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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
I argue that sometimes, animal movement should be understood as political. While animals cannot deliberate, they can act politically through acts akin to "everyday politics". These animal movements, hence, can also be understood as attempting to move socially: i.e., as political movements.
Paper long abstract:
Multispecies studies have lately been pushing the idea that animals, as social agents, fit certain social frameworks that we earlier reserved to humans. For example, animal studies have portrayed animals as ‘laborers’ (Porcher and Nicod 2018; Hribal 2007) ‘residents’, ‘denizens’, and ‘sovereign’ (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011); similarly, some multispecies studies have recently used vocabulary from the social sciences usually reserved for humans (Cons and Eilenberg 2024; Ogden 2018).
In this paper, I propose that we push further what Ogden has called a “thought experiment”, i.e., using concepts from the social sciences for animals (Ogden 2018). If we take seriously that species have similarities with humans and reject anthropomorphism as has been proposed by some ethologist (de Waal 1999), I argue that anthropology “beyond-the-human” can also apply anthropological models for the study of animals themselves. We would, doing so, go “beyond-the-human” as was programmatically proposed by Kohn (Kohn 2013).
I propose that we understand animals not as agents in human-dominated, anthropogenised environments, but rather animals as political beings themselves. The politics they do, I argue, does not consist of the deliberative activities humans do, contrary to what some argued (Driessen 2014; Meijer 2017). Rather, it is an everyday politics of movement, occupation, invasion (Scott 1985; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013). By playing on the notions of movement and mobility, I argue that animals sometimes move physically to move socially, and their aim is social mobility. These animal movements, hence, are fundamentally a political activity we can understand with anthropological concepts.
Thinking human movements with animals