Eileen Crist - Images Of Animals (Animals Culture And Society)

Images of Animals : Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind: Animals, Culture, and Society

Crist, Eileen.

Temple University Press

ISBN-10 1566396565

ISBN-13 9780585364063

Images of Animals

In the series

ANIMALS, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY,

edited by Clinton R. Sanders and Arnold Arluke

Images of Animals

Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind

Eileen Crist

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122

Copyright 1999 by Eileen Crist.

All rights reserved

Published 1999

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crist, Eileen, 1961

Images of animals : anthropomorphism and animal mind / Eileen Crist.

p. cm. (Animals, culture, and society)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

1. Animal behavior. 2. Animal intelligence. 3. Anthropomorphism.

I. Title. II. Series.

QL751.C8824 1998

CIP

For my family, Despina Lala-Crist, Robert Crist, and Ray Crist

with gratitude and love

I have seen Swallows play a wonderfully graceful game of catching a feather. It was one August afternoon when I was sitting at the top of a steeply sloping farm field in the uplands of Devon, that I noticed more Swallows than usual were wheeling close together over one part of the field, presumably an abundance of flies on the hot, sunny day being the cause. Ducks and Geese roamed in this field and the grass was sprinkled with a few white breast feathers. I then saw a Swallow dip to the ground and sweep upwards with one of these feathers held in his beak and, circling above the other Swallows, he let it fall. As it floated down it was caught by one of the wheeling birds who then rose above the rest and again the feather was let loose, to float down through the many circling Swallows. This time it nearly reached the earth, then one bird swept down with graceful dip and flicker of wings, rising aloft with the feather, to drop it once more.

Sometimes their wayward toy would fall uncaught, perhaps too worn for further use; then quickly a bird swooped to the grass, seized another feather while on the wing and the play continued as before. It was a beautiful game to watch in the setting of hills, with a background of wild moorland and far away the blue haze of distant sea meeting the deeper blue sky.

LEN HOWARD

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Significance of Language in Portraying Animals

Darwin's Anthropomorphism

Lifeworld and Subjectivity: Naturalists' Portraits of Animals

The Ethological Constitution of Animals as Natural Objects

Genes and Their Animals: The Language of Sociobiology

Words as Icons: Comparative Images of Courtship

Unraveling the Distinction Between Action and Behavior

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Photograph of Smiling Man

Affectionate Cat

Gazing Wasp

Thorough Locality Study of Wasp

Hasty Locality Study

Ammophila Wasp Using a Pebble as a Hammer

Stickleback Model Dummies

Beetle Feeding Response: "Physiological Trap"

Oystercatcher with Supernormal Releaser

Male and Female Red Deer

The Mating Behavior of the Three-Spined Stickleback

Grebes' Bout of Shaking

Ceremony of the "Weed-Tick" and the "Penguin-Dance"

Female Grebe's "Cat-Attitude"

Male Grebe's "Ghost-Dive"

Grebes' Passive Mating Attitude

Displays of the Black-Headed Gull

Ornamental Feathers of the Male Polypectron

The Bowing Ceremony of the Grayling Butterflies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Arnold Arluke for inviting me to submit this work as part of the series Animals, Culture, and Society, published by Temple University Press. I also thank Mark Bekoff, whose careful, critical reading of the original version was invaluable for the process of rewriting. I thank Chip Burkhardt for bringing to my attention in a summer 1988 seminar at Woods Hole many of the writings I examine in this work. I'd like to express my appreciation to Donald Griffin for his bold books and for our conversations on the topic of animal mind.

The final version of this work was completed in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University during my postdoctoral fellowship there. I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at Cornell for providing a wonderful environment within which to work. In particular, I would like to thank John Carson, Charis Cussins, Adrian Cussins, Michael Dennis, Trevor Pinch, and Sheila Jasanoff for their close support. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Science Studies Program of the University of California at San Diego, where I began to rework my dissertation into this book as a postdoctoral fellow. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge the intellectual presence of Steven Shapin and Shirley Strum.

This book grew out of my dissertation work in the Sociology Department at Boston University. I thank my colleagues at Boston University during that period; their intellectual and personal support are the basis of this book. In particular, I'd like to thank David Bogen, Lynn Margulis, George Psathas, and Fred Tauber. Jeff Coulter's writings and seminars on ethnomethodology and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein opened new intellectual horizons for me; my indebtedness to his instruction is evident throughout this work. I would like to express my appreciation to Fred Wasserman, whose course on animal behavior was the inspiration for my dissertation topic. I must also acknowledge Tim Costelloe for our home in Boston and for his critical reading of many different drafts. Above all, I thank Michael Lynch, my advisor, mentor, and friend; without his unwavering support, in every way, this work would not have been possible.

Introduction:

The Significance of Language in Portraying Animals

A tension is built into the pursuit of knowledge about animal life, for it is heir to both the Cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable hiatus between humans and animals and the Darwinian affirmation of evolutionary continuity. The consequence of an intellectual and cultural heritage of opposed visions of the relationship between animals and humans is that the problematic of animal mindwhether affirmed or refuted, celebrated or doubted, qualified or sidesteppedis ever present, perhaps even the heart of the matter, in behavioral writings. Representations of animal life, whether intentionally or not, are always addressing what is for Western thought a most engrossing mysterythe contentious topic of animal mind or animal consciousness. In this book I address the theme of animal mind through a comparative study of representations of animals in behavioral works. Specifically, I examine the understanding of animal life in behavioral thought, from the writings of Charles Darwin and turn-of-the-century naturalists to works of classical ethology and contemporary sociobiology.

My focus is on the powerful role that language use plays in the portrayal of animals. Even a casual examination of different writings reveals that language, far from being simply a useful, neutral tool for inquiry, plays a formative part in how animals are depicted. While the different works I examine are kindred in their focus on naturally occurring animal behavior, they represent animal life in very discrepant ways. 1 My aim is to elucidate how different portraitures of animals are created. The works I study belong to the genre of behavioral science, in that the authors examined all share the ideal of discovering the realities of the natural lives of animals. It is paradoxical, then, that while they have this common goal of arriving at faithful representations of animalsdocumenting with great care their life histories, habits, and instinctsthey nevertheless often reveal realities that are worlds apart. I approach this paradox of striking