History and Theory 56, no.

2 (June 2017), 267-287 Wesleyan University 2017 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.12018

ANIMAL HISTORY1

The Historical Animal. Edited by Susan Nance. Syracuse: Syracuse University

Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 405.
ABSTRACT

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents
its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research pros-
pects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal.
These include such topics as the problem of the animals point of view, animal agency
(animals understood as historical agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces
of animal actions in anthropocentric archives and searching for new historical sources
(including animals testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially
with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities
and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying
animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that
the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians)
who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging
history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary
biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic
authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human
epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge:
can we achieve interspecies competence (Erica Fudges term) for creating a multispe-
cies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals perception of change help us to
develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based
on multispecies co-authorship?

Keywords: interspecies past, animal history, humananimal relationship, animal agency,

animals point of view, non-anthropocentric archive, historical sources, animals testi-
mony, radical interdisciplinarity

The Historical Animal is a genuinely multidisciplinary enterprise that embraces

such fields as art history, environmental history, social history, history of science,
but also literary studies and animal behavior sciences. The authors represent dif-
ferent stages of academic careers (PhD candidates, a postdoctoral fellow, assis-
tant, associate, and senior professors), different countries (Canada, Germany,
South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the US), and various methodological orientations
(articles vary from presenting good, classic historical craft with no theoretical
ambitions, through advanced historical research enriched by theoretical reflection
and innovative ways of thinking, to quite radicalto anthropocentrist histori-
anstexts that push animal history beyond the discipline of history). The book is
made up of the editors introduction and sixteen articles that are structured around

1. I would like to thank Paul Roth, David Gary Shaw, and Hayden White for their valuable com-
ments on an earlier draft of this article.
268 EWA DOMASKA

five main themes: I. Historicizing Nonhumans, II. Archives and the Animal
Trace, III. The Animal Factor of Historical Causation, IV. Animals Coping with/
Adapting to Us, and V. Documenting Interspecific Partnerships. The volume
also has a comprehensive bibliography, helpful endnotes, biographical notes on
contributors, and carefully crafted indexes.
I have decided that, instead of writing a kind of descriptive or critical assess-
ment, I will try to meet the challenges this information-rich, multilayered, critical,
and theoretically ambitious anthology presents and propose a reconstructive
approach to writing a book review. Thus, on the basis of a deep analysis of indi-
vidual texts as well as of the book as a whole, I will try to summarize, recreate,
and recapture the main tasks, principles, and analytical categories proposed for
the constitution of a field of animal history as it is presented in the volume. At
the end, I will delineate frontline research pointing toward future investigations
in the field of animal history and perhaps even in the field of history in general. I
will also approach the book critically but with no intention to criticize it. Rather,
I will apply what Elizabeth Grosz called the affirmative method.2 That is, my
focus will be on the works positive aspects and key concepts, while concentrat-
ing on those elements of the text that could open up interpretations of previously
overlooked possibilities.
I divide the article into five parts: 1) the first analyzes the problem of the ani-
mals point of view, 2) the second deals with one of the main themes of animal
history, namely animal agency and animals understood as historical agents and
actors; 3) the third considers the problem of identifying traces of animal actions
in anthropocentric archives and searching for new historical sources; 4) the
fourth considers methodological problems, especially with the idea of historici-
zation of animals and radical interdisciplinarity; 5) and, finally in conclusion,
I will reflect on animal history as a subfield of history, present its main argu-
ments and tasks, and identify its promises.

I. FROM THE ANIMALS POINT OF VIEW

The animals point of view is a paraphrase of a classic statement made

by Bronislaw Malinowski in his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).
Malinowski argued that the main goal of the ethnographer is to grasp the
natives point of view. The natives point of view came to be considered a
legitimate and necessary point of departure of anthropological study. For the sake
of further argument, I will cite a whole fragment that will help to contextualize
Malinowskis statement.
[T]he goal of ethnographic field-work must be approached through three avenues:
1. The organisation of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in
firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, statistical documentation is the means through
which such an outline has to be given.
2. Within this frame, the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behaviour have
to be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the
form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life.

2. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), 3.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 269
3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances,
items of folk-lore and magical formul has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum, as docu-
ments of native mentality.
These three lines of approach lead to the final goal, of which an Ethnographer should
never lose sight. This goal is, briefly, to grasp the natives point of view, his relation to
life, to realise his vision of his world.3

It seems to me not only that Malinowskis idea of writing ethnography from

the natives point of view is close to the goals that are leading many scholars
interested in writing animal history, but also that the principles of research are
quite similar. Through various historical written and material sources, documen-
tary films, and observations, historians are trying to grasp animal (typical and
sometimes strange) behavior and to document animal lives. Scholars are trying
to show how animals are an important part of our world and history as well as of
our species (exactly as Malinowski viewed the importance of natives).
However, this approach meets a severe criticism in anthropology. Clifford
Geertz was skeptical about Malinowski, who in his view romanticized the
fieldwork (perhaps there is an analogy here with historians fetishizing his-
torical sources).4 Other anthropologists observed that to apply the concept of the
natives point of view privileges the native, assuming that s/he has a better
understanding than an observer has. It also requires a presupposition that we can
actually understand the world from the natives point of view and present natives
accurately and in such a way that would not violate their perception of themselves
and their world.5
My reason for highlighting the problem of the native/animal point of view
is that animal historians use this phrase uncritically and so fall into the same trap
as anthropologists. They also treat animals as others who cannot speak for
themselves.6 This has significant methodological consequences for the project

3. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific [1922] (London and New York:
Routledge, 2014), 63, emphasis in original.
4. Clifford Geertz, From the Natives Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological
Understanding, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (October 1974),
26-45.
5. Kristen Hastrup criticizes this position: The criteria of theoretical acceptability of reasonable-
ness are neither given by God nor by the natives. They are posed in a scholarly community of possible
dissenters and depend on a degree of fit with experience. The world cannot be made up in theory.
Kirsten Hastrup, A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory [1995] (London and
New York: Routledge, 2013), 171.
6. This approach still resonates also in The Historical Animal. For example, Concepcin Corts
Zulueta writes that the new perspective offered by Michaels (animal) story reveals a previously
neglected and ignored other that has a point of view. As such it is analogous to a perspective,
similarly formed in conditions of relative lack of power as that of women, colonised people, minori-
ties, queer individuals (125-126). In a similar way, Zeb Tortorici confesses that I was also wary
of how, according to Neil L. Whitehead, the logic of domination is inherent in our attempts to write
animals in, just as with the category of children, the perceived lack of opportunity or inability to
speak for oneself invites the rescuing discourse of inherent rights to supplement this silence.
Even as scholars increasingly incorporate animals into historical narratives, they do often remain at
the margins of analysis. In my case, perhaps this is partly unavoidable, given that I am wary of the
colonizing gesture of purporting to be able to speak for another being or individual (87-88). While
trying to infuse things with agency, archaeologists were treating material objects as others. This
approach characterizes discussions about things before relational epistemology became popular. I
discuss this problem in The Return to Things, Archaeologia Polona 44 (2006), 171-185.
270 EWA DOMASKA

of writing animals into history, which is currently considered as too limited in

its goals.7 Also, it resonates in the problem of conceptualizing the main theme
of animal history: animal agency. In this context, writing history from the ani-
mals point of view is a metaphor expressing a desire for a more symmetrical
history8 that would approach animals as subjects and agents.9 However, for
scientists working on animal cognition, behavior, and psychology, the term
animals point of view is understood in terms of a possibility of interspecies
communication.10
It is worth noting that the problem so familiar to anthropologists of (cross-
cultural) translation in The Historical Animal emerges as the problem of inter-
species translation. Indeed, when Nance in the index records point of view, of
animals (403), the pages given do not refer to places where the phrase animals
point of view actually exists, but to fragments of an article written by an art
historian, Concepcin Corts Zuluetas Nonhuman Animal Testimonies: A
Natural History in the First Person? Zulueta analyzes an online video entitled
Michaels Story, Where He Signs about His Family. The video shows a male
gorilla who uses a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL) to answer
7. Cf. also Sandra Swart, The World the Horses Made: A South African Case Study of Writing
Animals into Social History, International Review of Social History 55, no. 2 (2010), 241-263;
Hilda Kean, Challenges for Historians Writing AnimalHuman History: What Is Really Enough?
Anthrozos 25, supplement (2012), 55-60.
8. I use the term symmetrical history by analogy to symmetrical archaeology. This approach
is influenced by Bruno Latours actor-network theory and concerns mainly relations between people
and things. As defined by Christopher L. Witmore, symmetrical archaeology is based on an assump-
tion that humans and non-humans should not be regarded as ontologically distinct, as detached and
separated entities a priori. . . . Any radical separation, opposition and contradiction between people
and the material world within which they live is regarded as the outcome of a specifically modern
way of distributing entities and segmenting the world. Christopher L. Witmore, Symmetrical
Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto, World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007), 546. See also: Bjrnar
Olsen, Symmetrical Archaeology, in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2012), 208-228.
9. ric Baratays book, Le Point de vue animal, une autre version de lhistoire (The Animal Point
of View: Another Version of History) in a similar way covers many ideas presented in the volume
under review. Baratay is also interested in presenting the animal side of history, going beyond the
human history of animals (lhistoire humaine des animaux), and documenting lived animal experi-
ences. ric Baratay, Le Point de vue animal, une autre version de lhistoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012).
Cf. also his Pourquoi prendre le point de vue animal? Religiologiques, no. 32 (Spring/Fall 2015),
145-165. Franoise Wemelsfelder presents a different approach to the the animals point of view.
Inspired by philosophy of language and phenomenology, she writes about access to animal subjec-
tive experience. She argues that the subjective experience of well-being and suffering in animals
is not, as is frequently assumed, fundamentally inaccessible to external observes; this view derives
from the misguided conception of experience as a causal object in mechanistic models of behavior.
Subjective experience should be approached on its own conceptual grounds, as a perspective, in
terms of what-it-is-like-to-be a particular individual animal. Animals then are perceived as agents,
as behavers, whose dynamic style of interaction may be taken as an expressive criterion for their
subjective experience. As Wemelsfelder stresses, this is not a proposal to seek identification with
an animals experience from within. Franoise Wemelsfelder, Investigating the Animals Point of
View: An Enquiry into a Subject-Based Method of Measurement in the Field of Animal Welfare, in
Animal Consciousness and Animal Ethics: Perspectives from the Netherlands, ed. Marcel Dol et al.
(Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997), 73.
10. Cf. also Miles K. Bensky, Samuel D. Gosling, and David L. Sinn, The World from a Dogs
Point of View: A Review and Synthesis of Dog Cognition Research, Advances in the Study of
Behavior 45 (2013), 209-406; Marian Stamp Dawkins, From an Animals Point of View: Motivation,
Fitness, and Animal Welfare, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, no. 1 (March 1990), 1-9.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 271
the question what can you tell me about your mother? (118). Zulueta claims
that the video might be understood as a first person account (she also calls it
testimony, 123). Indeed, she continues, They [apes] can . . . tell us stories. We
in turn can ask about the way they think about themselves and their surroundings,
about how they remember things (121).
Such statements inspire a paraphrase of the title of Geertzs well-known essay
that might be formulated in the following way: From the Animals Point of
View: On the Nature of Historical Understanding. This indicates a theoretical
problem that emerges from the above considerations: how the nature of histori-
cal understanding as such changes when scholars apply the animals perspective
and seriously consider animal testimonies as a way of communicating past events
and as historical sources. It seems that conventional interpretive modes of under-
standing and interpretation still predominate in The Historical Animal. In com-
parison to this approach, classic studies by Arthur C. Danto, W. B. Gallie, Louis
O. Mink, and Morton White, who in the 1960s analyzed historical understand-
ing in the mode of the analytical philosophy of history, might look irrelevant.11
But I would not dismiss such a track of thinking too easilyespecially not
after reading articles by one of the main representatives of virtue epistemology
(associated with the contemporary analytic philosophy): Ernest Sosa. In what he
calls virtue perspectivism, Sosa distinguishes animal knowledge from reflec-
tive knowledge.12 It is not my task here to discuss Sosas approach in detail, but
I would like to suggest that such challenging issues as writing history from the
animal point of view, humananimal communication, and humananimal cogni-
tion require a different way of knowing the past from the one offered by historical
epistemology with its specific understanding of time, space, change, rationality,
and causality. I refer to Sosa in order to indicate the possibility of reconsidering
the important place that analytical philosophy of history once had in theoretical
reflection about the past. I would also look for inspiration that it might provide to
build nonhuman ways of perceiving/sensing changes. I also wonder whether and
how virtue perspectivism might be connected to perspectivism understood as
a specific animist cosmology, as proposed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, in order to problematize humananimal interdependency,
kinship, and co-substance.13

II. ANIMAL AGENCY (ANIMALS AS NONHUMAN AGENTS AND ACTORS)

An interest in agency expressed by (animal) historians should be seen in the

context of a major tendency that is called the agentive turn in social theory.
11. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964);
Louis O. Mink, The Autonomy of Historical Understanding, History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966),
24-47, and his Historical Understanding, ed. Richard T Vann,Brian Fay,and Eugene Owen Golob
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
12. Ernest Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) and his Judgment and Agency (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015). Cf. also Eros Moreira de Carvalho and Flavio Williges, Sosa on Animal Knowledge
and Emotions, Analytica 19, no. 1 (2015), 145-160.
13. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Deixis and Amerinidan Perspectivism, Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 2 (1998), 469-488, and his The Relative Native: Essays
on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015).
272 EWA DOMASKA

In the framework of an earlier new humanities (and of critical theory), the

problem of agency was a main topic of political and theoretical debates. Scholars
were interested in various understandings and forms of human agency (agency
as free will, equating agency and resistance, the absence of agency).14 The late
1990s, as poststructuralism and deconstruction slowly transformed into critical
posthumanism, brought a major change in the understanding of agency as such.
The main theme of the discussions became a critique of anthropocentrism and
the recentering of nonhuman agents: animals, plants, and things. Material objects
and their potential capacity to act and make changes in the surrounding environ-
ment became particularly attractive subjects of research and the topic of vigorous
debates. Artifacts came to be perceived as active subjects or persons that have
identities, personalities, social lives, and biographies.15
This agentive turn is also related to the animist turn. The attribution of agency
to nonhuman animals, plants, material objects, and nature in general characterizes
non-Western worldviews.16 With animism, an idea such as that of a nonhuman
person came to be understood in a way different from the one proposed by the
discourse of law and animal rights.17 With the growing interest in indigenous
14. Laura M. Ahearn, Language and Agency, Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001) 130.
15. Archaeologists and anthropologists for years have been trying to comprehend the agency
of material objects and to discuss the problem of material agency. Crucial for recent debates about
agency in anthropology and archaeology have been the books by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). A useful summary of the
agentive turn in archeology is presented in Janet Hoskins, Agency, Biography, and Objects,
in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kchler, Michael
Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), 74-84. Cf. also Material Agency: Towards a
Non-Anthropocentric Approach, ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (Berlin: Springer, 2008);
Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin, The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency, in The
Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Mary C. Beaudry and Dan Hicks (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333-351; Torill Christine Lindstrm, Agency In Itself: A
Discussion of Inanimate, Animal and Human Agency, Archaeological Dialogues 22 (2015), 207-
238.
16. A. Irving Hallowell, Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View (1960), in Readings
in Indigenous Religions, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Continuum, 2002), 18-49; Nurit Bird-
David, Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology, Current
Anthropology 40 (February 1999), 567-591; Alf Hornborg, Animism, Fetishism, and Objectivism
as Strategies for Knowing (or not Knowing) the World, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71, no.
1 (2006), 21-32; Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006); The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (Stocksfield,
UK: Acumen Publishing, 2013); Tim Ingold, Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought,
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71, no. 1 (March 2006), 9-20.
17. Graham Harvey gives the following definition of what a person is: Persons are those with
whom other persons interact with varying degree of reciprocity. Persons may be spoken with. . . .
Persons are volitional, relational, cultural and social beings. They demonstrate intentionality and
agency with varying degrees of autonomy and freedom. . . . People become animists by learning how
to recognise persons and, far more important, how to engage with them. The ubiquity of terms like
respect and reciprocity in animist discourse demonstrates that the key identifier of a person is some-
one who responds to or initiates approaches to other person. . . . There is nothing in these discourses
that should be understood as implying . . . that humans are the primary examples of personhood. . .
. Perhaps rock persons might speak of other-than-rock persons while tree persons might speak of
other-than-tree persons. Such phrases, if unwieldy, are not intended to privilege any class of person
but to draw attention to degree of relationality. Harvey, Animism, xvii-xviii. See also Brian Morris,
Animals and Ancestors: An Ethnography (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000); Louis S. Warren, Animal
 ANIMAL HISTORY 273
cosmologies, and the influence of indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous
knowledges on Western academia (especially in Australia, Canada, and Latin
America), on the one hand, and the popularity of new material culture studies
and actor-network theory, on the other, agency lost its dominant association with
the self-aware, rational, intentional, freely-willing human being, and became
rather a specific mode of being in the world typical for a relational subject under-
stood as an element of various networks or/and assemblages.
In The Historical Animal the concept of nonhuman agents is present as the
main category of analysis. [A]nimals have always had agency but, often, not
powerstates Nance in the Introduction (3). Animal agency is realclaims
Drew A. Swanson, whether or not historians recognize and theorize it; the chal-
lenge is making this agency do historical work, thus using it to enrich our under-
standing of the past (Swanson, 241). In the book, animals are called subjects
and (unknown) agents of historical change (Colby, 21), active historical sub-
jects (Foote and Gunnels, 203), historical actors (Tortorici, 76), and autono-
mous wild animal actors of the past (Zehnle, 223). Empowering the (animal)
subject and finding proof of animal agency becomes the main task of writing
animal history. This is, of course, a known topos of the New Social History with
its aim to give the slaves back their agency (and also to women, to the indig-
enous, marginalized, and so on) and to focus on groups that have been neglected
or excluded from history.18 Animal historians often follow this pattern.19
Chris Pearson recently suggested abandoning the model of agency offered by
social history, which often equates agency with resistance and adoption of non-
anthropocentric approaches to agency, such as Bruno Latours actor-network
theory. He also finds problematic the idea of describing nonhuman agency as
resistance.20 Several essays published in The Historical Animal follow Pearsons
suggestions and present an advanced theoretical view of agency traditionally
understood as monolithic, human, and associated with intentionality (Swanson,
251). For example, Andria Pooley-Ebert, in Species Agency: A Comparative
Study of HorseHuman Relationships in Chicago and Rural Illinois, is inter-
ested in conceptualizing a revised notion of agency. She introduces the concept
of species agency that includes an idea of animal agency, but goes further by

Visions: Rethinking the History of the Human Future, Environmental History 16 (July 2011), 413
417; Erica Hill, Animals as Agents: Hunting Ritual and Relational Ontologies in Prehistoric Alaska
and Chukotka, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21, no. 3 (October 2011), 407-426.
18. Walter Johnson, On Agency, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003), 113-124.
19. Jason C. Hribal, Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below,
Human Ecology Review 14, no. 1 (2007), 101-112; Georgina G. Montgomery and Linda Kalof,
History from Below. Animals as Historical Subjects, in Teaching the Animal: HumanAnimal
Studies across Disciplines, ed. Margo DeMello and Georgina Montgomery (New York: Lantern
Books, 2010), 35-47.
20. Cf. Chris Pearson, Beyond Resistance: Rethinking Nonhuman Agency for a More-than-
Human World, European Review of History: Revue europenne dhistoire 22, no. 5 (2015), 710;
Bob Carter and Nickie Charles, Animals, Agency and Resistance, Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour 43, no. 3 (2013), 322-340. The need to disentangle the concepts of humanity, agency, and
resistance was expressed by scholars working on human agency quite a long time ago (Laura M.
Ahearn in 2001 claimed that [f]or anthropologists in particular, it is important to avoid treating agen-
cy as a synonym for free will or resistance. Ahearn, Language and Agency, 130). Walter Johnson
has indicated human agency and resistance as used in slavery scholarship in On Agency, 115.
274 EWA DOMASKA

investigating species-specific behaviors through interdisciplinary exploration

(Pooley-Ebert, 149). Pooley-Ebert makes an important move when pushing ani-
mals out of the paradigm of victimhood and agency seen as resistance. As we
read in her essay, historical records show that horses played a role in shaping
their own environment and often managed to delineate the terms of their servi-
tude to humankind in important ways. Equine agency, consequently, should not
be thought of merely in terms of resistance, because compliance and cooperation
was usually a more pervasive behavioral trait than defiance (150). Following
a definition of agency proposed by Vinciane Despret, Pooley-Ebert claims that
giving an animal historical agency is not necessary implying that the animal
acted independently, but rather that it was an integral component in a complex
relationship (152).
Noah Cincinnati, in Too Sullen for Survival: Historicizing Gorilla Extinction,
19001930, writes that Gorillas had become agents in compelling scientists
and conservationists to embrace a limited experiment in protecting these crea-
tures in situ (183). In a similar way, Dolly Jrgensen, in her essay Migrant
Muskoxen and the Naturalization of National Identity in Scandanavia, describes
an accident when in 1964 muskoxen killed a woman who was in a group of peo-
ple who wanted to observe the animal and entered their property (193). Thinking
of the muskoxen as migrants allows us to see when individual animals have been
forcibly acted upon by humans wielding power and when individual animals
have been able to exercise their own agency (199). Nicola Foote and Charles
W. Gunnels show the problem of agency understood in terms of resistance in a
different light. When challenging the notion of the inherent passivity of animals,
the authors use zoology and evolutionary theory to examine Galapagos animals
reaction to contact with humans and their ability to resist efforts to kill or trap
them (205).
Drew A. Swanson (Mountain Meeting Ground: History at an Intersection of
Species) has a theoretical ambition to challenge the dichotomy between human
and animal agency. He is interested in the joint nature of agency in a way that
does not deny or detract from the historical power of either (240). Swanson
proposes to focus on the spaces of interaction between human and animals as
expressions of interspecies relationships that he calls meeting grounds (240,
242). An understanding of nonhierarchical agency is proposed by David Gary
Shaw in Horses and Actor-Networks: Manufacturing Travel in Later Medieval
England. Shaw uses Latours actor-network theory to research travel networks
in later medieval England in which horses were conspicuous players (136) and
as such created historical change (147). As he claims, ANT helps us to challenge
the assumption that animals never are crucial or central, that they are only oper-
ating as peoples things in human plots (147).
When analyzing a debate about agency in archaeology, John Robb concludes
that [i]n many ways, therefore, we are beyond agency; we have learned what we
can from the concept and can move on. However, it is worth retaining the concept
in our fields discursive consciousness.21 It would be too radical for historians

21. John Robb, Beyond Agency, World Archaeology 42, no. 4 (2010), 515.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 275
right now to follow such a move. Probably they would rather share Pearsons
view that human agency, intentionality and responsibility should remain key
components of history, but with the condition that historical agency would also
include nonhumans and that we continue to explore connections between human
and nonhuman agency.22
But we might be surprised by the words of historian Joshua Specht, who
claims:
there is one subject in animal history that scholars should move beyond: agency. . . .
Today, the agency paradigm is actually counterproductive, because it is predicated on a
model of historical agents as autonomous individual actors, disaggregated from a broader
historical structure. . . . Agency is a concept that was once vital to persuading scholars that
they should care about animals, but the paradigm has outlived its utility. Future work is
better served using agency as a starting point and mapping the varied economic, political,
social, and cultural contexts in which animals are embedded.23

Perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss agency as such, but ratheras the
authors in The Historical Animal are doingtry to find out what kind of under-
standing of agency would be able to push animal history beyond the New Social
History paradigm and to deactivate agency as a hammer for animal history.24
Such a move does not mean, however, abandoning social history itself as a frame-
work for practicing animal history (or as a kind of social history). As suggested
by several contributors, it would mean not perceiving animals and humans in
binary opposition between victims and victimizers, problematizing the idea of
agency (especially agency as equal to resistance), as well as concepts of actor
and agent (including dismissing these concepts as a point of departure in writing
animal history).25 Thus, agency might be decentered and delinked from social his-
torys triad humanity/human rights, agency, resistance without erasing it from
the metalanguage of animal history.

III. EVIDENCE, TRACES, SOURCES, AND ARCHIVES

[O]ur archives and museums have been structured to document human agency
and life, observes Nance (10). The basic task of an animal historian is to trace
every evidence of animal life in existing historical sources.26 Locating animals

22. Pearson, Beyond Resistance, 719.

23. Joshua Specht, Animal History after Its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary
Approaches, and the Animal Lens, History Compass 14, no. 7 (2016), 331-332.
24. I paraphrase Torill Christine Lindstrms words: Agency seems to have become a hammer
for archaeology. Lindstrm, Agency In Itself, 207.
25. Pascal Eitler proposes considering animal history as body history and understanding it as a
special form of Social History that aims less at following an emphatic history from below and
more at developing a distant history from outside to the extent that this is at all possible. In this
sense, it does not take animals and humans nor actors and subjects as a point of departure, but rather
makes bodies and their changing production into an object of historical investigation. Pascal Eitler,
Animal History as Body History: Four Suggestions from a Genealogical Perspective, Body Politics
2 (2014), Heft 4, 274.
26. For example, Scott A. Miltenberger shows how (more or less conventional) historical sources
such as state records, newspaper articles, pet-keeping manuals, childrens literature, when analyzed
in a sensitive way, reveal information that helps him to develop an idea of an anthrozootic city
(262-263).
276 EWA DOMASKA

in the historical sources can be a puzzle, says Nance (10). Image captions often
pose problems. Thus, one of the possible ways of creating a non-anthropocentric
archive would be to change the way the images (and other source materials) are
described, with more sensitivity to the way that nonhuman actors are represented
(4). Another task is to activate unconventional sources. For example, the value of
anecdotal evidence (and poetry) as a legitimate (and direct) means of illustrating
the historical importance of humananimal bonding is highlighted by Andrew
McEwen in He Took Care of Me: The HumanAnimal Bond in Canadas
Great War (275).
In Finding Animals in History: Veterinary Artifacts and the Use of Material
History, Lisa Cox points out the significance of veterinary tools (instruments
used for dental work and castrations, surgical instruments) as important historical
evidence that proves the importance and place of material history in uncover-
ing historical animals (101). Using these artifacts may provide a stronger case
for viewing animals as historical actors, but as reference material they require
looking at historical evidence in different ways. Cox claims that textual sourc-
es may indicate an ideal or professionally accepted way that animals interacted
with people in terms of their health, but artifacts . . . illustrate what was actually
practiced (117).
Interpretations of primary sources through the lens of zoological categories
help us to trace and explain animal behavior and certain phenomena that scientif-
ic methods are not able to explain, declare Foote and Gunnels (213). For example,
[e]vidence from non-scientific written records . . . demonstrates that tortoises
displayed relatively low fecundity stress, which allowed them to reproduce in
unstable environments (217). Special attention is required for what is probably
the most challenging of animal history phenomena: accounts of their lives created
by animals themselves. Zulueta analyzes video that she proposes to understand
as a first person account, by a nonhuman animal, of something that happened in
the recent past (118). The apes can express how they feel and also can explain
why (120). Such accounts challenge us to think about what constitutes histori-
cal evidence and personal testimony (Nance, 11). More important, they force
us to think about the very concept of animals, the belief that only human beings
can narrate.
Zeb Tortorici, following Ann Stoler and Nicholas Dirks, takes an ethnographic
approach to the colonial archive. He treats historical archives as condensed sites
of species anxietiesplaces where species boundaries are continuously reified
and ruptured (76). Tortorici comments on the physical presence of animals in the
archive as evidenced by the leather and animal glue used to bind so many archival
manuscripts together (83). These are, as cited by Tortorici, what Sarah Kay calls
ghostly imprints (83). Archives thrive with nonhuman life (bacteria, insects,
book lice, rats, mice), Tortorici observes. Their activities show very clearly that the
presence of animals in the archive is not only textual (83-84).27 Tortorici indicates
that such traces as squashed bodies that stain documents inspire us to re-theorize
how we might organize and understand modes of animality in the historical record

27. The photo on p. 85 shows traces of pests in a 1584 archival document.

 ANIMAL HISTORY 277
(86). In this context, inspired by Erica Fudge, Tortorici introduces the concept of
animal-made-history (86).

IV. APPROACHES, METHODS, AND THEORIES

Part III of the book is entitled The Animal Factor of Historical Causation. This
scientific language might suggest that we are entering a territory of history under-
stood as science and a space of sophisticated reflection on the problem of his-
torical explanation (especially causal explanations), causal circumstances, causal
factors, and so on. However, these concepts appear only in the Introduction,
where methodological language (and terms such as historical causation, factors,
historicization) is just another way to express the problem of agency. Nance
moves narrative to the level of methodological discourse when she asks: Are
we able to account for animals as factors of causation, given that certainly one
central question historians always want to answer as fully as possible with respect
to processes and events in the past is why? (4). The task of the animal historian
is to seek out the activities of nonhumans as factors of historical causation in a
necessarily interspecific past, Nance claims (7).28 Such statements somehow do
not fit into the books narrative and in their style might correspond only to Foote
and Gunnelss article on historical zoology, which smuggles analytical catego-
ries used in zoology into history. Such intrusion of scientific language might be
treated as a sign of expectations. After long years of the dominance of interpretive
approaches, such as the scientification of history, a more analytical approach to
historical reflection and radical interdisciplinarity seems to be welcomed.29
Apart from the above-mentioned thought-provoking ideas, a classic historicist
method is highlighted as the main task of the animal historian. In the book, his-
torical explanation is achieved by historicization (of animals), and historicization
means showing that animals (as well as institutions related to animal welfare)
change over time (Nance, 6, 8). In this context, treating animals as others,
and their pasts in terms of minority histories, might still have certain theo-
retical advantages. For example, following postcolonial scholars such as Dipesh
Chakrabarty and Ashis Nandy, I might ask how we can use animal history (as a
specific approach to the past that emerged within the European tradition) to free
us from history as the discipline that legitimizes various forms of colonial vio-
lence, the nation-state, secular consciousness, cultural stereotypes, and ideologies
of progress.30 In this context, in The Historical Animal a call to historicize animals
would neutralize radical possibilities that lay in their profitable and enlivening

28. It is only Drew A. Swanson who uses these concepts in the book when he asks: After all,
what is causation but a historical ecology of actions, the ultimate expression of actor-network?
(Swanson, 256).
29. In recent years, I have observed a renewal of interest in the problem of historical cognition,
objectivity, explanation, causal reasoning, and evidence. Apart from scholars who in the field of
philosophy of history continue to work in the analytical tradition (Paul Roth, Aviezer Tucker), see,
for example, Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History (Dordrecht: Springer,
2010); Thomas M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences: Phenomenological
Investigations (New York: Springer 2015).
30. Ashis Nandy, Historys Forgotten Doubles, History and Theory 34, no. 2 (May 1995), 44ff.
278 EWA DOMASKA

ahistoricity (similarly to how it happens with subaltern subjects). As Chakrabarty

notes: In calling attention to the limits of historicizing, they [subaltern pasts]
help us distance ourselves from the imperious instincts of the disciplinethe
idea that everything can be historicized or that one should always historicize.31
Indeed, perhaps animals should not (always) be historicized. Perhaps their ahis-
toricity helps to reduce certain ways of absolutizing the past powered by history
and opens an alternative to history with a different (nonhuman) perception of
changes, reasoning, and sensing. Thus, whereas The Historical Animal proposes
a kind of alternative history and shows the animal past as strictly connected to the
human past that waits to be transformed into history, I would also consider the
possibility of studying the animal past in order to create an alternative to history.32
Historians of animals are very eclectic in terms of theories and approaches
because most important for the development of the field are ideas and research
created and conducted outside the discipline of history (Nance, 8). Actor-network
theory has a privileged position in The Historical Animal (Shaw, Swanson).33
Nance, summarizing Shaws arguments, writes that ANT is a tool that can be a
basic item in the animal historians methodological kit and describes it as pow-
erful in declining to privilege human agency over nonhuman agencies (12).
Indeed, ANT provides a useful instrument to practice relational epistemology
(of history). It enables one to consider the ontology of the past through the lens
of Latours flat ontology, and pushes history beyond modernist (and even post-
modernist) settlement in the direction of posthumanism. However, historians are
aware that instrumental projections of theory onto historical material may prove
the theory, but may well fail to reveal the richness of the past (as saved in histori-
cal materials). For example, Swanson treats actor-network theory as inspiration
for the development of the idea of the middle ground understood as expressions
of interspecies relations.34
As The Historical Animal shows, such fields of study as animal history (as
well as biohistory, environmental history, and neurohistory) present a significant

31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts, in Provincializing Europe:

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2000), 112.
32. Here I follow Nandy, who is skeptical of Gyan Prakash and Dipesh Chakrabartys critique of
history and claims that they propose powerful pleas for alternative histories, not for alternatives to
history. Nandy, Historys Forgotten Doubles, 53.
33. There are also references to trauma theory that is applied to study interspecies bonding between
horses and soldiers (McEwen), as well as to approach animals behavior (Michaels Story as an
enunciation of trauma, Zulueta, 123ff.). Authors also mention that serious treatment of animal
agency . . . promotes an ecological approach to history (Swanson, 256). Swart and Tortorici declare
that they use an ethnographic approach (Swart, 71; Tortorici, 76). These declarations are, however,
not elaborated.
34. It would be worth analyzing possible relations between a middle ground and a concept used
by Donna Haraway: contact zone. Haraway uses the term, borrowed from Mary Pratt (Imperial
Eyes) and developed by James Clifford in the field of anthropology, to describe spaces of interspe-
cies assemblages that uncover various manifestations of copresence and the shared building of other
worlds and interdependency between species. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). It seems that an anthrozootic city, as proposed
by Scott A. Milterngerber, might be treated as such a middle ground/contact zone. Miltenberger
presents it as an analytical concept to see the urban environment as a place of encounter between
different forms of life as well as among people (Miltenberger, 271).
 ANIMAL HISTORY 279
barrier to the conceptions proposed by the life sciences and natural sciences. In
this situation, there are calls for an alliance among art, the humanities, the social
sciences, and the natural sciences.35 In order to meet the challenge of constructing
inclusive and complementary knowledge of the past, it is necessary to redefine
the status and objectives of the humanities (and its specific fields). Many of the
authorsCincinnati, Foote and Gunnels, Nance, Jrgensen, Swart, Zehnle, and
Zuluetastress the necessity of cooperation between natural scientists and social
scientists (including historians). Nance calls it a radical interdisciplinarity (3).36
As she claims, scientists work provides us with new questions and possible
explanations for animal life that we [historians] can use to reconsider historical
sources in new ways (7). Such cooperation involving very different methodolo-
gies and theories is fruitful and needed.
For example, Stephanie Zehnle (Of Leopards and Lesser Animals: Trials
and Tribulations of the Human-Leopard Murders in Colonial Africa) uses
contemporary ethological studies methodology in order to approach colonial
accounts of human-leopard murders in new ways (223). They provide insights
into patterns of animal behavior.37 However, in the most visible way, radical
interdisciplinarity is manifested in Foote and Gunnelss article, which advocates
historical zoology as a multidisciplinary methodological approach (218).38
Foote and Gunnels explain how zoology and biological sciences enable us to look
35. What we are facing, then, is a significant shift away from the meaning of the traditional
humanities, understood as a group of sciences whose object of research is the human as a social
being. There is also a move away from the usual opposition of the humanities and the natural sci-
ences and the interpretive and experimental sciences. The successful construction of such integrated
knowledge could lead to the emergence of the third culture that John Brockman writes of: The
Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). However, this
approach might be too limited at present. Environmental Science & Policy 28 (April 2013). Special
Issue: Responding to the Challenges of our Unstable Earth (RESCUE), ed. Jill Jger.
36. It is interesting to observe how the idea of radical interdisciplinarity is evolving. When he
used this term in 1989, Stanley Fish was referring to deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, the radi-
cal version of neopragmatism, and the new historicism that somehow unified interdisciplinarity and
critique. Now radical interdisciplinarity means connecting humanities, the social sciences, and the
natural sciences and is considered as a necessary condition of innovative research. However, it is
worth noticing that, for example, new materialism calls for connecting both understandings. Thus,
Kyla Wazana Tompkins claims that The attention to the interface between the human and the nonhu-
man as it yields to and undoes human sensory organization, suggests that New Materialist thinking
must necessarily engage radical interdisciplinarity; this in turn brings us back to the provocations
of left, feminist, queer, and critical race theory, whose anti-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary energies
continue to retain a link with the political movements that produced them. Stanley Fish, Being
Interdisciplinary Is so Very Hard to Do, Profession 89 (1989), 15-22; Kyla Wazana Tompkins, On
the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy (Forum: Emergent Critical Analytics for
Alternative Humanities), Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (2016), http://
csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-new-materialist-philosophy-tompkins/ (accessed
July 12, 2016. Cf. also Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, ed.
Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
37. For example, ethology informs how leopards relate to their territories (female leopards are
philopatric animals that spend their lives close to where they were born and raised [Zehnle, 224-
225]) and enables the explanation of animal acts and a different way to interpret historical sources.
38. The merger is also proceeding from the direction of the sciences toward the humanities
and social sciences. A good example is cultural primatology or social zooarchaeology. Richie
Nimmo, Animal Cultures, Subjectivity, and Knowledge: Symmetrical Reflections beyond the Great
Divide, Society & Animals 20 (2012), 173-192; Nerissa Russell, Social Zooarchaeology: Humans
and Animals in Prehistory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
280 EWA DOMASKA

at the problem of violence from a different perspective, in terms of interspecific

aggression (207).39 The natural sciences enrich the historical vocabulary with
concepts such as intraspecific interactions, phonotypic plasticity (learning to
recognize and resist dangers), and refugia (places beyond easy reach of human
predators), enabling us to comprehend animal lives in more nuanced ways
(205, 209, 215, 219). Such cooperation is profitable for both cultures. On the
one hand, engagement with zoological science is an important tool for animal
historians seeking to provide a richer and more multi-layered understanding of
past animal lives (220). On the other hand, animal history potentially opens
a new window into core zoological questions (220). For example, a zoologi-
cal concept such as first contact is poorly conceptualized in this discipline,
and needs knowledge provided by humanists and social scientists in order to
enhance zoological understanding of this phenomenon (220).

V. CONCLUSIONS: ANIMAL HISTORY AS A SUBFIELD OF HISTORY

(ASSUMPTIONS, PRINCIPLES, TASKS)

The Historical Animal wishes to claim that animals not only have histories and
play a crucial part in the historical development of human cultures but can also
be said to be an active part of human history. What is more, animals (in the case
of mammals with developed neural systems) also have their own perception of
past events, and some of them (apes) are able to communicate their stories.
The authors bring different conceptions of history to bear in the investigation of
these topics and utilize different methodologies and theoretical apparatuses in
defense of their claims. Through an analysis of the book, I was able to identify
the following assumptions, main principles, and tasks of writing animal history:40
1. The past was always multispecies and interspecific. As the authors claim,
[a]nimals are everywhere, and there has never been any purely human moment
in world history (Nance, 6). They have played critical roles in human history
(Foote and Gunnels, 203) and have shaped our collective past, whether by direct
action, unique perception of a given context, or their simple materiality (Nance,
11).
2. Anthropocentric history is narrowly reductive and presents a distorted image
of the past by setting forth an ideology of speciesism and human exceptional-
ism. Excluding nonhuman animals from the past creates a false sense of human
autonomy (Nance, 5).41 The traditional view is that history is distinctively

39. Foote and Gunnels explain that interspecific aggression occurs when an individual of one
species acts antagonistically toward an individual of a second species. . . . Interspecific aggression
can occur in cases where individuals use the aggression to mitigate competition for a shared resource,
such as food or nesting sites. Other cases of interspecific aggression occur as a byproduct of intra-
specific competition, where aggressive animals show agonistic displays in response to similar cues
used by both species (207).
40. Erica Fudge provides a useful overview of the field in What Was It Like to Be a Cow?:
History and Animal Studies, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also David Gary Shaw, A Way with Animals, History
and Theory 52, no. 4 (December 2013), 1-12.
41. Nance asks: As a central task of Animal History can we recognize and document the degree to
which all history is inherently interspecific, and that to write others out is a methodological, and even
 ANIMAL HISTORY 281
human, and animals do not have a history and do not live historically. These basic
assumptions have governed historical reflection for a long time and are deemed
not only false but also morally wrong (Swart, 56, 70). A typical Western under-
standing of animals as passive and static ahistorical beings has to be abandoned.
Animals should be treated as agentive subjects and autonomous individuals (Cox,
101; Zehnle, 223; Nance, 8). An important task of animal history is to make ani-
mals real and to historicize them, which means showing how they change over
time and adapt to a changing environment (Nance, 4, 6; Swart, 70-71).
3. In human-centered history, animal history has been lost. [N]onhuman ani-
mals are the last ones still waiting for their history to be written, although they do
not know it, writes Nance (16). Animal historians are seeking ways to center
nonhuman animals in historical narratives of the past (Tortorici, 76), without,
however, decentering our narratives (Swanson, 256). This move is made possible
by treating animals as agents. It also makes alternate histories possible, such as
a salamander-centered history (Swanson, 254-255).
4. The basic task of writing animal history is to document animal lives (Nance,
8) and to show the role of nonhumans in historical processes and events (Nance,
11). Thus, one of the typical and constantly recurring research questions is: what
is the animals place in history? (Pooley-Ebert, 149). Writing animal history is
difficult because animals are not writing their own history, therefore only some
aspects of the nonhuman past are available to historians (Nance, 15). Historians
have also noticed that, as a practice, history privileges human language and
chronology over smells, images, physical sensations and emotions conveyed in
some other prioritized or storytelling order (Nance, 11). Thus, there is a need
to research possibilities of writing animal-sensitive history (Swart, 56). In the
case of apes, scholars also suggest the possibility of approaching the past from the
animals point of view and the use of testimonies created by animals.
5. Animals do have their own archives, argues Nance (11). Creating non-
anthropocentric archives and looking for unconventional and new historical
sources and innovative ways of approaching them is crucial for historians of
animals.42 Standard historical sources (documents, memoirs, newspaper articles,
manuals, and so on) are still important, but historians often need the help of
scientists to be able to detect traces previously unnoticed because of the limited
hermeneutic methods they use to interpret these materials. Important status in
historical research is given to material artifacts, such as, for example, veterinary
objects (Cox, 101-102). Research on animals also reveals new kinds of histori-
cal sources: for example, animals bodies as valuable written records (Foote and
Gunnels, 215-216) or animal calls (Swart, 70). The ability to create animal first-
person accounts (Zulueta) challenges us to rethink what constitutes historical
evidence and personal testimony (Nance, 11) or what constitutes the first-
political, choice? (Nance, 5). Animal history questions human supremacist or human exceptionalist
ways of thinking and acting grounded in the (often subconscious) insistence that human form and
sentience are an ideal against which all other beings should be contrasted, and inevitably subjected
because inherently inferior to humankind (Nance, 6).
42. On the necessity of conceptualizing historical sources, see Etienne Benson, Animal Writes:
Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace, in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof
and Georgina Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 3-16.
282 EWA DOMASKA

person? Historians who are sensitive to any possible trace of the presence of
animals in the archive would not limit themselves to their mentions in a text.
Tortorici points out that the archive might be seen as an animal cemetery. From
this perspective, the archive emerges as a complex biopolitical and necropoliti-
cal space that challenges us to be fully conscious of how animal life supports
and complicates the archive stories we tell (Tortorici, 86). [W]e recognize that
non-human animals directly influence human modes of archiving and remember-
ing, and vice-versa (86).
6. Radical interdisciplinarity, new research methods, approaches, and theo-
ries are necessary to advance research in animal history. Animal psychology,
ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, veterinary medicine, and bioacoustics
become natural allies that complement and supplement research undertaken by
humanists and social scientists. Building new approaches (historical zoology,43
animal-sensitive history, animal-made history, animals first-person testimony),
new analytical concepts (anthrozootic city, distributed agency, middle ground),
and using concepts from the natural sciences (interspecific aggression, pheno-
typic plasticity, refugia) are critical to the development of the field. Theories
such as actor-network theory, evolutionary theory, and trauma theory need to be
approached critically and not instrumentally. They might open as well as reduce
interpretive possibilities, and limit the richness of source materials by allow-
ing us to see only what the theory highlights. Equally important is the constant
reevaluation of the understanding of the main themes and categories of animal
history, such as, for example, animal agency (and the animals point of view),
that might lead to abandoning such concepts and looking for new ones, if neces-
sary. This might lead to radical reconfiguration of the field, even to abandoning
history as a specific approach to the past because it is too reductive to grasp the
complexity of interspecific relations and the decrease of epistemic authority of
the human in (historical) knowledge-building.

Erica Fudge, a highly theoretically conscious and innovative historian (often

cited in the volume), indicated the importance of debates about dangers of
anthropocentrism for writing animal history in Perceiving Animals: Humans
and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (2002).44 However, it seems that
43. Robert Delort had already presented this postulate in Les Animaux ont une histoire (Paris:
Seuil, 1984). At that time, however, historians were still not prepared to make more daring incursions
into the territory of the study of the natural sciences and thus overcome the anthropocentric paradigm.
A similar merger with zoology can be seen in anthropology and archaeology. Both disciplines are
interested in the roles of animals in human societies and in the coexistence and coevolution of animals
and humans. Cf. also Samantha Hurn, Whats in a Name? Anthrozoology, HumanAnimal Studies,
Animal Studies or Something Else? A Comment on Caplan, Anthropology Today 26, no. 3 (June
2010), 27-28; Simon J. M. Davis, The Archaeology of Animals (London: Routladge, 1987); special
issue: Zooarchaeology: New Approaches and Theory, World Archaeology 28, no. 1 (1996).
44. Erica Fudge, Introduction: The Dangers of Anthropocentrism, in Perceiving Animals: Humans
and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 11ff. See
also Fudge, Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England, in Renaissance Posthumanism,
ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 145-166. Cf.
Jonathan Burt, Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth
Century, in Animal Encounters, ed. Tom Tyler and Manuela S. Rossini (Leiden and Boston: Brill
Academic Publishers, 2009), 159-170; Iman Jackson Zakiyyah, Animal: New Directions in the
Theorization of Race and Posthumanism, Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013), 669-685.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 283
the term non-anthropocentric history still sticks in historians throats. In The
Historical Animal the problem is addressed in a very subtle way: Animal
History invites us to ask unconventional questions about the interspecific past
in non-anthropocentric ways, states Nance in the Introduction (3). Even
if Swanson uses the term anthropocentrist historians to describe traditional
historians working on human history (257), and even if Tortorici indicates the
anthropocentric nature of historical sources (97) and Swart complains about an
anthropocentric perspective that privileges sight over our other senses (69), the
term anthropocentrism is not included in the books index. It is also surprising
that posthumanism, which serves as the main agenda of criticism of anthropo-
centrism and promotes animal as well as humananimal studies, does not appear
either. The main icons of posthumanist debatesDonna Haraway and Cary
Wolfe, whose works are relevant for writing animal historyalso are not pres-
ent.45 I come to wonder if (critical) posthumanism is too radical for historians, or
(paradoxically), is it insufficiently so?
Historians like ric Baratay, Erica Fudge, or David Gary Shaw (to mention
only a few) are right when they stress that studying animals forces scholars to
rethink history as a discipline and its very foundations. Baratay lists several
major problems that are constantly blocking animal history and reducing it to the
human history of animals. First, the classic definition of history as formulated
by Marc Bloch as a science of humans in time has to be changed in order to
embrace nonhumans. This would mean abandoning the long-standing anthro-
pocentric paradigm of historical knowledge. Second, historians would have to
embrace such natural sciences as ecology, ethology, zoology, and animal cogni-
tive psychology. Third, scholars would have to go beyond sociocultural history
and the problem of representation that has occupied them for a long time.46 The
Historical Animal shows clearly that such major reconfigurations of the disci-
pline of history are appearing in historical practice, and that progressive histori-
ans are already trying to go even further.
The introduction (or, rather, re-introduction in a new context) of research on
animals, plants, and things is in itself insufficient, as the contributors to The
Historical Animal know. It is not a question of introducing new fields of interest
regarding animals, plants, or ecological matters. As Cary Wolfe stresses, one can
engage in a humanist or a posthumanist practice of a discipline, and that fact is
crucial to what a discipline can contribute to the field of animal studies (or indeed
to a new paradigm in general).47 What is crucial is the formation of a theoretical
interpretive framework that can inspire different research questions and offer

45. There is one reference to Donna Haraways Primate Visions (1989) in a footnote in
Cincinnatis article on Historicizing Gorilla Extinction (329).
46. ric Baratay, Building an Animal History, transl. Stephanie Posthumus, in French Thinking
about Animals, ed. Louisa Mackenzie and Stephanie Posthumus (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2015), 3-6.
47. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 123. Wolfe gives
the example of a historian describing the cruel fate of horses on World War I battlefields, who in
doing so merely appears to be working in the anti-anthropocentric paradigm by responding only to
changes in the humanities, yet internal disciplinarity may remain humanist through and through.
Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 124.
284 EWA DOMASKA

alternative interpretations, while at the same time demanding the construction

of new concepts and theories in a situation where existing theory lags behind
the facts, and incommensurability emerges between practice and the theories
attempting to describe it.48 The majority of authors in The Historical Animal still
practice (animal) history in a humanist way. Following Wolfe, such a position
could be described as humanist posthumanism.49 However, historians might
often do so not because they want to save anthropocentric humanism but because
they do not have the proper theoretical frame, metalanguage, and tools to do it
otherwise.
Indeed, in recent decades animal history has gone from being a marginal
and exotic topic to one of the major and the most progressive fields within the
historical profession.50 With its attempts to connect various fields of the natural
sciences (ethology, evolutionary biology, zoology) it exemplifies an ongoing
merger among the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and natural sciences.
Some historians prefer to remain safe in familiar surroundings and are satisfied
with including animals in history and researching various forms of animal agency
and different manifestations of humananimal encounter. They try to develop and
enrich the field by using methods and instruments derived from sensory history,
ethnography, and sociology as well as work in new material culture studies and
science and technology studies. However, the most progressive proposals are
coming from scholars (including historians) who advocate radical interdisciplin-
arity. They are not interested only in merging history with the sciences, but also
question one of the basic assumptions of the discipline: not only the epistemic
authority of history for building knowledge of the past, but also the human epis-
temic authority for creating such knowledge.
To be sure, we can learn much from studies about animal cognition. Animals
may not have a human-like perception of history, but they do perceive sequences
of changes.51 Scientific journals, such as Animal Cognition and Science, publish
articles on animals perception of time and their ability to reason causally.52 This
topic might become of interest for historians. Perception of generational change
and the role of elders in animal communities (are they necessary for adapta-
tion and survival?) might become an important subject of humananimal history.
Should we rethink the idea of generation in history and take into account how

48. I am referring here to Imre Lakatos, who wrote that where theory lags behind the facts,
we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. . . . [I]n a progressive research
programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts. In degenerating pro-
grammes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts. Imre Lakatos,
Introduction: Science and Pseudoscience (1973), in The Methodology of the Scientific Research
Programmes, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), 5-6.
49. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 124.
50. In fact, it already has its own subfields, such as animal urban history. Animal Cities: Beastly
Urban Histories, ed. Peter J. Atkins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
51. Mahesh Rangarajan, Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest,
Gujarat, India, History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013), 109-127.
52. Edward J. Petruso, Thomas Fuchs, and Verner P. Bingman, Time-Space Learning in Homing
Pigeons (Columba livia): Orientation to an Artificial Light Source, Animal Cognition 10, no. 2 (April
2007), 181-188; Aaron P. Blaisdell, Kosuke Sawa, Kenneth J. Leising, and Michael R. Waldmann,
Causal Reasoning in Rats, Science 311, no. 5763 (February 17, 2006), 1020-1022.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 285
animals perceive generational bonds? Can research into animals perception of
change enable the development of nonhistorical approaches to the past? Should
this research inspire us to reflect (again, however, in a new context) on the evolu-
tionary advantages and disadvantages of historical knowledge-building? Can we
analyze historiographical works in terms of the adaptive benefit that they might
have? Does history have survival value?
The ultimate challenge of animal history, which makes it promising and
future-oriented, is not writing animals into history and treating them as agential
beings (which has been the main task in the early stage of the fields develop-
ment), nor even presenting history from the animals point of view, but to
consider (and possibly to contribute to advancing) interspecies forms of com-
munication that would allow nonhuman beings to report past events (Nance, 11).
This would require giving up the human epistemic authority of writing about
the past and opening the field up to various ways of nonverbal communication
that would not privilege human language (and language as a privileged way of
communication).53 Sandra A. Swart is right when stressing the role of bioacous-
tics studies that research various kinds of calls in understanding animals social
life (70). In this way she opens up a space for a kind of comparative zoological
knowledge of the past.
When stressing the importance of various senses, she also intuits a necessity
to consider various ways of nonlinguistic communication that connect human
and nonhuman animals. This is also why a growing interest in biosemiotics and
indexical signs might be observed among humanists and social scientists. T. L.
Short, while commenting on the implications of Charles Sanders Peirces idea of
indexical signs, noticed that his approach to semiotics:
[w]as extended beyond the study of thought and language. For although the index was
discovered as playing an essential role within cognition, it is by its natureas being
causal or otherwise nonconceptualnot limited to cognition. . . . But if semiotics pur-
view is extended to nonconceptual interpretants, then why not to nonhuman interpreters?
A person poked turns to look, but so also a browsing deer, startled by a noise, raises its
head to look; the seasoned driver, seeing a stop sign, stops without thinking, but so also a
bloodhound, nose to ground, follows without thinking the spoor of its quarry. Semiotics
thereby became a study not only of natural signs but also of natural processes of interpre-
tation. And that suggests a way in which the human mind may be located within nature,
namely, as a development of more primitive semiotic capacities. The second implication
of the discovery of indices is that it compels us to recognize a relation of sign to object
that is distinct from signification.54

These ideas have recently been used in the discussion about the use and
abuse of anthropocentrism. When they were adapted in the field of the humani-
ties and social sciences they helped to challenge a dualistic approach in which
humans are seen as separated from the natural world and to criticize human
exceptionalism. In this context, there is a growing interest in going beyond lan-
guage, in nonsymbolic representations, and the ways that nonhumans perceive

53. This approach is promoted by such fields as zoosemiotics. Dario Martinelli, A Critical
Companion to Zoosemiotics: People, Paths, Ideas (Dordrecht; New York: Springer, 2010).
54. T. L. Short, The Development of Peirces Theory of Signs, in The Cambridge Companion to
Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 222-223.
286 EWA DOMASKA

and represent the world.55 Indexical signs attract attention since there are typical
forms of animal communication (for example, odors or alarm calls indicate the
presence of a predator).
The history of animals in its future-oriented mode can thus lead to the forma-
tion of multispecies knowledge of the past. In her review of Beastly Natures
(2010), Swart wrote: This anthology has a subtextual lament that history is
written by humans alone.56 In light of what I have outlined above, the following
question emerges: can we imagine a knowledge of the past (which I would not
limit to history) that would be based on multispecies co-authorship? The question
might seem absurd, but it is far from such for the contributors to The Historical
Animal and for primatologists such as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who published an
article as co-author along with three chimpanzees.57
In the majority of the cases discussed here, the chapters of The Historical
Animal deal with domestic and totemic animalsmammals mostly of high intel-
ligence and a developed neural system (horses, burros, dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep,
as well as chimpanzees, gorillas, leopards, and orcas). Thus the authors might be
accused of a zoocentric bias. Scholars working on plants, such as Matthew Hall,
still operating in a mode similar to the New Social History and its methodology
of the oppressed, claim that zoocentrism is a method of achieving the exclusion
of plants from relationships of moral consideration . . . [and] helps to maintain
human notions of superiority over the plant kingdom in order that plants may be
dominated.58 In order to neutralize this bias, one topic worth discussing for the
future sake of history would be animals (various animalsnot only mammals)
and plants seen in terms of kinship system (based on shared heritage, cohabitation
in the same place, and co-substantiality and recognition of shared ancestry). Let
us consider, then, whether and how we could achieve interspecies competence
(Fudges term59), not only for thinking about coexistence with animals in the
future, but also for creating a multispecies knowledge of the past. It is important,

55. In the widely discussed book by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward
an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), Peirces theory
of signs is used to remind us that both humans and nonhumans use signs and that the symbolic is
uniquely human. Kohn is advocating transspecies attempts at communication that are taking place in
the multispecies world of semiosis.
56. Sandra S. Swart, Historians and Other Animals, review of Dorothee Brantz, ed., Beastly
Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. November
2011 http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31301 (accessed July 16, 2016).
57. Cf. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba, and Nyota Wamba,
Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes,
Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10, no. 1 (2007), 7-19. Of course, the chimpanzees (Kanzi
Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba, and Nyota Wamba) did not physically write this article, but they did
communicate with the researcher (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) and responded to questions concerning
their own needs. The article has aroused great interest because it undermines the human monopoly
over epistemic authority and thus shows the potential for multispecies authorship and the construc-
tion of transspecies knowledge. See also on this subject Gay A. Bradshaw, An Ape among Many:
Co-Authorship and Trans-Species Epistemic Authority, Configurations 18, no. 1-2 (2010), 15-30.
It should also be noted that co-authorship concerns not only animals but also intelligent machines.
58. Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2011), 6.
59. Erica Fudge, A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals, in Representing
Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 11.
 ANIMAL HISTORY 287
since as anthropologist Anna Tsing recently noted, survival is a collaborative
project and requires cross-species coordination.60 Perhaps the future requires
not species but rather planetary identification, and from this point of view, we
are all Terrans.

Ewa Domaska
Adam Mickiewicz University,
Pozna, Poland

60. Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist
Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 156, 280.