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27 - Animals and More-Than-Representational Ethics

from Part IV - Intimate and Everyday Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Rosie Jones McVey
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter argues that anthropological studies of human relationships with animals can draw our attention towards – rather than away from – the importance of representation within human ethical lives. The chapter posits that the anthropological ethical turn and the animal turn are each orientated in different ways to the concept of ‘representation’. This means the two traditions speak at cross-purposes to one another, visible particularly in their distinctive innovations in relation to ‘personhood’. From the perspective of the ethical turn, the personhood (or agency) attributed to animals by multispecies ethnographers appears ethically thin. From the perspective of the animal turn, the ethicists’ focus on varied human-held forms of reflection risks repeating dualistic distinctions and portraying animals only as they appear within human accounts. Yet the chapter shows that these two emerging traditions can benefit from one another, in attending to ‘more-than-representational’ (not non-representational) aspects of ethics. These include (1) the material/embodied form of ethical representations, (2) the fact that ethical life often seems inherently hard to represent, and (3) varied ethical attitudes towards representation (such as the ‘honesty’ sometimes associated with lack of speech) that can be seen as and when people interact with their animals.

Keywords

animalsethicsmoralityanthropologymultispeciespersonhoodrepresentationagencyspeechnon-human
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 677 - 705
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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