A B | Goldsmiths, University of London (original) (raw)
Papers by A B
'[...] I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have ... more '[...] I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.
'It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stearate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?
‘Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?’
Elisabeth Costello (Coetzee 2001: 69)
There are a few things I would like to consider in this essay. My primary focus will be examining... more There are a few things I would like to consider in this essay. My primary focus will be examining the visual cultures of mainstream animal rights (AR) advocacy, looking at the visual representations that some animal rights organisations utilise in their campaigning work. I hope to develop an anthropological critique of these visual materials, in part by relating them implicitly to some of the ethnographic literature that explores the human-nonhuman animal divide in non-Western contexts, especially through the notion of “perspectivism” (Vivieros de Castro 1992 1998; Willerslev 2004, 2007). In a general sense I want to 1) evaluate some of the ways in which particular visual representations that animal rights groups turn to in their public campaigns are limited by rigid ‘Western’ ideas surrounding the ‘human/animal’ boundary, and 2) explore the possibility of broader, experimental, anthropological approaches to animal rights visual campaigning. I aim to assess visual materials produced by popular AR organisations on how they might help to maintain, rather than undermine, the specific, historically contingent cultural contentions, adhering to the separateness of ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, that have served to justify and reproduce hierarchical relationships of exploitation between human and nonhuman beings in ‘the West’. My interest is also to find visual representations that might destabilise and dislocate these same cultural assumptions more affectively, and thus act to consolidate the aims of visual animal liberation campaigns.
This essay will ethnographically explore some social, material and visual dimensions of contempor... more This essay will ethnographically explore some social, material and visual dimensions of contemporary art praxis, focusing on its conjuncture with ‘the animal question’ and other animals’ bodies1. It will demonstrate that an anthropological approach to art, as defined by Gell (1998; 1999), is invaluable in beginning to trace some of the multilayered ethnographic pathways that constitute the ‘art-objects’ and/or ‘art-events’ that are at the centre of today’s complex ‘art-world’ scenes. In exploring these issues it will address such questions as: what is the place of nonhuman animals in contemporary art? Does the presence of the animal body in contemporary art imply the address of ‘the animal question’? Is it socially acceptable to inflict pain or cause the death of other animals ‘for the sake of art’? Throughout this paper it will be demonstrated and argued that using Gell’s idea of the art “nexus” (1998: 12 et al.) for ethnographic research is invaluable to engage critically with the at times obscure, murky and dazzling worlds of the ‘postmodern’ art scenes. It will also, towards the end of the text, and perhaps as a playful alternative to Vogel’s net and Gell’s traps as artworks, present the work
of Angela Singer as what art might look like if it were produced by (some) anthropologists.
In this brief paper I will explore some preliminary thoughts on how anthropologists at Goldsmiths... more In this brief paper I will explore some preliminary thoughts on how anthropologists at Goldsmiths College have approached the species classification, both theoretically and practically. Basing my ponderings on semi-formal interviews with departmental academics, I will highlight the (epistemological) split between the politics and the theoretics of anthropological knowledge concerning cross-cultural interspecies practices and conceptions. I will trace this divide to anthropologists’ real/imagined humanist anxieties/concerns which seem to work as boundaries and barriers for the scope of the politicisation of the species classification and reproduce the ‘classical’ ‘Western’ ‘human/animal’ dichotomy within anthropological practices. I will suggest to the need for ethnographic explorations of these humanist anxieties/concerns, as well as more general interest and participation in these fields, if we are to further investigate issues of species politics and our relationship to and with other animals.
In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society.... more In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society. I will begin by briefly introducing the study of food in general within the social sciences, setting a framework of reference for the exploration of meat specifically. In
examining meat I will firstly set the context by turning to the global livestock sector and its relationship with the environment, before probing meat’s physical properties and their
ensuing symbolism, which, as we will see, is the basic foundation for meat’s high culinary and dietetic value in our culture. I will then continue to investigate meat’s symbolism by
asking what place, if any, may meat hold within our wider cultural cosmology, within our systems of social and moral ideas, before drawing some conclusions.
'[...] I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have ... more '[...] I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.
'It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stearate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?
‘Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?’
Elisabeth Costello (Coetzee 2001: 69)
There are a few things I would like to consider in this essay. My primary focus will be examining... more There are a few things I would like to consider in this essay. My primary focus will be examining the visual cultures of mainstream animal rights (AR) advocacy, looking at the visual representations that some animal rights organisations utilise in their campaigning work. I hope to develop an anthropological critique of these visual materials, in part by relating them implicitly to some of the ethnographic literature that explores the human-nonhuman animal divide in non-Western contexts, especially through the notion of “perspectivism” (Vivieros de Castro 1992 1998; Willerslev 2004, 2007). In a general sense I want to 1) evaluate some of the ways in which particular visual representations that animal rights groups turn to in their public campaigns are limited by rigid ‘Western’ ideas surrounding the ‘human/animal’ boundary, and 2) explore the possibility of broader, experimental, anthropological approaches to animal rights visual campaigning. I aim to assess visual materials produced by popular AR organisations on how they might help to maintain, rather than undermine, the specific, historically contingent cultural contentions, adhering to the separateness of ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, that have served to justify and reproduce hierarchical relationships of exploitation between human and nonhuman beings in ‘the West’. My interest is also to find visual representations that might destabilise and dislocate these same cultural assumptions more affectively, and thus act to consolidate the aims of visual animal liberation campaigns.
This essay will ethnographically explore some social, material and visual dimensions of contempor... more This essay will ethnographically explore some social, material and visual dimensions of contemporary art praxis, focusing on its conjuncture with ‘the animal question’ and other animals’ bodies1. It will demonstrate that an anthropological approach to art, as defined by Gell (1998; 1999), is invaluable in beginning to trace some of the multilayered ethnographic pathways that constitute the ‘art-objects’ and/or ‘art-events’ that are at the centre of today’s complex ‘art-world’ scenes. In exploring these issues it will address such questions as: what is the place of nonhuman animals in contemporary art? Does the presence of the animal body in contemporary art imply the address of ‘the animal question’? Is it socially acceptable to inflict pain or cause the death of other animals ‘for the sake of art’? Throughout this paper it will be demonstrated and argued that using Gell’s idea of the art “nexus” (1998: 12 et al.) for ethnographic research is invaluable to engage critically with the at times obscure, murky and dazzling worlds of the ‘postmodern’ art scenes. It will also, towards the end of the text, and perhaps as a playful alternative to Vogel’s net and Gell’s traps as artworks, present the work
of Angela Singer as what art might look like if it were produced by (some) anthropologists.
In this brief paper I will explore some preliminary thoughts on how anthropologists at Goldsmiths... more In this brief paper I will explore some preliminary thoughts on how anthropologists at Goldsmiths College have approached the species classification, both theoretically and practically. Basing my ponderings on semi-formal interviews with departmental academics, I will highlight the (epistemological) split between the politics and the theoretics of anthropological knowledge concerning cross-cultural interspecies practices and conceptions. I will trace this divide to anthropologists’ real/imagined humanist anxieties/concerns which seem to work as boundaries and barriers for the scope of the politicisation of the species classification and reproduce the ‘classical’ ‘Western’ ‘human/animal’ dichotomy within anthropological practices. I will suggest to the need for ethnographic explorations of these humanist anxieties/concerns, as well as more general interest and participation in these fields, if we are to further investigate issues of species politics and our relationship to and with other animals.
In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society.... more In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society. I will begin by briefly introducing the study of food in general within the social sciences, setting a framework of reference for the exploration of meat specifically. In
examining meat I will firstly set the context by turning to the global livestock sector and its relationship with the environment, before probing meat’s physical properties and their
ensuing symbolism, which, as we will see, is the basic foundation for meat’s high culinary and dietetic value in our culture. I will then continue to investigate meat’s symbolism by
asking what place, if any, may meat hold within our wider cultural cosmology, within our systems of social and moral ideas, before drawing some conclusions.