomestic society, we have a situation where sex with animals is considered just about the most disgusting thing you can imagine. At the same time, we encourage people to use their imagination in sex, fantasize about sex, have phone sex and have computer sex--it's safer to imagine sex than to do it. |
So we have reversed the issue on imagination, and the reason this is possible is that we've actually removed people from the carnal reality of sex that they had as a commonplace when they saw dogs, sheep, horses, cows having intercourse in a domestic society. |
Fathom: What are the expressions of postdomesticity? |
Bulliet: Once I thought of the idea of postdomesticity, I began to think of what gets tied in here, and dozens of things suddenly took on significance, partly because they were all so recent. Nobody was knitting dog sweaters in the eighteenth century, and we didn't have little doggie tombstones or dog cemeteries. You didn't have cartoon shows of animals. You didn't have children's books with cute little animals wearing cute little human clothes and living in burrows on the riverbank that had little chairs in them and serving tea to each other. You didn't have elective vegetarianism, and there are so many things that become linked once you realize that we are in a different stage of human-animal relations. |
This is one of the biggest changes in human-animal relations, really, since the emergence of hominids. There are several stages in this long history. The first is the separation of humans from animals, when we became conscious that animals are one thing and we're something else. Then you enter a period of predomesticity, where on the one hand we're eating animals and on the other hand we're beginning to have them figure in our myths and our religion and our art. |
Fathom: How are animals represented in predomestic, domestic and postdomestic societies? |
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| Bulliet traces the representation of animals from Egyptian gods to Ren and Stimpy. | |
Bulliet: In predomestic society, our best evidence comes from Paleolithic rock art, where you see a celebration of animals. You don't see any trees. You rarely see a human. But you see bison, you see horses, you see deer, all sorts of animals. Their meaning to the artists who put them on the walls of caves, we don't know. Many people have guessed at it. But, regardless of the meaning, it is evidence of the aesthetic, the degree to which animals filled the imagination of people in predomestic times. |
Then we go into domesticity, which goes from somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 BCE down to basically the last generation. When you move to domesticity, earliest domesticity, animals begin to be represented differently. They're often represented with humans, sometimes in the form of theriomorphic gods like the Egyptian gods, which have the heads of animals; sometimes as pulling chariots, because chariots have a certain symbolic character. Free-flowing depictions of animals become tempered by role-playing that we associate with early stages of domesticity. |
Throughout domesticity, animals tend to be simply drawn as animals. They show up in art; maybe there's an aesthetic object to the art, or maybe they're simply background. But the one thing that they don't by and large feature is human clothes. |
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, from 1902, is a little bunny with little clothes on. That may not be the first, but it is certainly close to being the first depiction of an animal, as an animal living an animal life, wearing human clothes. You can go back before that, you look at nineteenth-century illustrations of La Fontaine's fables, for example, maybe those by Gustave Doré, and the animals are not clothed in the fables. They basically, in many cases, come from Aesop. You can go back to someone like Goya, who did make prints showing donkeys in human clothes, but those are always satirical. |
With Peter Rabbit you start to get the animals becoming living things wearing clothes. That's a children's world and it carries on, but it moves into the adult world. One of the earliest cases is George Herriman's "Krazy Kat." In "Krazy Kat," Krazy Kat wears a little collar, and Officer Pup wears a little cap--a marvelous symbolic comic strip, one of the greatest comic strips ever done. But you can't say the animals are humanized, and they're not really fully animal, either. |
Then you get to the great landmark of Walt Disney and the creation of cartoon animals for the movies. Interestingly, the earliest Disney characters included mainly farm animals, so you had characters like Horace Horsecollar or Clarabelle Cow, who are wearing human clothes but are farm animals. Disney moved away from those animals, but when Disney started out I think the appeal was partly to the generation of people whose parents or grandparents had lived on a farm, and there was a kind of an atavistic feeling about farm life, and the animals were part of it. |
As you go along into the late '40s, the farm animals give way to wild animals. Whether it's chipmunks or Bambi, you're getting a sort of different thing, and the farm aspect begins to be lost. Then, when you get up to the '70s, you still have the creation, for children, of animals with little clothes on--Paddington Bear--but then you begin to have the creation of animal characters for satirical purposes. |
You have comic books like Howard the Duck, or you  have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, by Eastman and Laird, which was a wonderful satirical comic when it first appeared, before Saturday-morning television degraded it. In a sense, you sort of reach the limit of what you can do with the animal motif. We don't have many animals created since then in nonsatirical forms. Take Ren and Stimpy, for example. Those aren't real animals. You have a hard time even identifying the species, because we've already had too many animals. |
Eventually we'll measure the history of the animal as human in depictions from Peter Rabbit to Ren and Stimpy, and we'll move on to other forms of animation. But this is part of the emergence of postdomesticity. |
In late domestic times you had masses of people leaving the farm, moving to the city, having these atavistic thoughts and memories about an idealized farm life, and the animals are a part of it. Nowadays nobody has any farm life. They don't remember that we still have children's books that teach kids to say, "The cow goes moo" and "The sheep goes baa baa," but they never see a cow, they never see a sheep, and they see dogs and cats. Ren and Stimpy are a dog and a cat. I'm not sure that the farm animal motif is going to be sustainable, except in romantic reconstructions, as we move further into postdomesticity. |
If you go to southern Indiana, rural or quasi-rural houses frequently have full-sized plastic farm animals in the front yard. You're living outside of town, you have a half-acre, you have a house, and you know what the farm was like? Well, a farm would have a cow and sheep, so you go and buy your plastic cow and your plastic sheep and put them in your front yard. This is part of postdomesticity, because it's a very complex and ramified state of society. It's also a state of society that's not stable. As with domesticity itself, or predomesticity, for that matter, each of these stages is a process in itself, so that we're early in postdomesticity and we're going to go to other places. |
We may find that we start going for virtual animals. I find fascinating the Japanese pet toy that you keep in your pocket and it makes demands on you. Having animals make demands on you is something that humans like. There's a question of whether we get into robotics and surrogate animals here. It's very hard to see where postdomesticity might go. But in the shorter run I think the United States is in for a very heavy dose of animal-rights agitation, which, if Britain is any example, can lead to intense political clashes in the next decade. |
Fathom: What other countries are postdomestic? |
Bulliet: Britain preceded the US in most animal things, particularly those relating to pets and to animal rights. Britain has been ahead of the US since the middle of the nineteenth century. They were the first people to create the notion that dogs and cats should be judged on rules of appearance, as opposed to utility, so you have a dog show where you ask what the dog looks like instead of whether this dog can herd sheep or that dog can fetch dead birds. |
Field trials give way to the dog show. The first dog shows start in Britain, and a decade or so later come to the US. The cat shows start in Britain, then come to the US. The same thing, to some degree, happens in the area of exhibiting horses. |
The development of animal rights is far more intense in Britain than it is in the United States. Most of the books written on the subject are published by British publishers for British audiences, and my own guess is that, very simply, on the curve we're heading along, within 10 years' time animal rights is going to be a much more intense focus of interest in this country. |
In Australia, even though it is a huge herding country, the population predominantly lives in cities, and they're not out there with the sheep in the outback. So we do have a certain amount of indication of Australia. In fact, one of the best books dealing with animals and modernity was written by Adrian Franklin, who teaches in Tasmania. If things continue as they seem to be going, I imagine that Western Europe as a whole will be following along to the same degree. But there are clear differences between these areas and areas like India, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, where domesticity is still well entrenched. |
In some cases there will be tests as to how postdomesticity proceeds. For example, in the Islamic religion there is animal sacrifice annually, and that animal sacrifice is not hidden--indeed, it is celebrated. You have the feast of sacrifice; in some countries such as Morocco, the king goes on television and cuts the throat of a sheep, as a demonstration for everyone else in the country, and they don't do the sacrifice at home until they have watched the king kill the ram on television. |
For Americans, that seems pretty revolting, because we're in a postdomestic society. On the other hand, these Muslim children are growing up seeing sheep slaughtered, and perhaps they will never become as thrilled by slice-and-dice movies as American children are. It came as a major case of religious freedom in this country when the Supreme Court found that a practitioner of Santeria could slaughter an animal as part of a religious ritual, but by and large Americans are horrified by the idea of animal sacrifice. |
Fathom: What about Japan? |
Bulliet: Japan is an interesting case, because, like the United States and Europe, Japan is one of the biggest centers for pornographic experience with a great deal of violence. |
I can't call Japan a postdomestic society in the same way, because Japan was never to a very large extent a domestic society. You had no sheep and pigs. Now, they didn't eat pork, they didn't eat mutton, they did have oxen for plowing and horses for military purposes. But the degree to which Japan was dependent upon herds of animals, and the degree to which the population was exposed to the animal life of domesticity, because they are around animals a great deal, was much less than you would have had elsewhere. |
I do make a correlation between the comparative absence of exposure to a carnal animal world and the prevalence of pornography. But, as in the case of Europe and America, there surely are other factors involved. I certainly don't want to suggest that this is the only thing involved in the rise of pornography in the West. |
Fathom: How has the concept of human-animal relations changed from predomestic to postdomestic times? |
Bulliet: One of the aspects of domesticity is the division between humans and animals. This is seen particularly in a Christian form, where we said that God created animals and created us separately, or in the Enlightenment form, associated primarily with Descartes, who said that animals are animate machines. In these examples the division between animals and humans is absolute. |
Now, particularly in efforts that deal with animal communication by porpoises and apes and so forth, all of which has been from the '70s on in postdomestic times, people are trying to break down the notion that there's a division between humans and animals. |
If humans talk and apes and porpoises communicate, what about monkeys and dogs and pigs? And if pigs, then maybe mice or raccoons, and if mice, well, why not parrots? I mean, where do you draw the line? |
In postdomesticity, as in predomesticity, the line between the human and animal world becomes blurred. In predomesticity we had notions like centaurs and fauns, and the werewolves of ancient Greece--half human, half animal. The notion of Jupiter, or Zeus, appearing as a bull and raping Europa, the notion of mating between human and animal, did not seem preposterous. But that was a remnant of predomesticity. |
Now that we're in postdomesticity, we're beginning to blur the human-animal division again, and as we do we set ourselves adrift, because we don't know where the limits will be. There are people who argue against this. They argue that human speech comes from deep structures of the brain that separate humans absolutely from all other animal species, and that there is no comparison between the grunts and hoots and howls of some animal and human speech. |
So you do have people who, philosophically, will still maintain an absolute distinction between humans and animals, but that's a battlefield. That's where part of this fight on animal rights will be waged--whether we draw distinctions and how we draw them--and I don't know how it's going to come out. |
Fathom: How do insects figure into this? |
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| Bulliet discusses how humans demonize insects in pop culture but remain sympathetic to other mammals. | |
Bulliet: Humans tend to be very sympathetic to animals in the category in which they themselves fall, namely that of mammals. So we have sort of a phylum distinction: Where do you end the continuum that people are beginning to imagine as a recrudescence of predomesticity? Where do you end the continuum between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom? The one thing that people seem to agree upon, leaving aside bacteria, is that you can do anything you want to insects. |
We haven't had any dangerous mammals from outer space in a long time. People don't want to see mammals killed. In the science-fiction novels that have mammals invading, like the one by Larry Niven in which elephants invade from outer space, nobody is going to put that in the movies. But insects are free game. |
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| In the movie Them, insects are portrayed as threats to human existence. | |
It is striking that in The Matrix, when the machines are explaining their position to Keanu Reeves, trying to make him understand, the analogy is: "You're not humans, you're not animals. You're a virus." A virus. We can kill a virus. But where in the long run will we draw that line? |
There's some people even now who are saying that all DNA is of equal value, and that it would be wrong to destroy, for example, the last stocks of smallpox or other pathogens, because that would violate this sort of sacredness that every category of DNA deserves to survive. I've heard one Soviet academician, now retired, who thought there should be bacterial rights. |
Fathom: Can we predict which other societies are becoming postdomestic? |
Bulliet: If we look at postdomesticity as something new, then are we able to look around and say, "Will Poland become postdomestic? Do we see signs of it there? Will a new Walt Disney show up in Poland?" No, you don't have to go through that phase of it, because I think that the psychological impact may never be as great as in the first instance. |
This would keep, to some degree, with technological history. For example, when people talk about the history of the automobile, they say, "What's the impact of that?" They say, "Oh, it changes dating patterns." Instead of mooning on the front porch, couples are making out in a car, and therefore it totally changes American social life. |
Then if you ask what the impact of the motorcar is on India, that isn't it. It only went through that in the United States. It has different impacts in India. So, as postdomesticity spreads, in one form or another, I think it'll have different manifestations in different places. |
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