What if it’s really illusionary to heal one evil by applying another evil? Like trying to fight an -ism
while (or with) sustaining another -ism – maybe inadvertently?
We don’t need/see/want an antisexist society where birds are still being objectified as food.
Any -ism … has its own specifics. Being against all neg. ‘-isms’, implies acknowledging their cases.
antispeciesist Animal sociology, Gruppe Messel
A socially just sociology means implying antidiscriminatory animal sociology. The levels of interaction between all subjects and all varying subjectivity need to be focused.
antidiskriminatorische Tiersoziologie
Slightly edited repost of: https://simorgh.de/niceswine/fragment-on-insect-mythologies-and-representations (2014)
A fragment on insect mythologies and insect representations, and why symbolism is not sufficient to explain the relation
Insects in mythology are mostly explained as a phenomenon that stands for a “symbolism”. It seems that authors/researchers find it hard to imagine that for instance the Scarabaeus (attributed in the Egyptian pantheon to the God Kheper), a “dung beetle”, was appreciated for more than just that, what humans attributed to him in terms of their own anthropocentric concept of the earth, its meaning and the universe.
What if for instance the early Egyptians did see a world of unique value in the life and activities of the scarab beetles?
It could likely be that it was fascinating to observe, how the beetles rolled this ball of soil and dung, to think about what meaning the beetles might have given to their existence on earth overall. Maybe it was that ancient civilizations/cultures had an ability to take nonhuman animals as cultures? A small beetle that rolls a ball like a planet, from which new insect life would spring forth … .
A typical thought you find on the topic of nonhuman animals and nature in mythologies is, that humans would imbue nature with meaning. Quite contrarily, people could have felt that nature did in fact have meaning, and that nature (being) is meaning in itself.
As far as I could find out now, the most prominent mythologies about insects and alike, evolve around: bees, butterflies, spiders, scorpions, cicadas and the scarab beetles.
If we add the heavy weight of underlying such a relationship in mythology to our today’s definition of “symbolism” – that is if we say that i.e. such insects were mere symbols for anthropomorphic attributions – then we should scrutinize more closely the epistemological history of “symbols” and the term’s etymology to shed light on the construct that we apply here.
Fragment
Decolonialism does not explain forms on nonhuman objectification and human “ruling via definition” in regards to “(nonhuman) animality” (which in itself is yet a term to be argued about and to be analyzed).
Decolonialism is one thing, Animal Objectification has its own histories, even when problematics converge and overlap e.g. in terms of ecological, eco-social contextualities. Brining decolonialism in as the solution for forms of animal objectification puts all hope on intra-human cultural diversity and ignores the dilemma of human definition of animal identity, which is simply not considered to be a historical major mistake seen in itself.
Decolonialism applies to intra-human constellations while the schism between “animal” and “human”, as some form of great hierarchically applied identities, stands outside of intra-human conflicts.
The notion of “human“ and the notion of “animal” differs with individuals, differs in different times and in different cultures. Bringing us all together under the assumption of functionability can’t solve the source of conflict between the predominant varied human notions of “human” and varied human notions of “nonhuman and animal” which resulted in today’s settings that we persistently have with animal objectifications.
Also, the problem with decolonialism to be applied as a tool to dismantle animal objectification raises the question of why the histories of animal objectification can’t be addressed with their own complicated specifics.
Antibiologistic Animal Sociology
Who pretends that subversion functioned differently in society than oppressive patterns, with both relying on similar basic assumptions about the human-animal-nature schisms – mostly in regards to the phenomenons of “existential meaningfulness” and the question of “self-authority”?
antibiologistic animal sociology
Those most visible of today’s animal allies (the animal rights and animal liberation movement) are equally unwilling to abstract from the biologism they apply to their perspectives on animality in a seemingly unquestioned manner, not different to any perspectival view on animality expressed in the conventional foundations of “human” hybris.
They equally limit their view to the equation: human > reason; animal > instinct. The paradigm-shifts in concepts of culture, languages, and sociability/socialness themselves haven’t taken place in human emancipation yet, to extend to nonhuman groups and individuals. Manifoldness and heterogeneity do not appear on the human map, outside of hierarchical hegemonic ideas of life and living beings in general.
Argumentation routinely lays a burden of proof in a comparability of nonhumans to humans, as if a.) some unique standard of measurement always had to be taken, and b.) as if “human” could be grasped as a single monolith, when in comparison to “nonhuman”.
antibiologistic animal sociology
If you conflate the facts of ecological human destructivity with the factuality and bare existence of animal bodies, by statistically and quantitively adding up the array of damages caused by the existence of animal bodies in animal agriculture, then you make these animal bodies responsible for human actions of animal objectification.
Why don’t you instead name the injustice that animal bodies live through and die under? Do you assume that ecological destruction has nothing to do with the violations of nonhuman spaces? At least you never seem to talk about the harsh facts of injustice towards nonhuman animals when you discuss the ethical fallacy of anthropocene destructivity.
Reminder: Ethical talk without (animal) rights isn’t plausible.
Antibiologistic Animal Sociology
PREAMBLE
We need a term that describes the broad discrimination/s or injustice/s exerted by human collectives and human individuals towards nonhumans animals and towards nonhumanity overall – in all its facets in which these oppressive mechanisms, thoughts and actions occur in different human cultural layers, such as religion, science, law, arts, etc.
Also, we need a term for the overall phenomenon of human destruction and destructivity in these regards. I refer to it as faunacide, as far as nonhuman animals are concerned. Some criticize the term “speciesism” on various grounds, I ask everyone to come up with more descriptive terms for what we witness and might conceive differently.
antibiologistic animal sociology
Alternative terms for speciesism
SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATION
SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATIVE
-DEVALUATION
-HUMILIATION
-…
antibiologistic animal sociology
CN: animal portrayals in language
Why do speciesists and antispeciesist alike verbally make/cite basic similar descriptions when it comes to talking about Nonhuman activities, referring to instinctual behavior patterns more or less? Observationwise they both obviously fetch their language from the same biologistic box. As if lived subjectivity, outside that of a “human” self, was non-describable. As if an idea of generic pictograms ruled our language about what in reality is the nonhuman autonomy missed by these portrayals per definition.
antibiologistic animal sociology
When nonhumans are forcibly subjected to trauma, it does produce trauma, but translates into a problematic that a biologistic approach to nonhumans won’t be able to unravel. Trauma occurs in context with all fine tunings of psyche and mind – can’t ever be understood by violence.