Multispecies Scholarship and Encounters: Changing Assumptions at the Human-Animal Nexus

‘Zoological Connections’: Changing Background and Disciplinary Assumptions

To truly understand human social behaviour in all its vagaries, and to be completely sensitive to the full array of its nuisances [sic] and subtleties, we must enhance our appreciation of its zoological dimension. Accordingly, we might … come to perceive whole new vistas of behavioural linkages by taking into account the ‘zoological connection’. Our behaviour, our lives and our destiny are directed in part by the shadow of the beast. Let us, therefore, turn our sociological attention to this neglected area of social causation. (Bryant, 1979: 417)

Sociology is typically understood to be the study of human society; hence its assumptions, concepts and theoretical frameworks are appositely suited to represent and explain the human-centric nature of its focus. According to Gouldner (1970: 32) ‘the work of sociologists, as of others, is [also] influenced by a sub-theoretical set of beliefs, for that is what background assumptions are’. Such assumptions, he explains, ‘are affectively-laden cognitive tools that are developed early in the course of our socialization into a particular culture and are built deeply into our character structure’. This partly explains why scholars may regard some theories as more ‘intuitively convincing’ than others (1970: 30). Given this, if scholars have been brought up in an anthropocentric culture that generally legitimates, objectifies, and normalises the use of animals for human purposes (i.e. dominionism) then this may foster a depiction of animals as necessary but tacit resources (Franklin, 1999). Just as non-animate resources such as water and petrol do not usually feature in lay or sociological accounts of daily life, unless there is a drought or fuel shortage, likewise, animated resources are barely discernable unless there is a problem. Thus, scholars who are exposed to, and influenced by, anthropocentric norms and beliefs are perhaps more likely to perpetuate and relate to human-centred accounts of social life, because such accounts just feel right and make intuitive sense.

Although sociologists have paid minimal attention to what Bryant (1979) refers to as the ‘zoological connection’ (i.e. our symbolic and material relations with other animals), the extent to which this has been a deliberate omission is perhaps open to question. If scholars reflect upon why nonhuman animals may or may not be incorporated into sociological enquiries then perhaps ‘silent assumptions [about animals and human-animal relations] rooted in the ideological or cultural background of the society’ to which they belong may come to the fore which would otherwise go unexamined (Ichheiser, 1949: 1). For example, ‘Every attribute that it is claimed we uniquely have, the animal is consequently supposed to lack; thus, the generic concept “animal” is negatively constituted by the sum of these deficiencies’ (Ingold, 1994a: 3). This shows how human beings are depicted as unique and distinct from all other animals (i.e. human exceptionalism). Since the term ‘animal’ encompasses all species of animals apart from humans, this has prompted the use of unwieldy phrases such as ‘nonhuman animal’, ‘other-than-human animals’, ‘other animals’, and the formation of new terms such as ‘anymal’ to manage this ‘lexical gap in the English language’ (Kemmerer, 2006: 10–11). This may be a matter of semantics, but ‘these categorical errors have historical roots in philosophical and religious ideas that formed the foundation of Western culture and ensured a subordinate and inferior status for nonhuman animals’ (Shapiro, 2008: 7).

The depiction of animals as mindless automatons by René Descartes in the 17th century perpetuated the view that animals were incapable of speech and the ability to think: ‘Without thought, they did not experience emotion and were unencumbered by what Descartes saw as the elemental and most unique human possession – the soul’ (Sanders, 1999: 114). Elements of this perspective may arguably be traced in George Herbert Mead’s depiction of animal communication as a ‘conversation of gestures’ (1934: 48). Mead suggests when two dogs fight they are instinctually responding to each other’s bodily gestures: ‘The dogs are not talking to each other; there are no ideas in the minds of the dogs; nor do we assume that the dog is trying to convey an idea to the other dog.’ As humans typically communicate via the spoken word, this type of vocal gesture ‘usually calls up the same response in the speaker and listener – if both people use the same language, and their words have standardized usages’ (Baldwin, 1986: 77). Since animals do not converse as humans do, i.e. by means of ‘significant symbols’, they are considered incapable of participating in symbolic interaction. According to Clinton Sanders, a pioneering American animal sociologist, Mead’s view of animals:

… came to be a taken-for-granted assumption when sociologists occasionally passed lightly over the topic of animal-human interactions. Since animals were not full-fledged social actors from the Median point of view, their encounters with humans were one-way exchanges, lacking the intersubjectivity at the heart of true social interaction. People interacted with animals-as-objects. (1999: 118)

Over time, every discipline develops its own classics and ways of seeing the world which are more or less imbibed by each generation that enters the field. Sociology is no different. For example, introductory textbooks play a key role in inducting new entrants into disciplinary assumptions and what has been described as ‘“common denominator” or non-problematic sociology’ (Ferree and Hall cited in Alger and Alger, 2003a: 70). However, the accumulation of contemporary research in areas such as cognitive ethology, primatology and animal science has greatly enhanced our understanding of animal intelligence, emotion, sociality, communication and culture in different species of animals (e.g. Bekoff, 2006; Birke and Hockenhull, 2012; De Waal, 2001; Griffin, 1984; Hillix and Rumbaugh, 2004; Masson and McCarthy, 1994). Moreover, such findings have been popularised in televised documentaries such as Super Smart Animals (BBC1, 2012) and Life on Earth hosted by naturalist David Attenborough. As ‘documentary makers [have] employed the fly-on-the-wall approach to bring the intimate lives of animals closer to humans’, this not only introduced exotic and familiar species of animals into people’s living rooms it also decentred ‘humanity by … reducing the perceived distance between humans and animals’ (Franklin, 1999: 48). It is interesting that the emergence of this new knowledge about animals was barely evident in the majority of introductory sociology textbooks published in America between 1998 and 2002. Instead, such texts typically reinforced species differences rather than challenging them (Alger and Alger, 2003a: 70). Although this may be the result of ‘inadequate scholarship’ (2003a: 75), ‘By focusing on the differences between humans and other animals, sociologists have lost sight of all that we share with them’ (Murphy, 1995: 692).

Such disciplinary assumptions are further reinforced by a division of academic labour that largely segregates nature from culture. Since social science disciplines have tended to perpetuate a ‘discontinuity between humans and animals’, albeit to varying degrees, this contributed to nonhuman animals being omitted from or placed at the fringes of sociological enquiry (Noske, 1993: 187; Tovey, 2003). Zerubavel suggests that the way academic scholarship is organised mirrors ‘the way we mentally carve up the world in our minds, as well as the way we experientially construct our professional identities as scholars’ (1995: 1093). Given that academic research is peer-evaluated to ascertain how centrally or marginally relevant it might be to a field, this spatial positioning of intellectual endeavours can ‘condemn scholars for being too “provincial” or “limited” in their academic interests’ or raise questions as to whether a ‘particular topic falls “within” or “outside”’ their disciplinary area (1995: 1095). The extent to which colleagues are ‘rigidly or flexibly-minded’ may also influence the degree to which they perceive academic fields and sub-fields as more or less demarcated ‘islands of scholarship’ (1995: 1095). If we return to Bryant’s (1979) plea to attend to the zoological connection, his request has generated a rather cool and at times contemptuous response from peers within sociology. ‘Although sociologists have shown increasing interest in this topic, it can hardly be called a flood. … Indeed some belittle it as mere boutique sociology … or consider it to be a passing fancy or trendy insignificance’ (Arluke, 2003: 28–9). At best, this ‘more-than-human’ topic is perceived to be of tangential relevance to the discipline (Whatmore, 2006: 604). At worst, it reflects a ‘rigidly-minded’ response to a rather quirky ‘island of scholarship’ that lies outside of sociology’s remit.

Multispecies Scholarship: Human-Animal Studies and the ‘Animal Turn’

Having said all this, an interdisciplinary field has emerged called Human-Animal Studies (HAS), which is ‘primarily devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex and multidimensional relationships between humans and other animals’ (Shapiro, 2008: 5). ¹ The current torrent of ‘new books, journals, conferences, organizations, college programs, listserves, and courses, both in the United States and throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada’ attests this interspecies area is attracting considerable interest (Shapiro and DeMello, 2010: 307). So much so, that within 30 years, the social sciences and humanities have embarked on what Sarah Franklin has dubbed an ‘animal turn’ (Armstrong and Simmons, 2007: 1).The field itself is likely to be associated with politicised scholarship synonymous with an animal rights agenda (Jerolmack, 2005). Such a view is not ungrounded because animal-related issues can engender polemic and politicised standpoints (Best, 2009). Even so, like any field, there is a continuum of positions and perspectives; HAS is no different. For example, ‘while activism to better the lives of nonhuman animals is not a key component of Human-Animal Studies, many HAS scholars are themselves activists’ (DeMello, 2010: xiv). This is especially the case for Critical Animal Studies (CAS), which ‘is the academic field of study dedicated to the abolition of animal and ecological exploitation, oppression, and domination’ (ICAS, 2012). Given this, CAS-orientated scholars are more likely to engage in emancipatory-type scholarship and advocate ethically motivated veganism (Humphries, 1997; Twine, 2010a). ² However, just because academics are engaged in pro-animal research does not necessarily mean they are uncritical of or sympathetic to animal-related politics (Aaltola, 2011). In other words, those studying human-animal issues may to varying degrees be involved in activist-scholarship and/or animal advocacy politics, but not necessarily so.

The reinvigoration and radicalisation of the animal protection movement in the 1970s, however, has played a pivotal role in translating contemporary ‘private troubles’ held by individually concerned citizens and ethically troubled consumers about animals into high profile ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959: 8; Ryder, 2000; Singer, 1995). As anxieties over the moral status, welfare and utilisation of different species of animals in modern industrialised societies have intensified, people have taken to the streets to register their personal concern, moral outrage and ‘zoocentric empathy’ (Franklin, 1999: 175). For instance, during the mid-1990s, the anti-live animal export protests in the south and south east of England generated such widespread local, national and European support this signalled that a political consensus was emerging about ‘the moral case for animal welfare’ (Benton and Redfearn, 1996: 51). This also indicates that people feel they have a duty of care towards animals used for human purposes: that is, dominion-type assumptions co-exist with, and are off-set by, more animal-centric perspectives such as the Christian notion of stewardship (Franklin, 1999: 175). In practice, people and scholars living in anthropocentrically orientated cultures are therefore exposed to competing positions and discourses, and changing assumptions, about the moral and legal status of different species of animals and how they should be perceived and treated.

For example, up until the mid-1990s, agricultural animals were legally classified as ‘goods’ or ‘products’ (Stevenson, 1994: 116). In effect, livestock were like any other agricultural resource such as wheat and potatoes, and could be processed as such. Following a lengthy campaign by animal welfare groups such as Compassion in World Farming, the status of livestock in European law was revised in the Treaty of Rome to that of ‘sentient beings’ (Camm and Bowles, 2000). In theory, this is a significant reclassification of food animals because it destabilises their ‘tool-like’ status by (re)acknowledging their animate qualities (Arluke and Sanders, 1996: 173). It also demonstrates that ‘The status of commodified domestic animals … once excluded from spheres of moral concern and legal protection, is being re-evaluated’ (Emel and Wolch, 1998: 14). If these moral concerns are combined with the public angst generated by genetically modifying animals (Macnaghten, 2004), the creation of ‘interspecies entities’ as in stem cell research (Parry, 2010) and the global health risks associated with emerging infectious diseases, many of which are zoonotic diseases transmitted from animals to humans, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Avian Flu (Jones et al., 2008; Torrey and Yolken, 2005), then lay people and experts alike are increasingly faced with and compelled to consider the ethical, political, socio-economic and institutional implications of hybridised beings and interspecies risks in late modernity (Brown and Michael, 2004; Whatmore, 2002; Wilkie and Inglis, 2007).

Haraway’s term ‘critter’ aptly refers to the ‘motley crowd of lively beings including microbes, fungi, humans, plants, animals, cyborgs and aliens’ that are ‘always relationally entangled rather than taxonomically neat’ (2008: 330). This notion resonates with Latour’s argument that the purified realms of nature (i.e. nonhuman) and society (i.e. human) are a modern myth that relies on not attending to what he calls the ‘work of translation’ or ‘hybridization’ (1993: 10–11, 1994). By dutifully perpetuating the ontological division between nature and society this ‘provides an impoverished analytical repertoire that purifies the vast “middle kingdom” of hybrid nonhuman entities, both organic and inorganic, that increasingly proliferate in our contemporary world’ (Lorimer, 2007: 913). ³ Given that ‘the creative mind’ is ‘attracted by problems which are overlooked, or not recognized as anomalies by his [or her] colleagues’, the emergence of HAS provides an institutional home and vital melting pot for like-minded scholars interested in hybrid-related scholarship (Shapiro cited in Dogan and Pahre, 1990: 35; Shapiro and DeMello, 2010). ⁴

Although the animal turn has been slower to register on sociology’s radar (Taylor, 2012: 44), a growing number of sociologists are considering social life through a multispecies lens (e.g. Arluke and Sanders, 1996; Cudworth, 2011a; Franklin, 1999; Irvine, 2004, 2008; Peggs, 2012; Twine, 2010a; Wilkie, 2010). This development provides an opportunity to address ‘possible blind spots in sociological theory’ and animalise the ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959; Myers, 2003: 46). This animalising impulse has already garnered sufficient support within the discipline to stimulate professional sociological associations to establish specialist research groups dedicated to the study of human-animal related issues in America (2002) and Britain (2006). That said, Leslie Irvine speculates that the continuation of the Animals and Society Section in America lies mainly in the hands of ‘graduate students who have the courage to challenge the field’s outdated ideas about animals’ (2012: 127). Even so, those who traverse disciplinary and species margins have harnessed the ‘creative marginality’ to produce innovative scholarship that goes beyond human-centric accounts of social life (Carter and Charles, 2011; Dogan and Pahre, 1990; Taylor and Signal, 2011). In the process of grappling with the empirical, theoretical and methodological challenges of attending to nonhuman others (animate and non-animate) such scholarship is destabilising long-standing disciplinary assumptions and dualisms, such as society/nature, human/animal and subject/object and decentring the human-centric focus of social science disciplines (e.g. Birke and Hockenhull, 2012; Haraway, 2003, 2008; Hinchliffe, 2007; Latour, 1993; Law and Hassard, 1999; Murdoch, 1997a, 1997b).

In some ways, such boundary-related debates tap into ongoing religious, philosophical and cultural dialogues throughout the ages, about the vulnerability, mutability and permeability of the border that is purported to separate humans from other animals (e.g. Clutton-Brock, 1995; Gilhus, 2006; Hirst and Wooley, 1985; Horigan, 1988; Thomas, 1983; Salisbury, 1997). ⁵ The extensive time and energy expended on (re)constructing, (re)negotiating and (re)affirming this nebulous natural-cultural nexus clearly shows how culturally significant this interspecies frontier is. As Taylor notes, ‘the boundaries between human and animal are not “natural” but are constructed and policed in order to maintain the purity of the different categories’ (2012: 39). Multispecies scholarship is also unearthing areas of modern-day life that highlights that ‘Our social enterprise is not composed of humans alone’ (Bryant, 1979: 417). Of course the realisation that animals are ‘good to think’ with is not new in the social sciences; animals have long been symbolic vehicles for understanding human societies and how they are organised (e.g. Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Mullin, 1999). Since animals have been humans’ ‘other’ this means ‘the very idea of the human – the way we understand and experience ourselves as humans – is closely tied up with ideas about animals’ (Armstrong and Simmons, 2007: 1). For example, Anderson illustrates how the formation of human identity in European societies is intimately tied up with the notion of animality and the ‘politics of domestication’ (Anderson, 1997: 467). By explaining how animal domestication is ‘a political activity historically interconnected with ideas of human uniqueness and dominion, savagery and civilization’, she shows how this shaped the nature of people’s relations with animals and other people too (1997: 470). Since the domestication and farming of animals were key ‘hallmark[s] of a civilized society’ during the colonial period, if indigenous peoples did not engage in these practices they were deemed ‘uncivilised’ and likened to animals (Anderson, 1997, 2004: 8; Elder et al., 1998). As Raymond Williams notes, ‘To cultivate nature was to draw it into a moral order where it became “civilised”. Indeed, it was the practice that signified culture itself, a term, which in its earliest use, meant to cultivate or tend something – usually crops and animals’ (cited in Anderson, 1998: 126). By implication, the more humans worked on nature and subdued their brutish natural instincts the more they could claim they had transcended this realm to become cultured and rational beings. However, the ideal human subject underpinning this western narrative is riddled with gendered, racialised and speciesist assumptions: ⁶

Those who were European, white, male and adult set themselves up as the prototype of humanity, with animality as its opposite. This sleight of hand relegated the feminine (equated with the body/the irrational), racialized peoples and children. All such ‘other people’ had ambiguous status. (Anderson, 1997: 473; see also Spelman, 1982)

Since ‘[o]ur ability to pass as “human” may be compromised by being marked out in various ways as “more animal”’, this illustrates how the human-animal divide, and discourses of animality and nature, can contribute to the construction of ‘intra-human categories of difference’ (Twine, 2010a: 10–11). Whilst sociologists often draw on the concept of intersectionality to understand the multifarious and entangled nature of social inequality, domination and difference (e.g. gender, ‘race’ and class), the dimension of species difference has been overlooked. ⁷ Multispecies scholars, especially within CAS, are addressing this oversight by ‘reimagining’ the human-centric focus of this concept to enable ‘more-than-human account[s] of intersectionality’ (Twine, 2010b: 397). In light of this initiative, Cudworth suggests ‘It is time that more sociologists took the social power of species seriously’ (2011b: 171). Since the animal turn also requires social scientists to pay heed to tangible animals, and people’s actual relationships with other species, this highlights that animals are more than just symbolic vehicles, they are ‘symbols with a life of their own’ (Daston and Mitman, 2009: 13). This is a significant amendment, because it draws attention to the nature of people’s material ‘entanglements’ with other animals in a multitude of personal and institutional contexts (Haraway, 2008: 4). Attending to our ‘co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality’ not only emphasises the multifaceted and exploitative nature of our connections with a multitude of critters (Haraway, 2003: 4), it also ‘re-vitalises’ our understanding of such connections because people can and do ‘become with’ other species of animals (Buller, 2012; Greenhough, 2010; Haraway, 2008).

Multispecies Networks and Encounters

As scholars flesh out the multifaceted nature of people’s liaisons with other species, there is a growing interest ‘in animals as subjects rather than objects, in animals as parts of human society rather than just symbols of it, and in human interactions and relationships with animals rather than simply human representations of animals’ (Knight, 2005: 1, emphasis in original). This change of emphasis has triggered discussions about nonhuman agency in HAS and an interest in actor-network theoretical (ANT) approaches too (e.g. Law and Hassard, 1999). Although ANT was first used by sociologists of science to investigate how scientists conducted experimental studies in practice (Murdoch, 1997a), ‘It is a way of looking at the social world which stresses that humans live and operate within wide networks of phenomena’ (Taylor, 2011: 209). This realisation that humans act in concert with a plethora of animate and inanimate others has shifted attention away from those doing the relating (i.e. a human subject who has the capacity to act intentionally) onto the relational webs and practices which connect humans with other species of animals (Law and Mol, 2008; Murdoch, 1997a, 1997b). This approach typically flattens out and disperses agency throughout the entire network (i.e. via the beings and things enrolled within it) to the extent that this ‘principle of symmetry’ means that all types of ‘actants’ (e.g. humans, animals and artefacts) may be treated in the same way (Jones, 2003). ⁸ Although this ‘liberates, or brings out from the shadows, oppressed [animal] subjectivities’, it simultaneously ‘undermines their identity as distinct subjects worthy of epistemological, political and ethical distinction’ (Jones, 2003: 293). ⁹ Moreover, since the ‘networks are flat – there is little ontological depth – no sense of multileveled qualities or hierarchical relations and the different kinds of sets of relationships therein’ (Cudworth, 2011a: 58–9). Perhaps a more contextualised understanding of interspecies relations that considers where species are located in a network and any power differentials that may exist between and amongst human and nonhuman animals would add more texture and depth to multispecies networks. As Cudworth notes, ‘Animals have more or less limited agency, depending on the kind of environment they are in’ (2011a: 77).

This proliferation of more-than-human perspectives, discourses and issues has also exposed scholars to new ways of thinking about how species are symbolically and materially entangled with each other. This means ‘a new generation [of sociologists] may arise with new background assumptions, ones that are not resonated congenially by theories based on older [i.e. anthropocentric] assumptions which the younger generation feels to be wrong or absurd’ (Gouldner, 1970: 34). Given there are about 67 million pets in the UK and 48 per cent of UK households are now ‘multi-species households’, it is likely that many scholars have personal experience of sharing their lives with nonhuman companion-type animals too (Franklin, 2006: 139; Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association, 2012). ¹⁰ Just as background assumptions may partly explain why some scholars regard some theories as more ‘intuitively convincing’ than others, then perhaps colleagues who have been socialised into multispecies relations, assumptions and scholarship may regard largely human-centric accounts of social life as intuitively unconvincing (Gouldner, 1970: 30). ¹¹

For example, a number of American sociologists have revisited Mead’s work to provide an alternative understanding of how humans and animals may meaningfully interact with each other without the use of linguistic symbols. Conducting ethnographic studies into people’s routine everyday interactions with animals in contexts such as animal shelters, veterinary clinics, living and playing with ‘pets’ and dog training sessions has enabled such sociologists to rethink notions of intersubjectivity, personhood and selfhood to include nonhuman animals (e.g. Alger and Alger, 1997, 2003b; Arluke and Sanders, 1996; Irvine, 2004, 2007, 2012; Sanders, 1993, 1999, 2003; Sanders and Arluke, 1993). Even though this pioneering work has opened up new lines of enquiry, the tendency in such research to ‘elevate animals to symbolic interactants … [or] assume “minds” or shared meanings’ between people and animals has been critiqued by fellow sociologists (Jerolmack, 2009: 376). According to Jerolmack, ‘associations with humans and animals are still possible and enjoyable to humans even if symbolic interaction is impossible’. Given this, he contends ‘It is useful to consider symbolic interaction as an ideal type by which to compare various interactions along a continuum of intersubjectivity’ (2009: 376). Moreover, although such studies show how animal practitioners and guardians may attribute ‘mindedness’ and grant ‘personhood’ to more-than-human beings this ‘simply maintain[s] dualist conceptions whilst moving the boundary slightly (i.e. from human/social v. animal/natural to human and (some) animals/social v. natural’ (Taylor, 2011: 206). Whilst the extent to which different species of animals may or may not be minded actors engaged in more or less meaningful exchanges with people is a point of contention, exploring contexts where people encounter individually known animals and/or groups of unknown animals does provide an opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of interspecies liaisons and sociality (Candea, 2010).

To illustrate, I will draw on an article that documents the experiences of a female primatologist who abandoned the accepted wisdom of ‘habituation’ whilst studying a troop of wild baboons near Lake Naivasha in Kenya (Smuts, 2001). Usually, the practice of ‘habituation’ requires animal researchers to ‘ignore’ the animals under study so that the animals will ‘ignore’ them (Candea, 2010: 246). However, Smuts’ attempts to be a neutral observer were ineffective in this species context. Instead, the more she understood how to behave and react in ‘baboon-appropriate fashion’ the more the primates disregarded her (2010: 246). Smuts suggests this was because the baboons perceived her as ‘a social subject vulnerable to the demands and rewards of relationship. Since I was in their world, they determined the rules of the game, and I was thus compelled to explore the unknown terrain of human-baboon intersubjectivity’ (cited in Candea, 2010: 246). In practice, this meant she had to alter her behaviour as opposed to the animals accommodating to her presence. As Smuts explains:

The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the world they had always lived in. I, on the other hand, in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body, and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of being in the world – the way of baboon. (2001: 295)

Clearly, the more Smuts attended to, and reflected on, the baboons’ bodily gestures, and inter-baboon engagements, the more she could mirror and ‘send such signals back to them’ (2001: 295). She became so attuned to the tacit subtleties of the troop’s behaviour that she reached a point where she responded at the same time as, or even before, the rest of the baboons when they had to stop eating to take shelter from the rain. Smuts writes:

… something shifted, and I knew without thinking when it was time to move. I could not attribute this awareness to anything I saw, or heard or smelled; I just knew. … I had gone from thinking about the world analytically to experiencing the world directly and intuitively. (Smuts, 2001: 299)

She recalls how the transition from self-consciously to perceptively engaging with the baboons fundamentally altered her sense of identity. In effect, her ‘subjective consciousness seemed to merge with the group-mind of the baboons. … Increasingly, the troop felt like “us” rather than “them”’ (2001: 299). This transformation in how she perceived herself has been described as an ‘intersubjective merging of identities’ (Dutton, 2012: 100).

In contrast, an ethnographic study that explored how biology and zoology volunteers managed their relations with Kalahari meerkats found that both species practised a restrained form of interaction termed ‘interpatience’, i.e. ‘relationships based on detachment or disengagement’ (Candea, 2010: 249). ¹² Whilst Smuts deviated from the norms of habituation by actively adapting to, and participating in, the norms of baboon sociality, in this case, the volunteers emphasised the importance of blending in or ‘becoming part of the scenery’ so that both species could maintain ‘a polite distance’ from each other (2010: 245–6). The striking differences between the species, in terms of size and physiology, meant that even if the volunteers attuned themselves to meerkat social etiquette in all likelihood they would be unable ‘to play the meerkat game’ (2010: 246). What these two ethological-type studies indicate is how people had to negotiate and respect species-specific socialities in completely different ways, i.e. relations of engagement (baboons) and relations of disengagement (meerkats), to be co-present with these animals. As Segerdahl notes, ‘Cross-species relationships thrive in so many locations, creating new animals and new humans, shaped not only by their novel genomes but also by their unpredictable bonds in new circumstances’ (2012: 157).

Such studies compel social and natural researchers to go beyond their disciplinary boundaries too (Birke and Hockenhull, 2012). The methodological challenges of multispecies research has already stirred scholars to engage in a series of inter and intra-disciplinary dialogues about established approaches to research that have tended to prioritise human-centric norms, assumptions, behaviours and practices. As Buller notes, ‘The methodological techniques of ethnography and ethno-methodology, coupled with ethology and behavioural observation have proved to be a potent mix to this new more-than-human social science’ (2012: 65). Given the interdisciplinary nature and interspecies focus of HAS scholarship, it is thought this field also holds the ‘transformative’ potential to transfigure more orthodox ‘methodologies that hitherto were imbued with anthropocentrism’ (Segerdahl, 2012: 156–7). It is interesting to note that such changes are already afoot, as evidenced by Cultural Anthropology’s special issue dedicated to ‘Multispecies Ethnography’ which was published in 2010. In some ways, the emergence of this approach within anthropology takes us back to Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘critters’ because these ethnographers are studying ‘contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010: 546).

Conclusion

Attending to zoological connections can highlight the entangled nature of our symbolic and material configurations with a multitude of critters that constitute our everyday lives. As multispecies scholars question the largely human-centric depiction of social life, they ‘disturb the comfortable certitudes of life by asking questions no one can remember asking and those with vested interests resent even being asked’ (Bauman and May, 2001: 10). Like any sub-field, HAS has the potential to nuance, augment or even challenge existing sociological knowledge and disciplinary assumptions. On the one hand, the animal turn may ‘enrich the sociological enterprise … [to] gain a better understanding of what it is to be human’ (Sanders, 2007: 7). On the other hand, it messes up categories such as society and nature and human and animal because it attends to the more-than-human relational networks that we are all a part of.

The interdisciplinary nature of HAS also means its scholars routinely liaise with colleagues in a wide range of social and natural science disciplines; thus its intellectual boundaries are less ossified and less clearly demarcated than more established areas of study. Since ‘innovative scholarship often presupposes intellectual cross-fertilization’ this quirky island of scholarship provides an institutional home and vital scholarly exchange for hybrid-orientated colleagues (Zerubavel, 1995: 1102). As more sociologists engage with the pioneering initiatives of multispecies scholars in HAS, and other cognate fields, such as cultural and rural geography that drew on ANT approaches to create more-than-human accounts of social life, they too have an opportunity to contribute to the development of this multispecies field. Although the extent to which animal sociologists might reshape the human-centric focus, assumptions and debates within their own discipline remains to be seen, likewise the influence of sociological perspectives upon HAS has still to be fully realised. What is more certain, however, is if scholars engage with the human-animal nexus then they are compelled, albeit to varying degrees, to cross disciplinary margins and rethink species boundaries. Such scholarly and multispecies encounters have not only reminded colleagues that the ‘“social” is not, and never has been, exclusively “human”’ (Cudworth, 2011b: 171), they have also laid the groundwork to animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS.