Animals, Theory, and Practice in the Context of Social Justice

Hi everyone, 

I will probably edit this more at some point and add pictures (or add a clarifying post to be a companion to this one). This post is rather unwieldy, but I wanted to get some preliminary ideas down in case anyone wanted to dialogue with me on the blog about them. I'm seeing this blog as a place to brainstorm, try things that might not necessarily work, and for things to become more refined as they go. Here goes:

I have been thinking lately about the divide between humans and nonhuman animals: is it really a divide?

Donna Haraway, a prominent feminist scholar and philosopher of science and technology, published in 1985 the essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” It was a work that questioned boundaries of humans, destabilizing ideas of what was “natural” and “whole,” and doing important work by making space in dominant narratives for those who were often left out: lesbians, disabled people, other minorities. Haraway would say no to my question. She writes:

…by the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted, if not turned into amusement parks – language, tool use, social behavior, mental events. Nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal…Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture (151). 

If we believe Haraway, and I suggest that we should, it becomes clear that we haven’t yet worked out our ethical relationships with animals. I do believe that this is important, considering who – and, if we consider the principles of “new animism” that thinkers that Ewa Domanska are putting forward, what – we include in our concept of persons. I would argue, however, that the implications of acknowledging the nonexistence of the human and nonhuman animal boundary go even farther: this boundary separating those who are persons from those who aren’t is not a new structure. It is an age-old one, laid down in different places, but performing the same work. In fact, it was precisely the sort of structure that we use to separate humans from nonhuman animals that we used to use to separate some groups of humans from others:

Musicologist Nina Eidsheim, citing sociologist Jon Cruz, considers the idea of ethnosympathy in her discussion of race and vocal timbre. According to Cruz, Frederick Douglass, an emancipated slave who wrote a famous autobiography urged readers to hear sorrow and woe in slaves’ songs. Before this, slaves’ singing was heard by Euro-Americans as “noise.” With the influence of Douglass’ autobiography, however, listeners (especially abolitionists) learned to hear what they used to hear as noise as song, and this because they now acknowledged that slaves had an inner world. This example is by no means a complete success story, especially if we consider, as Eidsheim urges us to, that

The persistent ‘recognition’ of the sound of the spiritual in black classical singers’ voices… is coupled with a lingering ethnosympathy. The limited subjectivity offered to slaves through their reconceptualization as ‘culturally expressive subjects' (Cruz 4, qtd. in Eidsheim 83) is thus maintained – but the subject will only be recognized as long as s/he stays essentially black. In the process of racializing vocal timbre, the spiritual has served as a vehicle to distinguish between the sounds that can supposedly arise from black and white bodies (Eidsheim 82-83). 

This being said, the example does let us see shifting of boundaries that point to ideas of who gets to be a person and who does not: before ethnosympathy became a mode of listening in this context, Euro-Americans were thought of as having an inner world and African-Americans were not. Surely social justice, especially in musical situations, would involve learning to see subjectivities of all sorts be treated as subjectivities. Are we still looking at humans this way? And is looking at how we treat animals key to this problem since we do it probably the worst to animals? These questions took me to the zoo.

***

Actually, this is not quite true. The zoo presented itself as one option and I took it. It is important here to be very clear about the very material factors that shaped and are shaping this project.  I am (of course) writing this blog post for a class, more specifically for our class called “Music and Social Justice: Emerging Approaches in Applied Music Research.” Both inspired by and necessitated by this class, social justice is always in my mind. One of the participants in the class asked last class, “What even is social justice?” I’ve realized now that I share this question. What does this mean for me as an ethnomusicologist? In this project, am I looking for instances of social justice and talking about them? Should I be engaging in an act of social justice myself? What does an act of social justice look like?

Our professor, Samuel Araujo, argues in his "From Neutrality to Praxis" article that any ethnomusicology is applied ethnomusicology. Whether or not you are actively trying to change things at your field site, you are intervening. (I would even go further and say that even actions away from the field site (say, in traditional musicology) create some sort of change). This being said, many thinkers (including Araujo) agree that not all applied ethnomusicology is striving for social justice (even though it’s often associated with social justice). It’s striking to note that ethnomusicology has often worked against social justice, intervening to convert people to new religions (primarily Christianity), to “civilize” them, to classify their music as “primitive.” 

The class readings we have been engaging with social justice in very intelligible ways. They involve often working with groups of traditionally disenfranchised people, (the residents of Mare, for example). But where is the social justice in our everyday ethnomusicology? Is social justice like ethics? Shouldn’t social justice be one of the many lenses we use to see the world, especially as ethnomusicologists? In that case, isn’t social justice as position as much as it is an engagement with very specific topics?  As a result, I’ve been thinking of social justice, then, in this project as something that I have to contribute to or enact in my work regardless of where that work might be.

This desire to try out the “social justice lens” in an unlikely place and a desire to investigate the structure that that we erect between humans and nonhuman animals as a means of undoing similar structures that work against social justice among humans, were among the conditions that shaped this experiment.

***

I didn’t know where I would start but I did have some principles:

• That I would write intelligibly about my experience, that I would write so that laypeople would read what I had written, so that it could be accessible to a broad population. (I’m not sure how true this is of this post).  
• That in support of horizontal knowledge production I would draw on thinkers from outside academia as well. (Stay tuned for discussion of the eco-feminist philosopher, Starhawk, in future blog posts).
• That I would be honest about my failures. I am trusting the community (this class) to engage with me in dialogue. This blog post is by no means the final word from me on these thoughts, but rather supposed to be generative.
• Because this is a short project, and I don’t want to, with missionary zeal, get into communities and try to change them, I want to be part of a slow observation process. Social justice should come from a perceived need in the world, right?  
• Kathi Weeks, in her The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries discusses, among other things, how a glorification of work and a refusal to examine this keeps us enmeshed in unhelpful power structures. I consider the material origins of projects to be key information. In this case, I originally proposed to look at many settings, but realized that this wasn’t viable for me this weekend (since I had two small papers due, and a fieldwork for a conference paper). Going to the zoo – because of its location in the city, because my boyfriend (John) had to go there anyway to critique someone’s guided walk for a class and was willing to help me make recordings and take pictures – was viable. These questions about materiality seem mundane but are important: we’re writing for a class about social justice and have to write about social justice. How do we work within those constraints? It doesn’t end once we’re out of school (I hear): you get asked to author a book chapter on a specific topic by a specific date, for example, and then you work within the prescribed topic and your own schedule. My goal is to be explicit and unashamed of these conditions.
• That narratives do powerful work. This is why reclamative, reparative histories are so important. By telling stories (academic or otherwise) that might productively change views, we can create change.

***

John and I arrived at the Lincoln Park Zoo around noon on Saturday. Because it was a free zoo, I didn’t have to worry about whether or not I was monetarily supporting something I felt was harmful. I was prepared to watch some human animals watching some incarcerated nonhuman animals and to record the soundscape of the zoo, paying attention to how different voices were functioning. Most of the adults there had children with them, and it is these voices that feature primarily on the recording that I made. Also striking is how prominent bird sounds (of local birds, not zoo birds) feature (half of the zoo is outside). The zoo animals, except for a brief grunt from a jaguar, were completely silent. Even the gorilla sounds emanating from the building that housed gorillas were produced by humans: there was an exhibit where you could place your hand in a handprint under a likeness of a gorilla and the exhibit would produce the gorilla sound. This silence was hugely striking.

But ultimately I felt both defeated and silly walking around the zoo and thinking about social justice without engaging more strongly with my environment. Yes, I was watching a gorilla poke his finger repeatedly through a chain-link fence while people were delightedly laughing and watching. But what does this do? This is not a new narrative for most people, and in that sense, this fieldwork doesn’t seem to effect change (not as much, perhaps, as reading narratives that disrupt our structures of thought, Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, for example). 

Without giving up the belief that social justice is a lens that one could be using all the time, what could I have done here? Did I just need a better perspective? I think my biggest failing was that I didn’t try harder to speak with people at the zoo. I could have been prepared for busy parents to say no to my questions, but I could have attempted to start dialogue with people about what brought them to the zoo, about their perspectives. This simple act might have been more successful in changing narratives both for them and for me.

***

Strangely, the theorizing in this post does more work for social justice (I think) that the attempted (and rather miserably failed) practice of it. My next steps will be to engage in fieldwork again (and again the site might be chosen somewhat at random) and to try to engage interlocutors in narrative-changing discussion. More on this soon. In the meantime, I welcome compassionate confrontation! There is lots here to be confronted on!

Sources

Araujo, Samuel. 2008. “From neutrality to praxis; the shifting politics of applied ethnomusicology.” Muzikoloski Zbornik (Musicological Annual, University of Lubljana) 46:13-30.

Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance.” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008. ProQuest (UMI 3306458).

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991.
---. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.