I recently read Tim Cresswell’s Place: A Short Introduction (2004), and was struck by how different concepts about what makes a place can be so thoroughly and imaginatively explored, and yet never once mention non-human animals in more detail than a hand waved vaguely in the direction of ‘nature’. Yet animals were lingering silently behind all of Creswell’s main points, and I’ll give an overview below.
Places are not static; they are continuously created anew by the activities of their inhabitants.
Creswell talks about people all over the world engaging in place making activities. Unless he is using the term ‘people’ to refer not only to homo sapiens sapiens, but the peoples of the non-human races as well (and I’m thinking not), he is seriously missing a trick here. Animals are arguably more inside their environments than we are. I may sit at my desk at work for eight hours a day, but my mind is somewhere else for at least seven. As mentioned in a previous post, pretty much every animal engages more with its surroundings than do humans. Animals are constantly in the process of exploring and modifying their environments, which is part of what is so horrific about barren factory farm stalls, where they are unable to satisfy these instincts.
Place is used in the construction of ideas about who/what belongs where, and who/what does not belong
Creswell explores this idea through looking at homeless people and homosexuals. One might explore it further (in a pretty heft tome) by looking at the placement/displacement of animals. We take them out of places they belong. We put them places they don’t belong. We make judgement calls on where they can fit in and where they can’t. We create whole races, like the domestic dog, by taking a species out of one environment and making it reliant on another.
Culture transforms the natural environment
By ‘culture’ Cresswell refers specifically, of course, to human culture, i.e. positioning nature/animals outside of the sphere of cultural places. Chris Philo, in his essay Animals, Geography and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions challenges the notion of non-human animals existing outside the sphere of human culture.
…’the possibility is raised here of thinking about animals as a social group with at least some potential for what might be termed ‘transgression’ or even ‘resistance’ when wriggling out of the cages, fields and wildernesses allotted to them by their human neighbours…’(In Animal Geographies, eds Wolch & Emel, 1998).’
To dwell in a place you must understand and follow its rules
This is one of the points that Foucault makes about his Heterotopias, and similar to Henri LeFebvre’s conception of Social Space. Socially constructed places have unwritten rules, which must be followed by the inhabitants. A single species tends to understand the nuanced rules of its habitat; interlopers must pick up on these or face being seen as transgressors and trouble makers. The majority rule in most situations, except in those predominantly non-human habitats culturally constructed by humans for other species. Zoos and animal shelters are two places where animals are often seen to transgress in ‘their own’ environments. Yet they are following rules – just not ours.
Modern places are increasingly marked by a new ‘placelessness’
This again speaks to Foucault’s Heterotopias, abstract spaces which are constructed out of a collection of other spaces, for example gardens, or museums. These spaces become ‘placeless’ because they lack their own intrinsic meaningfulness. This appears at first blush to be a specifically human construct. But what of animal collectors, such as magpies? Is the magpie’s fabled nest of appropriated items a heterotopia?
In modern society spaces are increasingly ‘consumed’ through photography, cinematography, tourism and other media.
Technologies allow and encourage the fetishisation of places. We put pictures of foreign places on our living room walls and on our screensavers. Undeniably, animals feature largely in our consumption of other places; a Serengeti scene features a herd of wildebeest, an ocean scene features seagulls. It could be said that the place is only complete, and therefore ready for consumption, when it features the animal inhabitant associated with it.
We have an irresistible urge to mark out boundaries, barriers and frontiers.
This is talked about as a fascinating human phenomenon, but this is one irresistible instinct that we share with our brothers-from-another-mothers, aka, all the other species. Take a look at Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (1966) for an alluring insight into the ways that species mark out ‘my land’ vs ‘your land’.
Obviously, as an anthrozoologist, I see animals everywhere, present in every philosophical debate, every pop culture phenomenon. Yet, for all the intelligent and insightful piece of writing on Place: An Introduction, there is an elephant in the room, and Creswell either doesn’t see it, or doesn’t see an audience for it. It emerged this week that there are something close to 9 million individual species on our planet. To see only ourselves is not to see at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment