To what extent are your beliefs or understanding of life underpinned by western systems of meaning, give examples, 2. How do Su

INDS207: Indigeneity in the Contemporary World

MODULE TWO: “OBJECTS OF FASCINATION AND FEAR”

Key Concepts

1. Representation

§ What do we mean by “representation”? § What are “regimes of representation”? Why are they significant? § What are “paradigms”? § What key paradigms have shaped our representation of Indigenous people?

2. The Concept of “Essentialism”

§ What is “essentialism”? § Why do you think colonial discourses relied and perpetuated essentialisms? § What are some of the “essentialist” ideas that have, and continue, how Indigenous

people are depicted?

3. Stereotypes

§ What are stereotypes and why are they significant? § Is there are difference between “typing” and “stereotyping”? § How is the stereotyping of Indigenous people “essentializing”; “reductionist” and

“naturalising”?

4. Edward Said and “Orientalism”

§ What is the central theme that underpins Edwards Said’s Orientalism? § What is “Orientalism”? § What does Said say about the nature of Western representations of the non

Western world?

§ What are some of the underlying assumptions of Orientalist discourse?

,

Good news: Humans are neither distinct nor superior

Commentary on Chapman & Huffman on Human Difference

Anne Benvenuti

Honorary Research Scholar University of Winchester

Abstract: Chapman & Huffman suggest that to correct our thinking about the supposed superiority of humans over other animals, we must train our reasoned investigation upon ourselves. Their thesis may usefully be viewed from within the general findings of the cognitive revolution in science, particularly findings that speak to the limits of rationality in everyday thought of humans. That we have failed — throughout a long history of scientific and philosophical thought — to ask fundamental questions about animal cognition and emotion is rooted in the fact that much of our thinking, feeling, and behaving is beyond our own immediate grasp. Scientific investigation has demonstrated that other animals are not so programmed as we assumed across a great range of behaviors. These two sets of findings should indeed change our thoughts about other animals.

Anne Benvenuti is the author of Spirit

Unleashed: Reimagining Human-Animal

Relations, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. She continues to focus her interdisciplinary scholarship on human animal relations, with particular interest in scientific explication of the qualitative dimension of experience. Website

I fully concur with Chapman & Huffman (C & H) that to correct millennia of incorrect thinking, we must train our human power to reason and conduct our scientific investigations on our own minds. The title of their essay obliquely but accurately reflects the mistaken assumption that underlies virtually the entire past history of human thought, including scientific thought, about human-animal relations. Aristotle (350 BCE), for instance, implied that animals did not think and thus operated at a lower level of existence, without memory or forethought. Drawing upon what was by then a pervasive and entrenched meme of human distinction and superiority, Descartes (1641) declared animals to be mere machines in a mechanistic universe wherein cause and effect played out endlessly without purpose.

I add that we are both more innocent and more ignorant than C & H suggest because our rationality is less rational than we assume, and because our thinking is influenced by many forms of self-serving bias (Shepherd, 2008; Tavris, 2008; Taylor, 1989). C & H’s thesis must be placed within the context of the enormity of unconscious or implicit content and process in human reasoning (Damasio, 1999; Wilson, 2002; Cacioppo, 2009; Schore, 2009; Panksepp, 2012; Benvenuti, 2016). The problem is not only that we want to justify mistreatment of other animals, but that so much of our own thinking, feeling, and behaving is beyond our own immediate grasp. Given the relative inaccessibility of our own minds, changing deeply held constructs of culture is challenging, though possible (Wexler, 2006).

Virtually all animal behavior, including human behavior, is affectively motivated. It is our feelings that decide what we do, while our rational assessments tend to justify our behavior after the fact. Hume (1739) argued that the passions express value and should guide behavior, in contrast to Descartes (1641) and Spinoza (1677), who identified the passions as animal and sub-human. But Hume’s minority position is affirmed by contemporary affective neuroscientists who note that affective systems, shared by all mammals, are biological expressions of biological values (Panksepp, 2012; Damasio, 2018).

It was the thinking of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and others, however, that led to the undergirding of the modern scientific project with a profound acceptance of the meme of human distinction and superiority. Only humans can think abstractly, it has been supposed, including the use of applied memory, mathematical reasoning, and concept formation; only humans have language; only humans use tools, or medicine; only humans organize politically; only humans have true empathy; only humans grieve and understand the finality of death; only humans have opposable thumbs and descended larynxes; only humans have self-awareness; only humans have “theory of mind,” or the capacity to guess what another is thinking. Only humans have von Economo neurons. The list goes on and on, as do the refutations when these claims are submitted to experimental study (Benvenuti, 2014). All of these illustrative examples of human distinction and superiority have been empirically demonstrated to be false. To give a surprising illustration, moths remember what they learned as caterpillars (Blackiston, 2008). And some comparative neuroscientists seriously ask whether whales might be smarter than humans (Fields, 2008).

One of the most oft-cited ex-post-facto explanations for the assumption of human superiority is the notion that animals lack language capacity. But now we know that elephants communicate with their feet over distances of up to twenty miles (O’Connell-Rodwell, 2000, 2007); that prairie dog language has semantic content, grammar and syntax (Slobodchikoff, 2012); that dolphins call each other by name and recall individual voices over periods of twenty years (Bruck, 2013; King, 2013); and that songbirds share with us recursive syntactic patterning: the ability to embed clauses and phrases in a series (Gentner, 2006). All these facts indicate that other animals use communication systems that perhaps should at last be classified as language (Fitch, 2005). Slobodchikoff (2012), whose elegant experiments demonstrated the complexity of prairie dog languages, notes that most scientists had accepted two broad propositions: first that other animals behave according to inflexible genetic programming, and second that they lack self-awareness and so also lack intentions. He notes: “As a result, they [were] highly unlikely to ever set up an experiment to explore the possibility that animals have language” (Slobodchikoff, 2012).

But in keeping with the principle of evolutionary continuity, and in light of recent decades of scientific exploration of both human and animal minds, I would summarize it this way: all animals share a great many of the general features of living. Animals, including humans, have internal experiences of sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and intention (Panksepp, 2009). These internal experiences are responses to the external world we share, about which animals communicate with other animals. All animals, inclusive of humans, are members of an extended family, a notion that carries an important affective component. Yes, it is past time that we accept and teach this scientifically correct and affectively compelling notion, and that we allow it to motivate our behavior towards other animals. As C & H suggest, this shift to bringing the animal Other into our circle of concern may then have ripple effects in improving the lot of humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems alike (Freeman, 2012; Goodman, 2012).

References

Aristotle. (c. 350 BCE) On the Soul. Translated by J.A. Smith. Benvenuti, A. (2014) Spirit Unleashed: Reimagining Human-Animal Relations. Eugene: Cascade

Books.

Benvenuti, A. (2016) Evolutionary continuity of personhood: A response to Rowlands on animal

personhood. Animal Sentience 10(13).

Blackiston, D.J., Silva Casey, E. and Weiss, M.R. (2008) “Retention of Memory through

Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What it Learned As a Caterpillar?” PLoS One 3:3.

Bruck, J. (2013) “Decades-Long Social Memory in Bottlenose Dolphins.” Proceedings of the Royal

Society B: Biological Sciences, 280.

Cacioppo, J.T. and Decety, J. (2009) “What Are the Brain Mechanisms on Which Psychological

Processes Are Based?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4:1, 10–18.

Chapman, C.A. and Huffman, M.A. (2018) Why do we want to think humans are different?

Animal Sentience 23(1).

Damasio, A. (2018) The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New

York: Pantheon.

Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by J. Bennett (2010–15). Fields, R.D. (2008) “Are Whales Smarter Than We Are?” Scientific American: Mind Matters. Fitch, W.T. (2005) “The Evolution of Language: A Comparative Review.” Biology and Philosophy

20, 193–230.

Freeman, M. (2012) “Thinking and Being Otherwise: Aesthetics, Ethics, Erotics. Journal of

Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 32, 196–208.

Gentner, T.Q., Fenn, K.M., Margoliash, D. and Nusbaum, H.C. (2006) “Recursive Syntactic

Pattern Learning By Songbirds.” Nature 440, 1204–07.

Goodman, D.M. and Freeman, M. (2012) “Editorial: Psychology and the Other Special Issue.”

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 32, 193–95.

Hume, D. (1739–40) A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton.

Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000).

King, S. and Janik, V. (2013) “Bottlenose Dolphins Can Use Learned Vocal Labels to Address Each

Other.” PNAS, 12853–54.

Loftus, E. and Pickrell, J.E. (1995) “The Formation of False Memories.” Psychiatric Annals 25:12,

720–25.

O’Connell-Rodwell, C. (2007) “Keeping an ‘Ear’ to the Ground: Seismic Communication in

Elephants.” Physiology 22:4, 287–94.

O’Connell-Rodwell, C., Arnason, B.T. and Hart, L.A. (2000) “Seismic Properties of Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) Vocalizations and Locomotion.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108:6, 3066–72.

Panksepp, J. and Biven, L. (2012) The Archaeology of Mind. New York: Norton. Panksepp, J. and Northoff, G. (2009) “The Trans-Species Core SELF: The Emergence of Active

Cultural and Neuro-Ecological Agents through Self-Related Processing within Subcortical Cortical Midline Networks.” Consciousness and Cognition 18, 193–215.

Schore, A.N. (2009) “The Paradigm Shift: The Right Brain and the Relational Unconscious.”

Plenary Address, American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada.

Sheppard, J., Malone, W., & Sweeny, K. (2008) “Exploring Causes of the Self-Serving Bias.” Social

and Personality Psychology Compass 2:2, 895–908.

Slobodchikoff, C. (2012) Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals. New York:

St. Martin’s Press.

de Spinoza, B. (1677) Ethics. London: Penguin Classics (1996). Tavris, C. and Aaronson, E. (2008) Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish

Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. New York: Mariner Books.

Taylor, S.E. and Lobel, M. (1989) “Social Comparison Activity Under Threat: Downward

Evaluation and Upward Contacts.” Psychological Review 96:4, 569–75.

Wexler, B.E. (2006) Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. Boston: MIT

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Wilson, T.D. (2002) Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. New York:

Harvard University Press/Bellknap.

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Australian Geographer

ISSN: 0004-9182 (Print) 1465-3311 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cage20

'Totally Wild'? Colonising discourses, indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife

Sandie Suchet

To cite this article: Sandie Suchet (2002) 'Totally Wild'? Colonising discourses, indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife, Australian Geographer, 33:2, 141-157, DOI: 10.1080/00049180220150972

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180220150972

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Australian Geographer, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 141–157, 2002

indigenous ‘Totally Wild’? knowledges1 Colonising and discourses, managing wildlife

SANDIE SUCHET, Macquarie University, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper offers a critique of politically dominant Eurocentric notions of culture and nature in Australia. In particular, it interrogates Eurocentric concepts of animals, wildlife and management, and seeks to unsettle these concepts by considering some of the diverse ways in which indigenous people in Australia know country, animals and wilderness. Using the metaphor of Eurocentric ontology in a hall of mirrors, the paper argues that Eurocentric claims of universalism for naturalised discourses that assume the adequacy of a nature–culture binary form a very fragile circular argument. Self-justifying the imposition and assertion of Eurocen tric concepts and practices is a mechanistic re� ection of the particular terms of reference set by Eurocentric knowledges and a denial of multiple ways of knowing. The dangers this presents are illustrated by examining how concepts and practices underlying wildlife management have self-justiŽ ed (continuing) colonising processes in Australia. Finally, the paper attempts to open up spaces that address these dangers. Situated engagement is introduced as an approach which could shatter the hall of mirrors—by clearly embodying and emplacing all thought and action, universalised boundaries can be recognised and breached and new possibilities imagined and realised.

KEY WORDS

Indigenous knowledges; wildlife management; nature; wilderness; postcolonial ism; situated engagement.

Each weekday TOTALLY WILD takes viewers on a stimulating adventure into the wilds of Australia’s � ora and fauna … (Totally Wild 2001)

Promotions and content of the popular children’s television program Totally Wild posit a clear difference between the wild and the everyday world of its viewers. As part of the popular media’s presentation of nature, Totally Wild re� ects and reinforces a particular view of a boundary between nature and culture. Unquestioning acceptance of the existence of ‘the wilds’ and their distinct separateness from our lives, and the accept ance of an external relationship between the human domain and entities such as � ora and fauna, are discussed in this paper in terms of Eurocentric knowledges. These knowledges are strongly in� uenced by Enlightenment science, industrial revolution technologies, Judeo-Christian beliefs, European philosophical traditions and dominant academic approaches to the construction of knowledges. Claims by Eurocentric knowl edge to legitimacy through universalism, objectivity and deŽ nitive causation allow an uncritical naturalisation of these ways of seeing and understanding the world as universal truths (Christie 1992). This denies knowledges constructed in alternative ontologies, cultures and discourses, such as indigenous knowledges, and justiŽ es

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/02/020141-17 Ó 2002 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc. DOI: 10.1080/00049180220150972 colonising processes in which people are marginalised, dispossessed and alienated (Escobar 1996; McDowell 1991).

In exploring relationships between colonising discourses and ontological pluralism, this paper initially interrogates Eurocentric understandings of animals, wildlife and management and reveals problematic aspects of the binary oppositions and assump tions which underlie the meanings of these terms. These binaries and assumptions will be unsettled by glimpses into situated indigenous knowledge systems in Australia. The manner in which notions of wildness and management justify colonising processes in Australia will then be examined in terms of a metaphor of a hall of mirrors. Finally, in an attempt to open spaces in which thought and practice can shatter mirrors, the approach of situated engagement will be introduced.

Unsettling animals, wildlife and management

Animals: Eurocentric assumptions of separation, hierarchy and reason

Static, naturalised boundaries between what is seen as ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are fundamental in Judeo-Christian traditions about the creation process. Man’s ability to name separates him from, and makes him more powerful than, ‘living creatures’ (and women): ‘And the LORD God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them …’ Genesis 2 19 (Plaut et al. 1981, p. 30).

ScientiŽ c method is also based on a belief in an objective world which humans need to understand and control through naming and categorising: ‘Imposing a model on the universe so as to take possession of it, an abstract, invisible, intangible model that is thrown over the universe like an encasing garment’ (Irigaray 1993, p. 121). In this model, scientiŽ c theory has separated animals into their own category. Forming a fundamental boundary in Eurocentric thought, it was only in the mid-1700s that Carl Linnaeus popularised the system of classiŽ cation still used by science today—binomial nomenclature—where animals are removed from any context, separated from plants and sub-classiŽ ed into genus, class, order, etc. (Whatmore & Thorne 1998; Anderson 1995). In exploring relationships between being and the ‘fragrant dwelling’ of earth, Irigaray (2000, p. 7) describes how the living ‘[u]nwittingly … distance themselves from what lavishes life, counting and calculating without making sure [of] their own steps or the values which guide them’.

As Eurocentric discourses set boundaries and external relations between culture and nature, the boundaries and relationships become dialectically embedded in mindsets and societies. Anderson illustrates the ways separation and hierarchy are reinforced and communicated by considering relationships between ‘humans’ and ‘non-human ani mals’ in the context of the Adelaide Zoo. She argues (Anderson 1995, p. 283) that:

The exhibition [of animals in zoos] showed nature not only conŽ ned and subdued but also interpreted and classiŽ ed. To that end, the zoo space occupied that critical nexus in the trafŽ c of ideas between scientiŽ c and popular.

The zoo is an excellent example of the boundaries and relationships set by Eurocentric discourses between nature and culture (Anderson 1995, p. 276):

… zoos are spaces where humans engage in cultural self-deŽ nition against a variably constructed and opposed nature. With animals as the medium, they

inscribe a cultural sense of distance from that loosely deŽ ned realm that has come to be called ‘nature’.

In the context of wildlife management discourses in Australia, concepts of animals and wildlife are also informed by, and inform, a belief in separation. Humans are not included in deŽ nitions of wildlife, and animals are further sub-categorised. In section 5 of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974—the act that sets the framework for ‘wildlife’ management in that state, animals are deŽ ned in scientiŽ c categorical terms:

… animal means any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, and at whatever stage of development, but does not include Ž sh within the meaning of the Fisheries Management Act 1994 other than amphibians or aquatic or amphibious mammals or aquatic or amphibious reptiles.

In a report evaluating wildlife management in Australia, ‘wildlife resources’ are charac terised according to Eurocentric scientiŽ c understandings of evolution, notions of value and scientiŽ c classiŽ cations. Thus Davies et al. (1999, p. 12) note that:

As a result of a long period of isolation from other land masses, many of the wildlife species are unique to Australia. This contributes to Australia’s status as one of twelve key regions for maintenance of global biodiversity. All three major groups of mammals are well represented, including two of the world’s three monotreme species (platypus and echidna).

The oppositional binaries of culture–nature and human–animal naturalised in Eurocen tric discourses do not exist in a power-neutral situation. Both ‘sides’ of the opposition do not have equal access to setting the terms of reference; the side that forms, asserts and imposes the representation is empowered (Fothergill 1992, p. 46; see also Irigaray 2000 for an exploration of the same theme in regard to masculine and feminine binaries). Thus, Eurocentric humans are privileged and perceived as the active, supe rior, progressive side of any opposition as they themselves have formed the opposition. To challenge Eurocentric beliefs that knowledge is universal and power relations formed are justiŽ able, it is necessary to identify and then unsettle the assumptions that underlie such knowledges. The characteristics of being able to consciously reason, be rational and have intent and purpose have been the most pervasive attributes used to externalise the relationship of culture from nature and human from animal. As feminist environmental philosopher Plumwood (1995, p. 155) argues: ‘One key aspect of the Western view of nature … is the view of nature as sharply discontinuous or ontologi cally divided from the human sphere of reason.’

Despite a variety of (often contradictory) ways Eurocentric discourses have repre sented relationships between culture and nature, a hierarchical opposition between human and animal can always be traced to notions of reason, rationality, intent and purpose. For example, inspired by Cartesian philosophy, nature is seen in certain discourses as inert and passive, having no inherent powers of resistance or agency. As such, humans relate to nature in order to reshape and reform it. Alternatively, in� uenced by Hegelian thinking, the human’s task is seen as actualising nature and animals through art, science, philosophy and technology so that nature can be con verted from something alien into something with which humans are comfortable (Passmore 1995, p. 136).

Although attempts are being made by contemporary philosophers to challenge hierarchical separations between humans and nature, many of these challenges revert to the universalising arrogance of earlier perspectives. For example, in presenting his own philosophy on nature, Passmore (1995, p. 140) argues:

No doubt, men, plants, animals, the biosphere form parts of a single com munity in the ecological sense of the word: each one is dependent upon the others for its continual existence. But this is not the sense of community which

generates rights, duties, obligations; men and animals are not involved in a network of responsibilities or a network of mutual concessions. (Emphasis added)

There are many ways in which human–nature relations are conceptualised in Western thought; however, they all construct a relationship of opposition between nature and culture, human and animal based on assumptions of reason and consciousness (Ander son 1995; Plumwood 1995).

Situated glimpses into multiple knowledges

Nature for all its apparent remoteness and distance from humans is, in some sense at least, socially constructed. (Anderson 1995, p. 275)

SpeciŽ ed boundaries and external relationships do not naturally occur between culture and nature, humans and animals. People make meaning in multiple, shifting ways depending on context, focus and position. Constructing complex worlds as culture and nature, human and animal, is not universal, true or ‘natural’ but is particular to Eurocentric knowledges. For those trapped in a universalising framework, acknowledg ing this speciŽ city can be challenging and unsettling. However, as discussed later in this paper, the spaces opened up by this acknowledgment can also be exciting and transfor mative. Throughout this paper situated indigenous peoples’ knowledges from Australia offer this unsettling yet exciting challenge to Eurocentric universalism (see Suchet 2001 for southern African challenges to Eurocentric notions of wildlife management). For example, Christie (1992, p. 5), a linguist working with Yolngu people in Arnhem Land, describes some unsettling aspects of recognising multiple knowledges:

I failed as I struggled mentally to arrange all Yolngu matha names into a hierarchy. I assumed, for example, that the distinction between ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ is a ‘natural’ one, an ontological distinction, a reality quite indepen dent of human attempts to make sense of the world. But there is no Yolngu Matha word for either ‘plant’ or ‘animal’.

The term ‘country’ offers another insight into contested ontological as well as physical terrains. Australian settler cultures draw on a concept of country as opposed to city. In this context, Goodall (1999) argues that country is often drawn upon to embody notions of land, people, families and society, and construct racialised landscapes of either productive conquest or heroic failure. However, the Aboriginal English concept of country offers a direct challenge to this separation from and domination over landscapes and people (D. Rose 1996, p. 8):

Country is multi-dimensional—it consists of people, animals, plants, Dream ings, underground, earth, soils, minerals, surface water, and air. There is sea country and land country; in some areas people talk about sky country. Country has origins and a future; it exists both in and through time …

Through the Dreaming, Aboriginal people know that speciŽ c animal species and humans were, are and will be interrelated at personal and social scales. Distinct, external boundaries are breached as Dreaming stories inform a responsibility to country based on a common heritage and kinship (D. Rose 1996; Suchet 1994): ‘Animals, they’re related to us … Animals were human before’ (Napranum elders cited in Suchet 1996, p. 211).

In beginning to outline what a ‘non-human-centred cosmos’ might look like, D. Rose challenges and unsettles Eurocentric assumptions of reason and superiority, such as those espoused by Passmore. Rose (1988, p. 379) argues that for Ngarinman people from the Northern Territory ‘ … human life exists within the broader context of a living and conscious cosmos’. Similarly, Williams (cited in Langton 1998, p. 27) argues that ‘Aboriginal people regard the environment as sentient and as communicating with them’. Rather than a naturalised notion of an inferior nature unable to consciously act and interact, we Ž nd epistemologies in which (Rose 1988, p. 379):

Other animal species are believed to be acting equally responsibly [as hu mans]. People, other animals and other categories of beings are moral agents. The whole cosmos is maintained through the conscious and responsible actions of different life

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