Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com Book Review: I Want to Know about the Dogs

Rebecca Cassidy Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 324 DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300724 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com

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I Want to Know about the Dogs The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signicant Otherness by Donna Haraway Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003, 112 pp. Reviewed by Rebecca Cassidy
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signicant Otherness (hereafter CSM) is a short book and an embellishment of an argument that also appeared in 2003 in an article in Ihde and Selingers Chasing Technoscience and in the Haraway Reader also published in 2003 (Haraway, 2003a, 2003b; see also Haraway 2003c, 2003d). It develops certain ideas that are a constant feature of Haraways work, which pays serious attention to entities that are neither nature nor culture (Markussen et al., 2003: 57), and makes use of the format that was so inuential when the Cyborg Manifesto was published in 1985 (Haraway, 1991). Eighteen years after the publication of her rst manifesto, Haraway declared that the cyborg was no longer the most fruitful gure through which to interrogate biotechnology and turned instead to the notion of companion species, a relational concept that permitted no singularity. In particular, CSM featured dogs. Not the idea of dogs, but particular dogs: slathering, bouncing and doing doggy things. In this work, although dogs and people gure a universe, dogs are not an alibi for other themes (pp. 21, 5). This is something that Haraway has found it necessary to make explicit. In an interview in August 2000, for example, Wolfgang Schirmacher implied that thinking about dogs allowed us to think about humanities, and that that is actually our interest. We dont want to know who the dogs are, we just want to know who we are. Haraway does not accept this argument: DH: Who is this we? WS: We, you and me. DH: I want to know about the dogs. WS: Not really. DH: Honest, really true. WS: You do the same thing that Heidegger once advised: If you want to know about humanity look away from humanity. DH: Thats all well and good but I also want to know about the dogs. (Haraway, 2000: n.p.) Haraways analysis of biotechnology, once regarded as radical and controversial, forms the background to the more contentious aspect of this text: the claim that profound insights can be generated by taking doghuman relationships seriously (CSM, p. 3). And so, with her customary gusto, Haraway sets about exploring how appreciating our shared histories with dogs might inform a more mutual and therefore ethical basis for relationships between all kinds of entities. CSM identies a number of theoretical inspirations, including the works of Whitehead, Verran, Cussins and Strathern. These authors share a commitment to partiality and openness, and a resistance to those who would impose xity and singularity upon the world. As in all her work, Haraway is determined to mix it up, in opposition to those who long for better protected species boundaries and sterilization of category deviants (p. 4), and to make unexpected connections, between,

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for example, tiger conservation websites and ranching in Montana. This deliberately unsettling range epitomizes Haraways deft combination of the familiar and the strange that is at the heart of her method. By investing the mundane with spectacular signicance, Haraway implicates all of us, and everything. We know, from Foucault and others, that the most powerful forms of oppression are the most mundane; Haraway replaces what seems inevitable with what is contingent, incomplete and ongoing. The CSM is, itself, she tells us, a work permanently in progress, in principle (p. 3). Despite the preparation of reading Haraways earlier works, it is still surprising to learn, on page 3, that she considers dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory. Put in these bald terms one might imagine responses that vary between outright rejection that this could ever be the case and dismissal on the grounds that every kind of writing is surely feminist theory, and that dog writing is therefore no different. One important question is thus, Why dogs? Why has this companion species been chosen to replace the cyborg rather than any other? The rest of CSM can be read as support for this choice, and progresses by considering relationships between humans and dogs through a number of different frameworks and scales, on the basis that every dog is immersed in practices and stories that can and should tie dog people into myriad histories of living labour, class formations, gender and sexual elaborations, racial categories and other layers of locals and globals (p. 97). Some of the constellations of dogs and people chosen by Haraway are more successful illustrations of this kind of embeddedness than others. The rst main section of the book considers evolution stories, stories we tell ourselves about the origins of the relationship between people and dogs, and what is at stake in choosing between them. Here Haraway is in her element, describing recent work on the dog genome that requires us to re-think domestication, often depicted as a process that was both purposive and people driven. According to Haraway, this interpretation reects and supports a particular vision of what it means to be human, and casts domestication as the paradigmatic act of masculine, single parent, self-birthing, whereby man makes himself repetitively, as he invents (creates) his tools (p. 27). In order to destabilize this vision, Haraway invokes an argument from historical ecology, recently retold by the Coppingers (Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001), Steven Budiansky (1992, 2001) and others: that the dog evolved from wolves scavenging on human debris. Those animals that were able to overcome their apprehensions about remaining in close contact with people were better fed and therefore produced more offspring. Other facets of the relationship, including herding and guarding, emerged later. In this story, serendipity replaces intent and man the hunter/tamer becomes man the garbage-generator, incidentally providing an evolutionary niche that had signicant and unexpected consequences for both dogs and people. Having explored a mutual story of domestication, Haraway fast-forwards to the present, and to contemporary relationships between pet dogs and their owners. In this section of the book, she describes a relationship between dogs and their owners that has been outlined in the training manual Ruff Love (Garrett, 2002) and is described by Haraway as positive bondage (p. 5). In this relationship, dogs and trainers are mutually implicated in an ethical relationship, the purpose of which is to enable fullment of potential or talent. This description of an emergent natureculture draws upon the work of Vicki Hearne (1991), who famously criticized supporters of animal rights for focusing too much on the avoidance of suffering and not enough on the achievement of happiness. Haraway uses this concept

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to think about her participation in agility training and competitions with her two dogs, Cayenne Pepper and Roland. Here she becomes more tentative and aware of the dangers of endorsing a particular relationship, in the light of her undoubted awareness that this is not a solution to the question of how one might live a good life, but rather an exploration of that question through our actual lives with others. Carol Adams has criticized Haraway for failing to condemn circuses, burger bars and dog breeders, and for focusing upon training relationships rather than relationships of non-eating (veganism) (see Tyler, 2006). As an anthropologist, I could point out the cultural and historical specicity of relationships between people and dogs, including that envisaged by the kind of deep bonding described by Haraway. However, this is beside the point. Haraway is no doubt aware of the alternatives, but her objective is to interrogate the contemporary world, where secondary Bushes threaten to replace the old growth of more liveable naturecultures in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on earth (p. 5). She has rebuked us in the past for failing to recognize the historical specicity of the cyborg, and the same must also be said of the companion species: she wants to know how to live with the histories [she is] coming to know (p. 81). Haraway does struggle with the not always palatable implications of our lives with dogs. The nal third of the book describes the fortunes of two breeds. The Great Pyrenees is a livestock-guarding dog, bred to protect ocks of sheep from predators. Most recently, these dogs have been shipped in to do the work of a man with a gun in the reconstructed ecologies of the Pyrenees and the American West, where imported bears and wolves populate the new wilderness and prey on its domestic occupants. Haraways description of the guarding dogs life, passing the day lounging with the sheep and the night patrolling, happily alert for trouble (p. 68), leaves one unprepared for the statistics on page 78, according to which, in 2002 in the US, 43 dogs died, along with 200 cattle, 500 sheep, 7 llamas and 1 horse. Haraway is against the use of a puppy to do a dogs job, but one must also question whether life really is quite as bucolic as she would have us believe for a dog that spends its time patrolling the deadly boundaries between wild and tame. The second breed considered by Haraway is obviously close to her heart. The Australian Shepherd is the breed of dog she herself owns and is owned by. This breed is the outcome of combinations of herding dogs that were brought to the United States from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The Australian Shepherd Club of America was formed in Tucson in 1957 by a small group of enthusiasts eager to promote the breed. Haraway sets out her stall for the versatile Aussie in resistance to the fracturing of the breed into ever smaller specialized splinter groups embodying various ideals: agility, show, etc. These comments on the whole dog ethos of the Great Pyrenees breeders and the versatile Aussie idiom are perhaps the best examples of her advocating a stance that she would usually subject to ruthless deconstruction. Dogs (like science) are dear to her and this is surely one of the reasons why she feels these questions to be important ones. The third and nal breed story is devoted to mutts, and specically to the adoption of abandoned mongrel dogs from Puerto Rico by North Americans. In this case, Haraway is queasy at the possible colonialist sentimentality (p. 89) that could drive such an exchange, but nally supports the adoptions arguing that, the dyspepsia at recognizing where this all comes from will have to be endured rather than relieved (p. 94). CSM has been marginal to Haraways work for several reasons. It addresses

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several audiences at once (dog trainers, social scientists, scientists) and each of these audiences has been wont to consider the piece as intended for an audience other than themselves. CSM also makes use of a vocabulary and a style that is on the one hand accessible to each of these groups and, at the same time, amenable to none of them. For occupants of dog world CSM is too radical; their online discussions reject the reading of feminist critique into relationships with dogs, pick the bones out of the description of dog training and bemoan the long words. For students of humananimal relations, CSM is too conservative. The idea that training relationships can be mutually gratifying, and even ethical, is opposed by many (including Adams, see Tyler, 2006) who would ague that the training relationship is always hierarchical and patriarchal. The irony and punning humour of CSM also irritates those who believe that relationships between animals do not command the respect within academia that they deserve, a misplaced anxiety: Haraway is deadly serious. Does Haraway provide a convincing answer to the question, Why dogs? While dogs will do, the analysis of many other companion species can be equally illuminating. I tried substituting several different assemblages, including thoroughbred racehorse, rat and mongoose into the spaces in the text currently occupied by dog and was pleased with the outcome. Hardly surprising that other (perhaps all) things are as implicated in and by the world as are dogs. However, this does not detract from the value of CSM but rather points towards its greatest contribution. Haraway has provided us with a method, a way of being critical in and about the world. She provides the tools to undermine powerful and established understandings by asking simple yet profound questions and by making seemingly absurd connections. She sees the signicant and remarkable in the everyday and quotidian. Whether we are all capable of matching the mental agility, humour and acumen that she brings to the task is of course another question. References Budiansky, Steven (1992) The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. New York: William Morrow. Budiansky, Steven (2001) The Truth about Dogs. London: Penguin. Coppinger, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger (2001) Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garrett, Susan (2002) Ruff Love: A Relationship Program for You and Your Dog. Chicopee, MA: Clean Run Productions. Haraway, Donna (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialistfeminism in the Late Twentieth Century, pp. 149181 in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna (2000) Birth of the Kennel: A Lecture by Donna Haraway. URL (consulted July 2006): http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway/haraway-birth-of-thekennel-2000.html Haraway, Donna (2003a) Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconguring Kinship, in Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (eds) Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna (2003b) The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna (2003c) For the Love of a Good Dog: Webs of Action in the World

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of Dog Genetics, in Alan Goodman, M. Susan Lindee and Deborah Heath (eds) Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two-culture Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Also in Donald Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds) Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.) Haraway, Donna (2003d) Cloning Mutts, Saving Tigers: Ethical Emergents in Technocultural Dog Worlds, in Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (eds) Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Hearne, Vicki (1991) Whats Wrong with Animal Rights: Of Hounds, Horses, and Jeffersonian Happiness, Harpers Magazine 283(1696) Sept. Markussen, Randi, Finn Olesen and Nina Lykke (2003) Interview with Donna Haraway, pp. 4757 in Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (eds) Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tyler, Tom (2006) An Animal Manifesto: Gender, Identity, and Vegan-feminism in the Twenty-rst Century, An Interview with Carol J. Adams, Parallax 12(1): 1208.

Rebecca Cassidy is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her rst book, Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. In 2007, Johns Hopkins University Press will publish her second monograph, which compares British and North American thoroughbred breeding and racing. An edited collection, co-authored by Molly Mullin, called Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, will be published by Berg in the Spring.

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