In his book Animal Fables after Darwin, Chris Danta anecdotally recounts the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar, a king divinely punished after proclaiming himself the creator of Babylon.[1] For his arrogance, God exiles him from his ‘human kingdom’. He is made to live among ‘wild animals’, “[eating] grass like cattle… his hair [grows] like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird”.[2] The king’s no-longer-human body is forced towards the Earth in a downward gaze. After seven years, he is again able to look up towards the heavens, which restores both his ‘sanity’ and ‘humanity’. Danta outlines how this story employs spatial metaphors to distinguish ‘human’ from ‘animal’, instilling a visceral, almost tangible hierarchy. “Human is up; animal is down”.[3] In this biblical anecdote, our upright posture becomes a metaphor for human exceptionalism, and the direction of our gaze becomes a vessel towards divinity. The nonhuman body, moreover, is shackled to an earthly biology that ours are able – perhaps destined – to transcend. Metaphors as embodied by (non)human actors pervasively organize thought about the world and ourselves.
A favorite of my childhood was a poem by Annie M. G. Schmidt about a frightening, “beastly” bird called Bisbisbis.[4] She flies in on the Northwind to snatch rude, stubborn, “growling” children. She steals them to an island “extremely far away” and returns them only once they’ve become “pleasant and polite” again. Bisbisbis ferries children across a narrative and spatial boundary that separates ‘civility’ from ‘animality’. Both are relegated to separate places and characterized, simply, as being vastly distant from the other. In high school, we read The Last Question by science-fiction author Isaac Asimov.[5] It narrates humanity’s gradual technological progress to a point where the ‘human’ is a single, disembodied, immortal consciousness, floating in space, having become its own Creator. They have no memory of their original galaxy, let alone planet. Its core contemplation reverberates throughout many works of science-fiction: “more and more, the real essence of men can be found out there”.[6]
These stories are tethered to a complex anthropocentric inheritance. Perhaps Bisbisbis ferried Nebuchadnezzar to the ‘wilderness’ of his exile. Perhaps Asimov’s human ‘essence’ twinkled back to him his sanity when the king could again contemplate whatever human-truths claim to transcend Earthly ones. ‘Humanity’, at any rate, finds little kinship with ‘animality’ in these stories, their own or otherwise. In fact, nonhuman figures seem to symbolically separate humans from their secular/divine exceptionalism. In these stories, ‘human’ – however ambiguous or fluid – must remain decidedly and necessarily ‘not-animal’.
Danta illuminates how certain stories within this inheritance act to subvert its logic. His book examines nineteenth and twentieth century fables: stories of anthropomorphized non-human animals. This period saw Darwin’s theory of evolution destabilize notions about ‘human’ and ‘animal’ within a European context. Danta argues that post-Darwinian fables serve to “de-sanctify” the human by placing them within a non-human body. Mirroring the story of Nebuchadnezzar, fables force human thought and consciousness towards the Earth. However, as opposed to a narrative punishment, these stories “[challenge] all modes of thought that seek to transcend the limits of biology or species.”[7] In other words, post-Darwinian fables that grapple with notions of humanity such as these, began contemplating a ‘new’, proximal relationship to animality. For many raised with this inheritance, this is profoundly ontologically destabilizing. Who are we if not ‘not-animal’? Who is ‘animal’ of not ‘not-human’? These questions expose further fissures in this ontological cornerstone. The word ‘animal’ and ‘human’ safeguard a precarious logic that imagines both as inherently separate. Who, then, is the ‘human-animal’?
‘Animal Studies’ is a developing field that broadly examines the ways we relate to, imagine, and are shaped by nonhuman animals. This essay roundtable traverses disciplinary boundaries at the intersections of Animal Studies, History, Classics, and Political Theology, inviting a dialogue between three works: Julia Kindt’s The Trojan Horse and Other Stories; Huaiyu Chen’s In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions; and Krešimir Vuković’s Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives. These authors consult real and symbolic nonhuman animals in their relationships with humans, deities and each other. These relationships co-construct religious, social and political arenas, and, as Kindt aptly outlines “[entangle themselves] in negotiations of power, control and belonging.”[8] These three works also discursively navigate disciplinary traditions. Chen explicates that “modern scholarship of humanities and social sciences … cannot be separated from the impact of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and imperialism.”[9] Animal Studies seeks to (re)imagine, (re)frame and (re)animate this heritage, by centering those otherwise excised or omitted from dominant modes of thought.
In their book Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being Against the Capitalocene, Milinda Banerjee and Jelle Wouters outline the importance of multi-species political ontologies in the face of climate crises, pandemics, inequality, mass extinction and other existential threats on a global scale. Their book converses with multi-species assemblies, mobilized against the oppressive forces of state and capital. They showcase how ‘thinking-with’ nonhuman actors is indispensable as we navigate a “second wave of anti-colonial revolution”; countering modes of thought that sustain violent political histories, enact global catastrophes, rupture kinship, and marginalize the politics of “nonexploitative interdependence.”[10] In most academic discourse, nonhuman actors might feature as characters or objects forming a backdrop to anthropocentric stories. By inviting them to speak in these co-constructed histories, they show us that they are, in fact, agents, conspirators and co-authors in plural, multi-species narratives.
In his essay, Vuković notes that all three books employ multi-species stories and storytelling as a medium through which to distill complex themes. Stories are agents of identity and political memory. They remind us of the ambiguity separating symbolism and reality, and how to mobilize both as we synthesize meaning. We tell stories as we navigate symbolic and material landscapes. We politicize stories as we afford these landscapes meaning. The dichotomous, hierarchical relationships between human and nonhuman figures told through Nebuchadnezzar, Bisbisbis, or the Last Question, embody ideas about religion, politics, citizenry, progress, destiny, authority, belonging, exceptionalism, civility, power, etc. Often, then, the barriers between ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’ become diffuse, just as those separating ‘story’ from political or religious ontology may be unstable. Nonhuman figures, especially, move between these barriers. They emerge as complex and profoundly exigent actors who co-negotiate spaces we are accustomed to defining as “human”, as well as (importantly) those we blanket as “other”. Nonhuman agents of course also negotiate meaning outside human participation or interpretation. As Donna Haraway importantly reminds us, “no species, not even our own arrogant one … acts alone.”[11] We exist – materially and ideologically – in the relationships that sustain and are sustained by us. The statement is almost banal. Of course we do. We cannot exist in a vacuum. It is intriguing, then, that recognizing the ways nonhuman agents co-author ‘human’ stories and political realities can be an almost alien exercise. It is towards this co-authorship that the authors in this roundtable attend.
My research similarly engages with nonhuman agents. I examine plants, insects, cows, fungi, elephants, bacteria, volcanoes and other organic and abiotic agents, across a longue-durée history of exploitative colonial-capitalist agriculture. I explore how we ‘story’ nonhuman histories conform anthropocentric ideas. We ‘story’ the nonhuman with words like crop, fodder and timber, casting plants as resources to directly or indirectly service human consumption. We story the nonhuman when the words ‘beast’ and ‘monster’ are so proximal to ‘animal’ as to be almost synonymous. We story nonhuman political lives when these become branded ‘invasive’, ‘plagues’ or ‘vermin’. Insect-histories in particular offers us a salient example of what it can mean to ‘story’ nonhuman agents in ways that inform religious, economic, social and political realities.
‘Insects’ have occupied a colloquially, scientifically and symbolically fluid category. They have served as symbols of divine authority, harbingers of evil, fetishized objects, economic allies and agricultural enemies.[12] Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, vast tracts of land in European colonies were converted to synthetic factory-fields, and nonhuman (vegetal, fungal, bacterial, animal) beings were moved along new, global networks. This radically changed local and global ecologies by both introducing displaced (invasive) species to other areas of the world, and entirely annihilating existing ecosystems in the service of capital. These changing environmental dynamics created unstable landscapes that were increasingly difficult to profitably mediate. Imperial governments devoted significant resources to applied natural sciences, including the field of economic entomology. This field was instrumental in revolutionizing insecticide research, which was catapulted into nothing short of chemical warfare in the post-war period. This is neither facetious or exaggerated; chemical pesticides are firmly wedged in the political and scientific histories of both World Wars.
Insects travel those diffuse barriers between ‘reality’ and ‘symbolism’ as we narrate for them a role that is both imagined and political: they become “pests”. This character(ization) emerges when landscapes we consider ‘human’, become threatened. Naming and then besieging the enemy becomes a rational exercise, despite the overt devastation it enacts. Some calculations suggest that a staggering 75% – 98% of insect biomass has been lost just in the past 35 years.[13] This is due to a variety of factors, many of which are directly or indirectly linked to exploitative capitalist agriculture. Insects are “integral to every terrestrial and freshwater foodweb”, not least our own.[14] Their growing absence is nothing short of catastrophic.
Under the multidisciplinary banner ‘Animal Studies’, we may decenter the ‘human’ in this history of capitalist agriculture, and instead attend to the political histories of insect agents. The resulting narrative is intriguingly subversive. Insects rebelled against the new political/environmental dynamics imposed by colonial-capitalist experiments. Human authority over synthetic monocultures became especially contested as insects increasingly consumed colonial ‘resources’. Insects devastated not only the viability of imperial projects, but the logic of (profitable) human mastery in these spaces. Colonial economic entomologists, when not devoting time to insect eradication, sought precarious alliances with ‘beneficial’ insects, employing them to attack the enemies of vegetal capital.[15] These ‘beneficial’ insects were transported globally to wage war against true “pests”. They often, however, acted in ways they had not been contracted for. They sometimes refused to ‘multiply’ enough to amass an army; they sometimes engaged in economically irrelevant negotiations; sometimes they even rebelled in their new environments such that they were (re)branded “pest”.[16] Fascinatingly, there was a concurrent notion that ‘pests’ emerged increasingly as a response to “natural imbalances” brought by the curated, “synthetic uniformities” of agricultural fields.[17] Their growing presence in plantation landscapes was evident. But only “nature” is bound to nonhuman political agency. Insects are not harbingers of “balance”, nor anything else our factory-fields are beholden to. After all, these spaces are ‘human’, so their cultivated destinies must transcend any limits of biology or species.
The story of the insect “pest” plays out in narrative landscapes that house familiar figures. Bisbisbis might be spotted flying along the borders that separate a cultivated field from the edge of ‘nature’. She may ferry insects across when they are invited to return to these fields as ‘allies’. If these insects fail to appease the gods of capital, however, they will be punished. Much like Nebuchadnezzar, their bodies are forced into a punitive metamorphosis that embeds in them a profane animality. They are exiled as “pests”. We may also recognize Asimov’s human ‘essence’, sown into these fields. While not planted in the stars, this agricultural story cultivates the ‘human’ in a landscape that excises nonhuman political memory. In effect, it alienates us from Earth by tilling our destinies into an ‘empty’, kinless space.
Within Animal Studies, these nonhuman figures are centered as agents and co-authors of agro-capitalist histories. Insects assert themselves as imperial adversaries. They subvert their role as “pest”, disrupt colonial-capitalist historiographies, and reclaim the fields we cultivate by challenging the notion that these landscapes are ‘human’. In fact, they act much like they might in Danta’s post-Darwinian fables. They hold up an intriguing mirror so we may question our roles in the myriad of negotiations that author agricultural spaces. They expose modes of thought that call them into being, and “de-sanctify” the unsustainable political stories rooted there. Insects explicate that banal truth: we exist in the relationships that sustain and are sustained by us. They render visible the plurality of agents with whom we navigate material and ideological landscapes. And they remind us to conspire with those who co-author and animate their meaning.
Tigers, snakes, horses, wolves – and insects – entangle themselves in ‘human’ political, religious and economic stories. Animal Studies is an emerging field that seeks to subvert an anthropocentric academic heritage, by decentering the human narrator. Again, calling back to Danta’s post-Darwinian fables; Animal Studies engage with non-human figures as their political ontologies mobilize across disciplinary boundaries, destabilizing the divide between ‘human’ and ‘animal’. We are excited to welcome Julia Kindt, Huaiyu Chen and Krešimir Vuković to this essay roundtable on perspectives and methods in Animal Studies. These three authors discursively navigate themes of power, identity and belonging by examining how these are afforded meaning through real and symbolic multi-species relationships.
[1] Danta, C. Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor. Cambridge University Press. 2018
[2] Danta, 2018, 5
[3] Danta, 2018, 15
[4] DBNL Rosalind en de vogel Bisbisbis, Het fluitketeltje en andere versjes, Annie M.G. Schmidt, DBNL. DBNL. Available at: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/schm001flui01_01/schm001flui01_01_0034.php
[5] Asimov, I. The Last Question. In S. Schneider (Ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy (2016): 279–289).
[6] Asimov, 2016, 284
[7] Danta, 2018, 14
[8] Kindt, J. “Towards a Comparative Political Theology” Journal of Political Theology (2024): page 1
[9] Chen, H. “Decentering History: Animals, Politics and Religion” Journal of Political Theology (2024): page 4
[10] Banerjee, M., & Wouters, J. J. P. Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene (G. C. Spivak, M. de la Cadena, T. V. Dooren, & S. Yengde, Eds.). Prickly Paradigm Press. (2022)
[11] Haraway, D. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”. Environmental Humanities, 6(1) (2015): 159–165, 159
[12] Hijmans, Minke. “Empire and the Insect-Enemy: Towards a Global History of Agro-Capitalism” JHI Blog, (October 21, 2024.)
[13] Goulson, Dave. “The Insect Apocalypse and Why It Matters.” Current Biology 29, no. 19 (October 2019): R967–71, 967
[14] Goulson, 2019, 967
[15] Quanjer, H. M. “Over nuttige insecten en over de zoogenaamde amerikaansche methode ter bestrijding van insectenplagen” Tijdschrift over Plantenziekten 15, no 1-2 (January 1909): 29. (28-81)
[16] See Quanjer, 1909
[17] See Quanjer, 1909, 50-53 and 81; see also Leefmans, S. “Over de ontwikkeling der toegepaste entomologie” Tijsdschrift voor Entomologie (1947): 168-172.
