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- Convenors:
-
Jan David Hauck
(London School of Economics)
Francesca Mezzenzana (University of Kent)
Teruko Mitsuhara (University of California, Los Angeles)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the foundations of ethical relationships with nonhumans in childhood across societies.
Long Abstract:
In times marked by anthropogenic environmental disaster, research on how we relate to the nonhuman world is more important than ever. Anthropology has been at the forefront of efforts engaging with non-Western epistemologies and their ontological foundations in the quest for alternative models of sociality and less destructive ways of relating to the environment. Perspectives and experiences of children have been largely absent from these discussions. Yet it is during childhood that understandings of the ontological status of nonhumans and ethical relations with them are developed. Across cultures, children are socialized implicitly and explicitly through specific everyday interactions how to attend to animals, plants, water, mountains, and air. We invite ethnographically informed submissions that explore the foundations of ethical relationships with nonhumans in childhood: How may everyday acts of kindness towards nonhumans relate to or translate into broader cultural attitudes? Which nonhumans can you be kind to and what counts as kindness in different contexts? How do children understand and interact with food and its origins? How do subsistence strategies such as hunting, herding, or agriculture, and practices such as pet-keeping socialize children's attitudes toward animals? What impacts do practices such as vegetarianism or veganism have on children's socialization and what are the roles of politics or religion? Addressing these and related questions, we hope to contribute to the role of anthropology in envisioning and working towards alternative possible futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Francesca Mezzenzana (University of Kent)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon among the Runa, this paper explores the ways in which indigenous Runa people manifest empathetic relationships towards animals and contrasts such experiences with Western conceptions of empathy.
Paper long abstract:
Within debates on empathy, it is often assumed that feeling empathy towards nonhumans requires an imaginative effort, which allows a human perceiver to partially grasp "what it might be like to be a nonhuman animal". While the difference between nonhumans and humans seems insurmountable from the perspective of Western academics, it is not conceived to be so by indigenous people who live in the Amazon, for whom access to the inner experiences of nonhumans seems to be relatively unproblematic. Drawing on fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon among the Runa, this paper explores the ways in which indigenous Runa people manifest empathetic relationships towards animals and contrasts such experiences with Western conceptions of empathy. I will argue that, in order to investigate cross-culturally empathy-like processes towards nonhumans we need first, to pay attention at local understandings of similarity and difference and, secondly, to explore the role played by direct experience and imagination in shaping people's perception of nonhuman others.
Elodie Razy (University of Liege) Elodie Willemsen (University of Liège and Association "Tabane")
Paper short abstract:
Even though adults teach children early on how to deal with non-humans, children develop their own relationships with them. On the basis of a research carried out in Belgium, we will examine whether a common world between adults and children is possible and what adults can learn from children.
Paper long abstract:
Even though adults teach children from an early age how to deal with non-humans, children develop their own relationships with them. On the basis of research carried out in Belgium, we will examine whether a common world between adults and children is possible and what adults can learn from children.
This paper presents the results of a research on children and young people's use of their environment in French-speaking Belgium both in "classical pedagogical" and "alternative pedagogical" childcare institutions (18 months - 12 years). It seemed that tensions and contradictions exist in the relationship to the environment in these institutions, strongly marked by the categories of "clean" and "dirty", and fear. This is particularly true for non-humans.
From ethnographic examples, we will analyse the ontologies underlying the classifications that adults more or less explicitly teach to children and the ways in which they teach them. The second part of the paper will look at children's experience and point of view, some of which are free from the injunctions and imaginary of adults, to understand how children develop their own imaginary about non-humans. Finally, we will consider whether a common world is possible between children and adults, and under what conditions. Throughout the presentation, we will mobilize the contributions of Godelier, Descola and Ingold to explore different notions: the environment, the living, human/nonhuman, and the existing. We will also question kindness and the continuity between the imaginary and the reality, and address methodological and ethical questions crosswise.
Jan David Hauck (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses indigenous Aché children's understandings of and ethical dispositions towards nonhumans in relation to different environments in which they grow up, the forest, and the village.
Paper long abstract:
The Aché of Paraguay used to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the forest; since the 1960s they have been settled on reservations after years of persecutions and deforestation. They now live in villages and subsist by horticulture, but families continue to go on hunting treks regularly in the few stretches of forest that remain. The different subsistence styles on these treks and in the village entail different ethical, interactional, and ontological orientations. Children grow up in both of these spaces and are socialized from early on into attending to these differences in relation to adults and peers but also into relation to the various nonhumans they encounter, such as hunting dogs, predators, prey animals, and pets. I discuss children's understandings in relation to the environments and different categories of nonhumans by analyzing everyday conversations about and interactions with them.
Verónica Policarpo (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa) Vasco Ramos Henrique Tereno (Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, we focus on the caring practices of adults and children towards their companion animals, and ask to what extent they are articulated with a wider ethics of care towards nature, the environment and non-human animals. We follow a story-telling method as proposed by D. Haraway.
Paper long abstract:
According to Puig de la Bellacasa (2012; 2017), Bartos (2012) and Hoti and Tammi (2019), children develop non-innocent relations of care with companion animals. Yet, daily practices of care towards animals are permeated by complex and contradictory rules. In fact, everyday interactions prompt dilemmas between preserving the 'animality' and 'wildness' of animals, including their environmental living conditions, and normative beliefs about home and 'proper' human living. These interactions are regarded as a privileged arena of (ethical) socialization of children towards animals. However, while parental discourses may reflect concerns with nature and respect for different species, and the need to raise awareness towards these issues in children, concrete everyday human-animal practices may contradict such intentions.
In this presentation, we focus on the caring practices of both adults and children towards their companion animals, and ask to what extent they are articulated with a wider ethics of care towards nature, the environment and non-human animals. Following a story-telling method as proposed by D. Haraway (2003), we explore how non-innocent relations of care are played in the context of home and family life, and if and how they can help to understand children's relations with nature and environment. We draw on data from the CLAN project [Children-Animals Friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and non-humans in contemporary societies - PTDC/SOC 28415/2017], namely on interviews from 24 Portuguese families with children aged 8-14, and owning at least one companion animal."
Teruko Mitsuhara (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
This talk discusses interactional data between a guide, children, and the cows at the community's goshala (cow pen).
Paper long abstract:
Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mayapur, a utopian community in Northern India, this talk discusses interactional data between a guide, children, and the cows at the community's goshala (cow pen). Mayapur was founded in the 1970s as a homeland for devotees of Krishna, a deity in Hinduism. Part of this community's planning was to integrate farming and cows into everyday life. To this end, the community's goals include fostering positive relations between children and cows, and creating positive experiences for non-Indian children especially with regard to a cow's feces and urine, which has manifold use in rural India (paddies for fire, glue for huts, paint, anti-sun reflection, antiseptic etc). For the non-Indian devotee families who have immigrated to join this utopian project, it is often the first time that children are living among cows as normal occurrences in their everyday life. A crucial element in scaffolding "love" for cows are weekly trips the goshala where children can pet, clean, and feed cows. Featuring conversations that children have at the goshala, this talk explores the role of touch in fostering love and appreciation for cows, and explores the multimodal ways that a cow becomes a "holy mother" to the children.
Melissa Santana De Oliveira (UFSCarLSE)
Paper short abstract:
I intend to explore how the series of shamanic procedures performed by the Eastern Tukanoan peoples, Northwest Amazon, at child's birth and complexified over the life are concerned to the composition of personhood and the managing of the relationships between humans and nonhumans.
Paper long abstract:
I intend to explore how the series of shamanic procedures performed by the Eastern Tukanoan peoples, dwellers of Tiquié river, Northwest Amazon, at child's birth and complexified over the life (male initiation, menarche, childbirth) are concerned to the composition of personhood and the managing of the relationships between humans and nonhumans (animals, plants, artefacts). I will be addressing some aspects of the shamanic spells related to the name giving, the baby's first bath and the child's feeding, in order to demonstrate how, on the one hand, these spells construct multiple or cyborg people (bodies/souls/thoughts) which are composed by human and nonhuman elements and affections, and on the other hand, they allow and protect people to engage into proper and safe relationships with nonhumans and their various environments in situations as feeding, bathing, growing, fishing. Finally, I demonstrate how these careful attitudes are founded in an ethics of relationship with the others that enables life to multiply and which has respect/regard as it main value.