Animals, Society and Culture

1. Animals, Society and Culture Lecture 9: Animals as spectacle 2013-14

2. Lecture outline • What are animal spectacles? What form do they take? • What do they say about human-animal relations? • How have they been understood sociologically?

3. Ancient world • Animal spectacles about demonstrating the superiority of humans over the natural world • ‘The arena was a human construction that brought into sharp relief the boundaries between order and chaos, culture and nature, human and animal. It was a place where the community gathered to witness and celebrate the elimination of threats to its security. The spectacles of the torment and death of animals and bestial humans provided the audience with the assurance that their state could triumph over the menacing chaos of nature.’ (Shelton, 2007:126) • Shelton, J (2007) ‘Beastly spectacles in the Ancient Mediterranean world’ in L Kalof (ed) A cultural history of animals in antiquity, Berg

4. Bullfight

5. Humane society • Every year, approximately 250,000 bulls are killed in bullfights. The animals are stabbed multiple times before suffering slow, agonizing deaths in front of an audience, including children. Animal cruelty is not entertainment. You can help by not attending bullfights. (Humane Society)http://www.hsi.org/issues/bullfighting/

6. Horseracing

7. Horserace goers • Racecourse attendance reached its highest level in recent years, with the number of people going racing across the country rising again for the third consecutive year. Total attendance reached 6.15 million visits, an increase of 7% from 2010. Average daily attendances saw a rise of 1%. (Horserace Betting Levy Board, annual report, 2011-12)

8. Greyhound racing • Welcome to the website of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain, the governing body for licensed greyhound racing.  With attendances of over two million and £2.5 billion wagered on races each year, it is no surprise that greyhound racing remains one of the country's most popular spectator sports. http://www.thedogs.co.uk/

9. Dog agility • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlbie2oNvjw&list=LPe0Y0cFDGTT0&index=8&feature=plcp

10. Circus

11. Performing dolphins

12. Spanish Riding School

13. Dressage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_dic5ghbWA

14. Sport • A form of play set apart from everyday life • It’s organised, involves physical exertion, is rule bound • For both participants and spectators it’s exciting and entertaining

15. Bullfighting • Wild and domestic • Nature and culture • Human and animal • Male and female

16. Wild versus domestic • Bulls perceived as wild but • Bred especially for the corrida • Have qualities of wildness and resistance to manageability • ‘There is a fundamental ambiguity about the toro bravo which should not be ignored. It is not simply an animal captured from the wild, it has been created by humans; human will and control have been exercised to create this ‘wild’ animal; it has been shaped for human purposes. People have selectively bred the animals for this quality of ‘wildness’ and thus have actually created something which is regarded as natural, given by nature; the toro bravo is culturally rather than naturally wild.’ (Marvin, 1994:90)

17. Nature vs culture, animal vs human • The corrida symbolises subordination of nature and making it cultural • It ‘brings together, in the centre of human habitation, an uncontrolled, wild bull, an item from the realm of nature, and a man who represents the epitome of culture in that, more than any ordinary man, he is able to exercise control over his ‘natural’ fear (the fear felt by the human animal), an essential prerequisite if he is to control the wild animal’ (Marvin, 1994: 131)

18. Male vs female • The torero is epitome of masculinity in Spain • Courage, dominance, control and assertiveness • Ambiguous masculinity – suit of lights • Despite ambiguity of costume – seen as inappropriate attire for a woman • women shouldn’t be in the arena as performers

19. Male humanity • The necessary courage to confront the bull is biologically/sexually based, in the testicles – toreros have to have cojones • For a woman to be a torera she’d have to change her essential nature – she’d have to be a man, defined by sexual characteristics • But there are matadoras • Their femininity is denied, they must be lesbians

20. Christina Sanchez • ‘the reality of being a woman in a male-dominated sport took its toll on the matadora. As her popularity grew, many successful male toreros refused to share billing with Sánchez. She became increasingly frustrated with the sport’s sexism and opted to retire in 1999.’ http://www.woa.tv/articles/at_sanchezc.html

21. Greyhound racing • Working class • Male dominated and masculinist • Norbert Elias’s notion of the ‘civilising process’ • Violent sports a consequence of and mechanism for the advancement of social civility • Modern societies distanced from excitement • Sport is interactive context where moderate degree of violence permissible and encouraged

22. Mimetic • Like hunting or war – killing by proxy • ‘sports spectators are excited by the often rough and violent competitive exchange between the participants, yet feel neither guilt nor repugnance in watching the battles since they are not perceived as real’ (216) • But for the dogs their suffering isn’t mimetic – it’s real • Commodities within figuration of greyhound racing

23. Dog agility • ‘training together, a particular woman and a particular dog, not Man and Animal in the abstract, is a historically located, multispecies, subject-shaping encounter in a contact zone fraught with power, knowledge and technique, moral questions – and the chance for joint, cross-species invention that is simultaneously work and play.’ (Haraway, 2008: 205).

24. Contact zone • people and dogs work together to ‘excel in an international competitive sport’ that’s part of ‘globalised middle-class consumer culture’ (Haraway, 2008:207). • Gendered

25. Entanglements • how dogs and people learn to pay attention to each other ‘in a way that changes who and what they become together’ (Haraway, 2008: 208) • Her discussion of the contact zone is about power, knowledge and ‘the meaningful material details of entanglements’ (216). • Ttransformative things happen in contact zones • Explores how different organisms, different species communicate with each other • Contact zones change those who become entangled

26. Authority • Agility is a sport designed by humans, dogs really enjoy it but it’s rule bound for humans and dogs • The human decides for the dog what is ‘the acceptable criteria of performance’ • But ‘The human must respond to the authority of the dog’s actual performance’ (221) • She explores training in terms of freedom and authority

27. Trust • This gives the dog freedom, it loosens human control. The dog has the authority – she knows what to do better than the human. • Once the human trusts the dog and recognises their authority then they’re a team, ‘a cross-species team of skilled adults’ (225) • This involves communication between humans and dogs – and response to each other which is ‘face to face in the contact zone of an entangled relationship’ (227)

28. Play • Inter-species play is an example of inter-species communication • Story of play between a donkey – prey animal – and a german-belgian shepherd cross – predator. They know how to read each other. • Doing agility is about the coming together of human and dog and trust between species. • It’s about ‘becoming’ which makes each partner ‘more than one but less than two’.

29. Gender and class • Spectacles gendered and classed • Spectators and those who participate and produce the spectacle • Jockeys overwhelmingly male • On the flat 117 professional jockeys, 109 (93.2%) men, 8 (6.8%) women • National Hunt 89 professional jockeys 88 (99.8%) men, 1 (1.1%) women

30. Summary • Humans in control whether spectacle involves a symbolic re-enactment of the creation of culture through hunting and killing an animal or training dogs for agility. • But significant difference. The first 2 types of spectacle involve an assertion of dominance and control over another sentient being, or their commodification, or both. • The third type, agility, recognises that the animal is an important actor in the relationship – and that inter-species communication, in work and play, is a two-way process. • It’s a posthumanist approach which decentres human beings puts humans in partnership with other animals, working and playing with them, and becoming something more than a person and a dog.