Beyond Boundaries: The Barbara Noske Interview

By Claudette Vaughan

Dr Barbara Noske holds a Master’s degree in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. In the nineties she taught and undertook research in the areas of environmental thought, environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto, Canada.

Presently she is a research fellow at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Claudette:   Can I start by asking you about your book, ‘Beyond Boundaries’? What was the motivation behind you writing it?

Barbara:  Since the seventies this has been my special area. That is: 'Beyond Boundaries' is one of my many publications (books and articles) dealing with, what one could call: 'the human-animal interface' or the human-animal divide, if you like. I tend to look at this interface from a historical, cultural, scientific and ethical angle.

My areas of research are:

• The human-animal relationship, the human/non-human divide, both in Western and non-Western cultures
• Animal rights versus deep ecology
• Environmental thought, environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology,
• The wild, the tame and the feral: domestication
• Social theory and nature
• Gender, nature, science
• Ecofeminism
• Animal Behaviour and Cognition
• Human-horse relationships, natural communication, equine research

Claudette:  Can you critique the human-animal continuity for us here?

Barbara:  That is a huge subject, e.g. in Beyond Boundaries it is discussed in two huge chapters. Those, who would like to go on thinking of animals as objects for us as we see fit, conveniently invoke the argument of discontinuity between animals and humans. They tend to emphasise how different we are from animals and how superior and unique humans are. There is, however, also something to say in favour of the recognition of discontinuity: it is also about the sensitivity and respect for the Otherness of animals.

The pro-animal lobby toes a fine line between the appreciation of human-animal similarities (continuity), in sentience, for example, and the recognition of and respect for this Otherness of animals (discontinuity). Disregard for the latter in the animal movement can lead to the colonisation and even hijacking of animal lives.

Claudette:  In your experience, if, as we know, nonhuman animals have beliefs and desires, how can we specify their content without lapsing into anthropomorphism?

Barbara: We will never be entirely able to 'leap over' our own humanity in our approach to animals. Anthropologists admit to this kind of limitation in their work regarding other human cultures. They claim they can never totally overcome their westerness or Europeanness. Yet they strive to minimizes this in their approach to the otherness of other cultures, they describe otherness without demeaning it. Likewise, knowing our own imperfection, we can still try to understand animals as Other Subjects instead of portraying them as Objects.

People who deny animals beliefs, desires and meaning, and only see them as endowed with a certain behaviour that is caused by some mechanism and triggered by some stimulus, reduce animals to machine-like creatures. This is not a more objective view than anthropomorphism, I would call this mechanomorphism. Some scholars in human-animal studies use the word 'critical anthropomorphism' to illustrate their position. They acknowledge cognitive continuity between humans and animals, without losing sight of what is uniquely human, and what is special in the animal.

Claudette: You have said before that the environment movement hardly seems aware that a nature exists which cannot be said to be ‘environment’, such as human bodies, companion animals, animal-human kinship and the capacity to feel pain.  Deep ecologists worry about animal suffering but they are selective in who it is that suffers. Why are intensively farmed animals dismissed too frequently by deep ecologists in favour of wild animals?

Barbara:  That has to do with the narrow definition of environment. I personally don't like that term. It drives a wedge between the human and the non-human. It means that which surrounds us, by definition it is NOT us, ourselves. Often it is only understood as a geographical concept: the green land or bush out there and the wild animals dwelling there.

Nature encompasses much more. It covers anything that not human-made, green or not, including our own bodies, and the natural beings we have domesticated such as companion animals, production animals + all their natural capacities, incl. suffering pain. Environmentalists, deep greens, deep ecologists often lose sight of this, because their whole focus is on 'the green' and 'the pristine'. To them factory-farmed animals are no longer environment, so none of their business. Another thing in deep ecology discourse is that species and biodiversity (the variety of species in an environment) are more important than the individual animals which together make up a species. Cruelty and pain issues are, of course, things which concern the individual animal, rather than the species. (Nervous systems are situated in individuals, not in species.)

Claudette: Your scholarly work has painstakingly categorised several groups in our society with their differing positions on the human-animal divide. You have taken it one step further and identified the weakness in their arguments. I know it’s a big job but can you categorise it for us here today?

Barbara: Yes, there are several groups in society with which I have an affinity. But with regard to their position on the human-animal divide I disagree with each of them at some point, albeit not the same point.

1. I am a social scientist so I know how complex human societies and cultures are. But in the human and social sciences anthropocentrism is rife, accepted a priori, often taken for granted. There is a lack of sensitivity for the 'socialness' of animals. Only humans are seen as social and cultural.
   Nowadays everyone is talking about the construction of things. But somehow it is always humans who do the constructing, and animals being the ones that ARE being constructed. This is a postmodern form of anthropocentrism which is very visible in the social sciences today.

2. I have in common with biologists and ethologists their appreciation for the wonders of nature, but they are often reductionist and/or mechanistic in their approach to animals. (Only the animals' measurable parts count for science).

3. Feminists were among the few who took the nature/culture dichotomy seriously. They genuinely tried to overcome this dualism. However, many so-called equality feminists have got a defensive attitude towards animals. This is understandable because women more than men have been equated with animals, and so feminists often bend over backwards to disengage themselves from animals.

I consider myself a member of both the animal movement and deep ecology. But I think they have mutual blind spots. Deep ecologists are generally very concerned about the wild and the preservation of species and habitat of species. They are less concerned about an individual animal’s welfare. In the animal lobby it is exactly the other way round. See for a discussion of this my 2004 article 'Two Movements' in the online journal Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal. It deals specifically with how the two movements approach the continuity issue.

By the way, there is a form of feminism -ecofeminism - which may be able to help overcome the division between the two movements regarding animals and the animal-human continuity. (Ecofeminism is not mentioned in the above-mentioned article).

Ecofeminists are in the habit of stressing both the preservation of the wild and the well-being of individuals. As women activists they have been made aware of personal face-to-face relationships, because society assigned women the role of managing emotions and the caring for the welfare of individuals. Individual suffering has mattered to feminists, and ecofeminists do have time for that part of nature which can suffer individually: animals. But ecofeminists also tend to value the non-sentient in nature, and the wild. It's not just the nature that has turned 'individual they care about. They advocate an environmental ethics which encompasses much more than just the sentient.

Claudette: Do you believe in revolution – political or in human consciousness or otherwise?

Barbara: I do believe in revolution, but it needs material roots. It cannot float above and be entirely disconnected from nature's reality. It has to be based on something, in the sense that a new idea needs to relate to nature's ways and nature's limitations. (Of course, the next discussion is then about which representation of nature one puts forward here).

As has become clear I myself currently have a position between animal rights and deep ecology. During my work in both Canada and Australia I have become much more sensitised to the wild than I was when still living in Europe. One of the arguments I am having with my fellow animal lobbyists is about their ready acceptance of technological developments, which amounts to an elimination of the physical. I tend to advocate compliance with nature, not the conquest of it. I don't want to rise above it by mechanical or digital means. The car and the computer have made concepts like time and space (natural entities) grotesque and I regret that. Movement is no longer body-related, it is machine-related.

In a way, animal-human continuity has become more important to me than the formal rights issue. Like animals we humans don't have a body, we ARE our body, a mammal body. Recently I started learning about natural horsemanship, which is all about communicating with your body, your hands, your posture and learning the equine language of the lead mare in the herd. To me, it is about us realising that we are just an animal body amongst other animal bodies: the ultimate expression of continuity.