Can humans survive without animals, politics, and religions? How can the rising field of animal studies constitute a new perspective on ancient cultures worldwide? Julia Kindt’s The Trojan Horse and Other Stories and Krešimir Vuković’s Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives offer inspiring insights to our thinking about ancient cultures with animals, from the past to the present, while venturing into the future. These books demonstrate that animal studies as a new field offers a powerful perspective for understanding the history shared with our companions in the multi-species universe. Animal Studies considers diverse angles and multi-dimensional aspects of social reality, social mentality, and cultural complexity that involve both real nonhuman animals and imaginary animals, or the animals appearing in the biological, psychological, and conceptual realms of human experiences, as Alan Bleakley suggested in The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism (pp. 38-40).
In a close reading of ten stories centered on real and imaginary animals in ancient cultures, Kindt examines how animals and their entangled relations with humans defined humans from the perspective of human-animal studies, responding to questions of humanity and animality raised by classical and medieval philosophers with their modern and contemporary implications. Vuković analyzed one of the most important festivals, Lupercalia, to reveal the interdependence between animals and humans in the Roman world from a comparative perspective, decentering the dominant classics, masculinity, imperialism, and colorism in Western classical scholarship. These two books, along with my book In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions, focus on the power relations between humans and nonhuman animals in politics and religions. All three books often remind readers of anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism in the binaries of humans and animals, nature and culture, wildness and civilization, and superiority and inferiority. These books’ reflexive discussions against anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism echo Aaron Gross’s critiques of the Western intellectual tradition since the Enlightenment era in his book The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications.
The Trojan Horse, Wolves of Rome, and In the Land of Tigers and Snakes all present nonhuman animals as the center of the discussion by looking into their indispensable roles and multiple images in the ancient world and their relevance to modern and contemporary human conditions. Interestingly, all three books share some common features, such as introducing the inspiring approach of animal studies, thematically arranging ideas rather than following chronological order, mobilizing wide-ranging sources, and attempting to emphasize the relevance of ancient and medieval studies to modern and contemporary issues.
In her 2011 article “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World,” Natalie Zemon Davis noted that after World War II in Western historiography, there were interconnected processes of “decentering” history—from elite class to working class and subaltern classes, to women and gender, then to ethnical and racial minorities, and then to non-Western histories and global history. In the past two decades, animals eventually took center stage in the world of Western historiography. As seen from all three books, the boundaries between West and non-West were also challenged. Although The Trojan Horse and Wolves of Rome focused on the classical world of the West, they express a strong awareness of decentering the dominant textual and philosophical traditions in Western classicism, attempting to diversify themes, sources, and perspectives to renew the scholarship of classical studies.
In particular, The Trojan Horse focuses on challenging Western anthropocentrism and logocentrism. In the first three chapters, while analyzing the stories centered on the Sphinx, Xanthus (Achilles’ Speaking horse), and the Lion of Androclus, Kindt addresses how the discourses on the human identity with reason (logos), language ability, and a sense of justice or virtue that made humans different from animals enters into the ancient world through the writings of classical philosophers and ancient narratives. Kindt destabilizes the separation between animals and human identity by introducing three narratives that indicate animals’ reasoning through the Sphinx’s story, the ability to converse with humans in the story of speaking horse, and the mutual virtuous support between the lion and Androclus. In the following two chapters, Kindt considers issues of otherizing and dehumanizing animals that bring up suffering and pain from killing the “otherized” lives in the war. Beyond defining humans by reason and soul, some scholars, particularly those who worked on affect theory, have already pointed out that humans and animals share the same sentience and feel suffering and pain together. Nevertheless, it has never been an issue in Buddhist studies since Buddhist cosmology lists human beings and animals as sentient beings.
Thinking of animals as “the other” opposite to humans was also discussed in Wolves of Rome. It focuses on the binary of humans and animals, the former as civilized and the latter as the savaged. Vuković mainly employs ritual theory, especially the analytical framework of rites of passage, to examine how humanity and animality were constructed via a series of ritual performances separating humans and animals, insiders and outsiders, citizens and outlaw, the civilized and the wild, etc. Different from Kindt, Vuković pays particular attention to ritual activities through the behaviors of humans and animals during the performance of Lupercalia rather than relying solely on writing and visual materials. He strongly opposes privileging the written record over other evidence in the study of the ancient world and reveals longstanding Eurocentrism in classical scholarship. Though he does not focus on the issues of reason, language, and virtue or moral capacity as Kindt did, Vuković dismisses the definition of humanity based on reason, language, and virtue. From the perspective of ritual studies, while setting reasoning and language (written texts) aside, humans and animals could be equally examined through their behaviors and activities. Another issue emerges: to what extent could animals be regarded as having developed religions or performing rituals or being aware of rituals as their sense of virtue and morality if the ritual is not the marker separating humans and animals?
My book touches upon the issue of otherizing animals in medieval Chinese political and religious discourses. Medieval Chinese elite literati and religious clergy members often write about animals as wild and savage sentient beings, opposite to humans. Confucianism has a long history of otherizing uncivilized objects, not only animals, but also the marginalized human habitants who did not understand Sinitic language and culture (music, rites, customs, and institutions). The Chinese empire even exercised a policy of exiling those unruly officials to the remote regions, which indicated the mixing of the unruly exiled humans with untamed beasts. My book challenges a popular standing in conventional scholarship that Buddhism and Daoism were perceived as friendly to animals and the natural environment for their compassionate virtue. I offer a nuanced view of Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China, that animals and the natural environment were said to be inferior to the “civilized” human converts who followed Buddhism and Daoism. Therefore, all three books name issues surrounding humans’ superiority and animals’ inferiority. In other words, decentering every dominant group is visible in these books: elite (vs. the mass), priests (vs. the lay people), aristocrats (vs. commoners), noble class (vs. lower class), male (vs. female), ruler or royalty (vs. subjects or the ruled), classics (vs. vernacular texts), canon (vs. non-canon), and human (vs. animals).
Vuković particularly points out that the binary of superiority and inferiority that can be found in the myth and ritual of Lupercalia is not limited to humans and animals but extends to enslaved people, women, and other less privileged groups and subjects. As he argues, “the Lupercalia provides a religious framework for the assertion of a dominant masculine identity, constructed to opposition to the female gender, perceived as lacking and inferior.” (p. 77) Kindt also notes that in ancient cultures, meat-eating and power, red meat and masculinity, and meat-eating and strength were interconnected with each other physically and politically (chapter 6). The ancient narratives often link eating cooked meat with humans and eating raw meat with animals. As I discuss the Buddhist categorization of animals, the medieval Buddhist monastic community would not change the social relations of enslaved people and animals, as they were offered to the Buddhist monastic communities as donations. Even though the ownership shifted from the lay donors to the monastic order, enslaved people and animals again became the “belongs” of the monastic order (chapter 1).
Furthermore, given that Vuković addresses the issue of the Roman ruler Caesar’s divinization by mobilizing the Lupercalia celebration as a political and religious drama (chapter 1), my 2012 Chinese book on animals in medieval Chinese political and religious order also suggests that there was also a parallel narrative mode in early Mahayana Buddhism for glorifying and divinizing the founder of the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha himself, by associating him with the epithet carrying the name of the lion, the power and strength as well as might of lion as the king of the animal kingdom. The Buddha was granted the title of the lion king, which often appeared in Buddhist narratives.
In addition to othering and challenging binaries, Kindt and Vuković address two critical issues in the Western tradition: offering animals as sacrifices and hunting animals as a political and military exercise. Sacrificial rites were used in ancient Western cultures to define the relations between God (who receives sacrifices), humans (who offer sacrifices), and animals (who become sacrifices). Hunting was developed to construct superiority over animals and enhance masculinity for men. Due to a focus on the medieval period, my book does not directly examine the sacrificial rites – there were many – in ancient China; instead, my study indicates that all organized and institutionalized teachings in China, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, attempted to replace locally popular animal and human sacrifices with their doctrinal teachings and ritual transformations. Buddhism claimed the supernatural power of moral compassion. Confucianism taught the virtuous governance of local officials that could transform wild animals. Daoism developed special rituals and techniques for pacifying ferocious beasts. Although both Buddhism and Daoism proposed not to engage in killing animals, in particular historical circumstances, Buddhist monks and Daoist priests killed snakes for competing social, cultural, and religious capital to expand their territories and attract more converts from local communities. A broader cross-cultural perspective on hunting’s roles in the political, military, and civil life in ancient and medieval world cultures might be more interesting.
Our understanding of ancient and medieval cultures, particularly about human’s definitions, has benefited from the Western intellectual and philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment era. Modern scholarship of humanities and social sciences then has a deep root in the intellectual tradition developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which cannot be separated from the impact of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and imperialism, as Kindt and Vuković remind us. Decolonizing and decentering the history of modern scholarship will shed new light on our understanding of the past, revealing the complexity of human-animal, politico-religious relations that shape our past and present.
