The Science of Posthumanism

As historians become increasingly aware of the need and utility of incorporating animals into the stories we tell of past societies, various methodologies and analytical tools have been employed to explore the history of human-animal relations.  This presentation will offer some thoughts on what historians can gain from using the insights of two scientific disciplines—ethology and evolutionary biology.  Ethology, the study of animal behavior, offers historians many possibilities.  For those interested in recovering the subjective historical experiences of animals, a grounding in animal behavior is essential to be able to tie information about animals in historical sources to what those animals may have been thinking, feeling, or experiencing in the past.  For example, an ethological reading of a description of a tiger attack in Indonesia in 1673 may lend clues as to what motivated the animal to act in a certain way.  Quite differently, depictions of dogs in European portraiture may suggest how those dogs were experiencing their roles as affective companions and what their histories mean for interpreting notions of just rule, politics, and the state.  Similarly, insights garnered from evolutionary biology show how human and other animal species coevolved in particular social and ecological habitats—how their actions and reactions helped to shape some of the possibilities and limitations of certain historical trajectories.  Understanding the specific mechanisms that made possible (and impossible) sets of evolutionary pathways helps historians to examine social, economic, and environmental phenomena as varied as the emergence of cities, the economics of fisheries, and disease outbreaks.  In sum, this paper’s contribution is to offer food for thought on the roles of ethology and evolutionary biology in the current and future work of animal studies and posthumanism.