Animal History as a Challenge to Social and Cultural History

From the birth of historic studies on animals, academics have been creating meanings out of animals and their behaviour in order to make sense of human culture and society. However, in modern academia, animal historians are attempting to give agency to the animals themselves by removing humans from the narrative. In this essay I will analyse the extent to which animal history challenges the concepts and methodologies of cultural and social history. In order to do this, I will first investigate the individual concepts and methodologies of social, cultural and animal history, before comparing and contrasting them in a final analysis and reaching a conclusion as to the extent of which animal historians challenge the classic ways of studying history.

CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGIES OF SOCIAL HISTORY

The concept of social history was formed at the end of the nineteenth century, when the historical studies previously practiced were unable to explain the social and economic transformations that the U.S. and Western Europe were experiencing. There were new calls for a broader approach to history other than the largely political focus that had been apparent beforehand in the field. These calls were prompted by new socialist parties and labour groups who aimed to bring issues of social reform to centre stage. In Britain such reformers included the likes of Charles Booth, a researcher of London’s working-class, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were economic reformers involved in the Labour movement. In the early twentieth century reformers and historians began to write new histories, shifting their focus from small groups of elites, the upper classes and biographical accounts of revolutionary individuals to ‘society’ as a whole, including those from the working class. Furthermore, Marxist thought was also entering the historical sphere, specifically Marx’s “emphasis on the historical significance of the means of production and of relations between classes”. However, new studies on the working classes were not originally introduced to give them agency; as John Tosh states, “no branch of history claims its indifference to the individual more clearly than social history”. Labour historians like Sidney and Beatrice Webb aimed to “furnish the British Labour movement with a collective historical identity” through studies of deprivation and struggles in employment, using their findings for political gain. Furthermore, whilst social reformers urged for an investigation into social issues of disease, poverty and housing conditions, their focus remained on the problems these issues caused society as a whole, instead of creating accounts of how people dealing with poverty generally experienced their lives. This is largely due to the fact that social history was written about collective groups; people were categorised by nation or class, as members of each group were considered “grounded in a shared existence from which they derived a common, defining consciousness”. By focusing their research into large social narratives, social historians were only able to interpret history through “a dynamic theory of social change”. Social history has long been criticised for being “wedded to an outdated Marxism and naïve methodology”. Historians extensively utilised the methodologies of social sciences in their research; they “posited hypotheses, they counted, they looked for trends […] above all, they investigated past societies in the mass”. However, the methodologies used in social history did not allow for the objective and systematic study of “the history of societies in all their complexity and multifaceted reality”; no new methodologies were developed in order to move the field of social history forwards past a largely textually based one.

However, historians and young Marxists in the mid to late twentieth century began to publish works considering a ‘history from below’, which focused on the social composition of servants, workers and other members of the working classes. This history from below was motivated by “the unorganised and the marginal who have been least visible in the historical record”, giving agency to the ordinary man and other groups in society that weren’t considered elite. William H. Sewell refers to having agency as meaning “to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree”. E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class strived towards humanising the working class, as previous works that they were part of “obscure[d] the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history”. Thompson notes how one form of agency that the working class exhibited were the small acts of resistance towards those supposedly above them in society, like smugglers resisting arrest or riots in resistance to oppression. Jim Scott furthers this notion by describing acts of resistance as the “weapons of the weak”, which could include “footdragging, dissimulation, false-compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth”. By including agency in their analyses of working classes, Thompson and Scott created humans out of people who were only previously present in statistics. Whilst Marxist thought came to prominence within history, so did the differing approaches of French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. They founded the Annales school in France, where the inter-disciplinary methods of history, sociology and economics they employed helped to create the immense range of history we have today. Bloch and Febvre were instrumental in broadening the approach to social history by insisting that their colleagues investigate other disciplines, like sociology, geography and economics, when conducting historical research. Whilst the social sciences they aimed to utilise in history were largely focused on contemporary issues, they claimed that “only with their help could historians become aware of the full range of significant questions that they could put to their sources”. However, Bloch and Febvre have been criticised by Traian Stoianovich, who claimed that “the Annales school emphasised serial, functional, and structural approaches to understanding society as a total, integrated organism”. Their focus was placed too firmly in social and economic issues within society, and despite this being an improvement to previous politically based histories, it was not enough to constitute a full analysis of social life. Nevertheless, the Annalistes were the first to stress the importance of ‘collective mentalities’, whereby they believed that “no picture of the past could be complete without a reconstruction of its mental landscape”. This mentality became increasingly popular within the historic sphere, with the Annalistes declaring that collective mentalities were “the fundamental level of historical experience, and culture its principal expression”.

CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGIES OF CULTURAL HISTORY

Whilst social historians explored non-elite experiences in their writing through the use of grand narratives, they failed to include a broader representation. The focus seemed to remain on what people did in their lives, not how they gave their lives meaning. When cultural history emerged as a concept in the early 1970s, historians became keen to attach “meaning and representation” to their historical subjects, instead of focusing on changes in society and its structure. This ‘cultural turn’ was not intended to be a new sub-discipline, but a “reorientation in the priorities of historians”. William H. Sewell Jr., during his research on French workers in the nineteenth century, hoped that a cultural analysis would enable him to “understand the meaning of workers’ practices that [he] had been unable to get at by using quantitative and positivist methods”; methods ordinarily employed by social historians. Like Sewell, early academics in the field turned to anthropological studies in their search for a cultural history, and utilised other areas of cultural interest including the works of Michel Foucault, literary studies and art history. The history of art has been used by cultural historians as a source of visual culture, despite paintings and sculptures relating to a more elitist ’high culture’ experience. Sources of ‘lower’ popular culture also emerged, as the wider non-elite population had been excluded from the ‘high culture’ present in art history. There was a stimulated interest in other cultural forms that “reflected or constructed their outlook on the world”, such as the transformative medium of film and photography. Unlike text-based sources prominent in social history, films provide us with an experience of society, almost as if we are present in the documented era. However, in recent years cultural historians have moved away from their focus on popular culture, art history, and attempting to create a cultural purpose for material artefacts. Historians have given culture a wider definition; it has now “lost its association with specific cultural forms” and become a “web of meanings that characterise a society and hold its members together”.

One of the main difficulties in the study of cultural history has always been the definition of the term culture itself, as every historian seems to interpret it differently. John Tosh states that the ‘cultural turn’ does not simply mean the study of “visual culture, literary culture and material culture, but also the culture of violence and the culture of fear”, and that these seemingly different areas of study are conceptually related at the same time. Peter Burke describes culture as a “system of shared meanings, but the people who participate in it also share the meanings of the culture at large”. Modern studies of culture encapsulate the conceptual, mental and emotional views of the past, and this transition to a broader definition greatly expands the scope of cultural history to be almost boundless. It can be applied to gender, class, emotions, politics, race, animals and even “formal belief through ritual and play to the unacknowledged logic of gesture and appearance.” The broadened perspective present in the cultural history has granted agency to those from historically disenfranchised groups. For example, studies of the subaltern have aimed to ‘give a voice to the voiceless’, as their political voices have previously been denied. To be a subaltern, according to Spivak, you must be from a “structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed”. However, whilst attempting to give agency to those with no voice, historians run the risk of imposing their own privileged, and often Western, perspectives onto the history of others. Furthermore, those considered by historians as subalterns are not voiceless; they just lack an audience that is willing to listen to them. Whilst historians are unable to fully comprehend and present the histories of subalterns, we are able to begin unpicking contexts and starting conversations in order to avoid placing a Euro-centric view on the wider world.

The methodologies of cultural history offer historians a wider range of information than the methodologies of social historians, which are rooted in social narratives. The sources available comprise of “every kind of evidence that human beings have left of their past activities – the written word and the spoken word, the shape of the landscape and the material artefact, the fine arts as well as photography and film”. Furthermore, historical research has been removed from the archives and now features different kinds of sources, including oral histories, which have become prominent features of historical research. Oral history has been celebrated in historic fields due to its “humanising potential, and its ability to democratise history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation”. However, despite the broader approach to history that cultural historians undertake, there are issues in the field that social historians do not suffer from. Ludmilla Jordanova explains that it is difficult to study in a new area of interest where “little previous work has been done and there is a minimum of discourse to shape the project”. John Tosh furthers this sentiment as he believes that cultural historians are “are for the most part thrown back on oblique and ambiguous evidence of what went on in the minds of ordinary people”. The methodologies of cultural history have been further criticised, as it is believed that they “undermine much of the traditional agenda of historians”, and signals “a minimalist position on the issue of historical truth”. However, historians of culture acknowledge that whilst some of the available sources are quite vague, they still enrich their findings with textual theory in order to back up their ideas.

CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGIES OF ANIMAL HISTORY

Animals have always been present in every area of human society, whether idolised or utilised for the goods that they produce. Whilst some animals are cared for as pets, fictionalised in stories, fiercely protected and subjects of entertainment and education at zoos, others have been mass produced for food and farming, killed in the name of science and medicine, skinned for fashion, hunted for sport and made vulnerable to trauma during times of war. Animals have also been present in the historical record for hundreds of years; from diaries, memoirs, literature and visual culture to civil ordinances, statistical databases and municipal records. Animals have even been represented in court records, as “until the eighteenth century they could even be prosecuted for committing crimes such as theft and murder”. However, despite the substantial number of sources that refer to the presence and significance of animals to human communities, historical scholarship has seemingly ignored the part that animals have played in history, even though humankind could not have progressed or survived without them. Before the emergence of a broader animal history, animals were not considered to have thoughts and feelings of their own. Cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche asserted that since animals are not conscious of their own histories, they do not possess a consciousness at all. René Descartes furthers this sentiment by claiming that “animals possess neither language nor soul and hence cannot be considered sentient”. This notion of a lack of humanity in animals, which has been present since the writings of Descartes and Nietzsche in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, has been pivotal to their exploitation by humans, and due to a perceived lack of human-like agency it has been difficult for scholars to fully integrate animals into history. Whilst animal studies were present in academia before the end of the twentieth century, they remained the subjects of biologists, agriculturalists, natural and environmental historians, who viewed them as “part of the wilderness, a threat to indigenous environments, a natural resource, or an obstacle to human settlement”. In order to include animals into historical enquiry, a radical rethinking was necessary, just as social historians had to rethink their previous concepts of history during the cultural turn. Scholars were required to take a “much greater intellectual leap since animals do not possess the ability to directly transform human structures and therefore cannot be considered historical agents”. Nevertheless, as modernity closed the gap between nature and human culture, and thanks to the progressive works of Harriet Ritvo and Keith Thomas published in the 1980s, more scholars have focused on animal history in recent years. Within the subdiscipline, some historians aim to give animals agency and provide them with their own histories, whilst cultural historians utilise animal history to explore and explain human culture by investigating “the diverse cultural arenas in which animals have played a principal role”.

This human-centric version of animal history is popular amongst cultural historians who apply an ‘animal lens’ in their investigations of human historical events and concepts. Using the animal lens has allowed historians to sharpen their “understanding of complicated historical phenomena by filtering them through an analysis of human–animal relationships”, and despite having a limited focus, research into animals “can have the counterintuitive effect of revealing new perspectives on well-trodden subjects”. Throughout cultural history, animals have been depicted as both “important actors in and victims of human culture”, and have been used to expose human attitudes to concepts such as modernity, science, race, gender, sexuality, the environment and empire. In studies specifically on ethnicity and gender, humans have manipulated animality and animalistic behaviour in order to ‘other’ marginalised groups. Negative bestial labels classify minorities as subordinate to those considered as not possessing animal qualities and relies on “naturalised categories of difference as the basis for identifying the abject”. By equating other humans beings to animals, it allows a sense of superiority because animals are seen to possess no rationality or moral compass. People of African heritage have historically been stereotyped as violent animals to justify their maltreatment, as the growth of Darwinism allowed scientists to equate the skulls of black people to those of primates. In terms of gender, males are frequently metaphorically referred to as strong, dominant and often violent animals like lions, bulls, wolves and studs, whereas women are typecast as weaker, smaller animals like kittens, chicks, birds and female dogs. The implications behind these metaphors “hint at stereotypical views of manhood and womanhood […] being wild animals, men need freedom and no restraint”, whilst women being “presented as domestic or livestock animals might suggest that a woman’s place should be confined to the domestic arena”. When investigating concepts of class, Keith Thomas found that cruel sports involving animals were prohibited not just to protect animals, but because of the “distaste for the habits of the lower orders […] middle-class opinion was as outraged by the disorder which the animal sports created as by the cruelty they involved”. Kathleen Kete further discovered that in nineteenth century Paris, the bourgeois classes feared outbreaks of rabies partly due to the fact that the disease was constructed as being working-class, as it was seen to affect stray dogs and mixed breeds. Kete’s research also provides an insight into ideas of science and the civilising process during modernity. She found that the movement towards animal protection in the nineteenth century grew when the bourgeois classes believed that “the spectacle of suffering encourages cruelty”, as violence towards animals was the antithesis of civilisation. The growing animal protection movement also increased with the growing disgust for the scientific methods of vivisection that were occasionally performed in public. Kete describes the base needs of the vivisectors themselves, from their passion to destroy animal lives, selfish gains of scientific prowess and their uncivilised disregard for pain. The baseness of cruelty to animals denounced humans to be animals themselves. Animals have also been used by historians to explore ideas of empire; John R. McNeill was able to investigate American imperialism through researching mosquitos and revealed “the ways in which mosquito-borne diseases decisively shaped imperial political projects”.

Whilst the methodologies available to human-centric animal historians are similar to those of cultural, there are some methods that can be used to aid research. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz utilises ‘thick descriptions’ in his research in order to provide multiple possibilities in search of a stronger cultural context. From a case of a Balinese cock-fight he was able to “provide a window on an entire culture, provided we do not impose on it a coherence that makes sense in our own terms”. Geertz employs the practice of thick description as it avoids thinly describing an event by simply stating facts without giving it significance; it allows him to provide enough cultural context to an event so that members outside of the culture being described can comprehend what is happening. This allows the reader to investigate both animals and humans at a deeper level. Robert Darnton conducted research into animal cruelty in Paris in the 1730s, where apprentice printers were killing cats on the streets. The thin description of events would be using the only available retrospective account of one of the printers; his interpretation of the events “shows how the massacre of cats combines veiled elements of a witch-hunt, a workers’ revolt and a rape”. In reality, the apprentices conducting the killings saw it as an “amusing way to let off steam”. John Tosh stated that “to get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as ritual slaughter of cats is a first step towards ‘getting’ the culture”, and when conducting this kind of historical research where there are few sources available, every detail must be scrutinised multiple times. This case demonstrates one of the pitfalls of conducting such research; as there were limited sources available, the conclusions drawn are interpretive at best, and there is the possibility of symbolic overloading. On the one hand the cat-killings may well have been a workers’ revolt, but on the other the events could serve as “an analysis of adolescent culture or a study of social attitude towards animals”.

Some scholars have attempted to give agency back to the animals by analysing their behaviour and documenting histories as if from the animal’s perspective; they are examined as “sentient beings who responded to or were products of specific contexts”. Those conducting an animal-centric history often do as they wish for an “end to ‘human exceptionalism’ and seek to explore the varied ways in which we live in a ‘more-than-human’ world.” However, historians have had difficulty finding sources when attempting to create a history from the perspective of an animal. Some have argued that the only sources available are those that humans have written about them, and that animal historians must analyse “human representations of and discourse on animals and our relationships with them”. Erica Fudge states that “if our only access to animals in the past is through documents written by humans, then we are never looking at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans”. Despite efforts from a multitude of scholars, animals are still largely shown in history as “objects in human culture, containers of human projections, and as useful tools for drawing social boundaries”. If the only sources available in animal history derive from human representations, animal historians must read between the lines in order to create their hypotheses, and undertake new theoretical approaches like geography and ethnography to place the focus back on the animal. Histories written from the perspectives of animals are largely done through analysis of the written and material sources available, as well as observation of the animal being studied. Examples of such work include Jason Colby, who investigated North American wild orcas through the histories evidenced on their bodies in the form of collapsed dorsal fins and scars. Before humans attempted to intervene in the lives of orcas by branding and capturing them for scientific purposes, the orcas had been friendly and welcoming to humans. Their response to human activity “inspired public support for bans on orca capture”, and Colby was thus able to prove that the material and physical forms of animals are capable of creating historical evidence and changing the structure of human society. In Horses at Work, Ann Norton Green reminds us that “historians routinely forget to see that animals change over time and hence require historicising just like humans”. Sandra Swart attempts both an animal-centric and human-centric history in Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa by placing the agency back with the horses themselves, just as social and cultural historians gave historic agency to those from marginalised groups. Swart acknowledges that “to locate horses at the centre of the narrative, one has had to extend the directions suggested by social history radically while accepting that the parallels are analogous but not interchangeable”. She claims that each animal has their own individual history, just as humans do, and this history is shown on the bodies of the horses themselves; “the scarred knees of a Cape carthorse, saddle sore scars of a Maluti Mountains pack horse and the steroid-based bone problems of a racehorse all bear testimony to how horses have endured human needs”. Swart also theorises that the behaviour of horses is also an indication of their history, as their differing reactions to their current circumstances are reflections of their individual past experiences. Horses showed their agency through resistance to human authority when they “refused to ‘play along’” with what the rider wanted, and this is shown in the way that horses bare their teeth, refuse to be captured, buck off their masters or kick humans when they get too close. Proof of agency in the form of resistance does not just apply to horses; animal historians across the field have used this concept to explore different animals and further prove their agency.

However, this animal-centric method of historical enquiry has been met with conflicting criticism from anthropologists and historians alike. Whilst Sandra Swart believes that “‘agency’ and public resistance are not synonymous and a search for agency should not be indexed necessarily by the presence of heroic acts of conscious self-determination”, Chris Pearson believes that the “the equation of nonhuman agency with resistance” is highly problematic. Pearson argues that “obstruction is only one type of nonhuman agency as nonhumans also enable and allow human activities”. He furthers the argument by adding that “the focus on resistance sets up a division between human and nonhuman agents, which obscures how human and nonhuman agents exist in close relationship to each other”. The act of giving agency to disenfranchised groups within the historic sphere has always referred to humans, and animal historians tend to use human agency as a way to try and understand the agency of animals. Furthermore, critics have also expressed contempt with the fact that animal historians “treat animals as ‘others’ who cannot speak for themselves”. This mirrors the issues present in human subaltern histories; we run the risk of imposing human ways of thinking onto nonhuman beings. Contradictory to this view, further critics believe that “to apply the concept of the ‘native’s point of view’ privileges the native, assuming that s/he has a better understanding than an observer has”. This criticism shows that some almost feared the reversal of the natural hierarchal order, where animals were suddenly priorities over humans. Fears of subordinating humans in favour of animals was also present in Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate, where critics were “suspicious of Ritvo’s embrace of cultural history as well as [accusing] her of prioritising the animal over the human” through her use of the animal lens. Such criticisms have led me to believe that there is a struggle in the historical sphere of animals where many find it difficult to separate humans and nonhumans, despite the attempts of animal historians.

TO WHAT EXTENT DOES ANIMAL HISTORY CHALLENGE THE CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGIES OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY?

There would be no history of humankind – and no existence of humans in general – without the animals that have remained largely invisible throughout historical scholarship. Just as cultural history grew to challenge social history, I believe that to a certain extent animal history has grown to both challenge and compliment the concepts and methodologies of both social and cultural history. Animal history has posed a challenge to the text-based methodologies present in social history and the focus on language, discourse and oral narratives in cultural history. Despite Peter Burke stating that cultural historians research the “parts of the past that other historians cannot reach”, animal historians have defied this assumption by reaching out even further; researchers are incapable of fully communicating with animals due to their lack of self-written history, their inability to speak and produce texts as humans do. However, to a certain extent I also believe that animal history has complimented the concepts and methodologies of social and cultural history. While social historians turned to social scientists, who were interested in contemporary issues within society, in an attempt to broaden their perspectives and attempt to solve them, so have animal historians. In the twenty-first century, issues of climate change, exponential population growth, globalisation and impending environmental catastrophe have emerged and require immediate action from scholars across all fields. Dan Vandersommers states that these “forces are larger-than-human […] they are seismic and are shifting intellectual terrain”. Such shifts in perception have led to historians searching beyond human-kind for possible answers and into the realm of animals. Furthermore, it is believed that historians have begun to look to animal histories for answers due to their desire for “a sustainable future not plagued by overconsumption, exploitation, environmental destruction, and disregard for the rights of humans and other animals”. As social and cultural historians brought new ideas about meaning, agency and resistance into historic scholarship as an attempt to better understand humans, so have animal historians, only they direct us to “document the lives of historical animals as an intrinsically valuable history through which we can better understand nonhumans and ourselves”. As earlier explored in social and cultural history, animal historians have attempted to give agency to animals, utilising both ‘history from below’ and cultural studies of the subaltern, to give a ‘voice to the voiceless’.

In spite of all of this, and despite the examination, comparisons and contrasts of the three disciplines, I do not believe that animal history is fully capable of posing a challenge to the older schools of historical thought, because it utilises many of their concepts and methodologies without realising, causing confusion and contradictions in the discipline. Social and cultural history were created for humans; they wished to show agency in their historical subjects as a way to humanise those people whose origins lay in disenfranchised groups. Using these same methods when talking about animals creates a confusing field to navigate, because animals are indeed nonhuman creatures, upon which our predetermined concepts and methodologies of history do not work. It is difficult to separate human opinion from historic studies on animals because we only have our own observations and perceptions to aid our research. Chris Pearson suggests we should abandon “the model of agency offered by social history, which often equates agency with resistance and adoption of non-anthropocentric approaches to agency”. Instead of restricting the field to human sources, historians must explore the nonhuman and step into geographical, ethnographical and possibly more scientific areas of scholarship.

In conclusion, whilst animal history does challenge the concepts and methodologies of social and cultural history in some ways, it has followed in their footsteps too closely to become a true challenge and discipline in its own right. In order for animal historians to be able to explore all of the multi-dimensional aspects of historical study of humans and animals, they must avoid the urge to humanise historic subjects learnt from past social and cultural historians and attempt a much broader approach that stretches across multiple disciplines. In the words of Dan Vandersommers, “it is time that we push through and past a human-centred historical tradition to uncover a livelier, more truthful, and complex past fashioned and experienced by all of the planet’s animals—human and otherwise”.

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