On the specific existence of animal culture: life torn asunder

Robert Briggs

doi:10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.59884

Authors

Robert Briggs Curtin University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3441-0940

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.59884

Keywords:

Animal culture, power, institutionality, cultural theory, eco-deconstruction

Abstract

While the thought of animal culture is readily accepted in the environmental humanities and in posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism, this paper seeks to re-examine this acceptance in view of the ambivalence of that concept’s institutional and intellectual origins. For the critical affirmation of animal culture presents as a curious historical object when viewed from the perspective of the late twentieth-century literary-theoretical interrogation of Enlightenment concepts of culture. Approaching the “animal culture” concept as itself a problem, then, this paper considers the potential limits and possibilities of that concept by assessing it from a decidedly poststructuralist perspective. The discussion begins with a genealogical review of “animal culture” in terms of its status as a discourse steeped in an anthropological intellectual heritage, highlighting the potential for characterisations of animal culture to reactivate anthropocentric values or presuppositions. This problematisation is followed by a speculation on what the critical and poststructuralist interrogation of “culture” might still have to offer to (environmental) humanities reflections on animal culture and ecological life more generally. To this end, the discussion reconceives animal culture as constituted and dispersed within a field of eco-institutional forces, pointing towards an institutionality of ecological life before the effects of anthropogenic environmental transformation.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and philosophy and other essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Basille, Jonathan. Life/force: novelty and new materialism in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, v. 48, n. 2, pp. 3–22, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2019.0018

Birch, Thomas H. The incarceration of wilderness: wilderness areas as prisons. Environmental Ethics, v. 12, pp. 3–26, 1990. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19901215

Bluff, Lucas A.; Kacelnik, Alex; Rutz, Christian. Vocal culture in New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, v. 101, pp. 767–776, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2010.01527.x

Bonner, John Tyler. The evolution of culture in animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Braverman, Irus. Wild life: the institution of nature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804794763

Carey, James. Communication as culture: essays on media and society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Chrulew, Matthew; De Vos, Rick. Extinction. In: Turner, Lynn; Sellbach, Undine; Broglio, Ron (ed.). The Edinburgh companion to animal studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 181–197. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474418423-015

Chrulew, Matthew. Abnormal Animals. New Literary History, v. 51, pp. 729–750, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0046

Chrulew, Matthew. Saving the golden lion tamarin. In: Rose, Deborah Bird; van Dooren, Thom; Chrulew, Matthew (eds). Extinction studies: stories of time, death, and generations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. pp. 49–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7312/van-17880-004

Derrida, Jacques; Ferraris, Naurizio. A taste for the secret. Ed. Giacomo Donia; David Webb. Trans. Giacomo Donis. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. Of grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Derrida, Jacques. The animal that therefore I am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991.

Foucault, Michel. The archaeology of knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972.

Foucault, Michel. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970.

Fritsch, Matthias; Lynes, Philippe; Wood, David (eds). Eco-deconstruction: Derrida and environmental philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823279500.001.0001

Fritsch, Matthias; Lynes, Philippe; Wood, David. Introduction. In: Matthias Fritsch; Philippe Lynes; David Wood (eds). Eco-deconstruction: Derrida and environmental philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–26, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt201mp8w.4

Garland, Ellen C.; Goldizen, Anne W.; Rekdahl, Melinda L.; Constantine, Rochelle; Garrigue, Claire; Hauser, Nan Daeschler; Poole, M. Michael; Robbins, Jooke; Noad, Michael J. Dynamic horizontal cultural transmission of humpback whale song at the ocean basin scale. Current Biology, v. 21, n. 8, pp. 287–691, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.019

Greenblatt, Stephen. Towards a poetics of culture. In: Veeser, H. Aram (ed.). The new historicism. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14, 1989.

Grüter, Christoph; Balbuena, M. Sol; Farina, Walter M. Informational conflicts created by the waggle dance. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, v. 275, pp. 1321–1327, 2008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2008.0186

Hall, Stuart. Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. In: Gray, Ann; Campbell, Jan; Erickson, Mark; Hanson, Stuart; Wood, Helen (eds). CCCS selected working papers: volume 2. London: Routledge, 2007. pp. 386–398.

Haraway, Donna. The promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In: Grossberg, Lawrence; Nelson, Cary; Treichler, Paula (eds). Cultural studies. London: Routledge, 1992. pp. 295–337.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Outlines of a philosophy of the history of mankind. Trans. T.O. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Oxford University Press, 1909.

Krützen, Michael; Mann, Janet; Heithaus, Michael R.; Connor, Richard C.; Bejder, Lars; Sherwin, William B. Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, v. 102, n. 25, pp. 8939–43, 2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0500232102

Laland, Kevin N.; Galef, Bennett G. Introduction. In: Laland, Kevin N.; Galef, Bennett G. (eds). The question of animal culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. pp. 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv322v4wf.4

Laland, Kevin N. Darwin’s unfinished symphony: how culture made the human mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400884872

McHoul, Alec. Semiotic investigations: towards an effective semiotics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology as text, text as ecology. Oxford Literary Review, v. 32, n. 1, pp. 1–17, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2010.0002

Purdy, Jebediah. After nature: a politics for the anthropocene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674915671

Rose, Deborah Bird; van Dooren, Thom; Chrulew, Matthew (eds). Extinction studies: stories of time, death, and generations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7312/van-17880

Sapolsky, Robert M. Culture in animals: the case of non-human primate culture of low aggression and high affiliation. Social Forces, v. 85, n. 1, pp. 217–33, 2006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2006.0142

Stojanovic, Dejan; Alves, Fernanda; Cook, Henry; Crates, Ross; Heinsohn, Robert; Peters, Andrew; Rayner, Laura; Troy, Shannon N.; Webb, Matthew H. Further knowledge and urgent action required to save orange-bellied parrots from extinction. Emu – Austral Ornithology, v. 118, n. 1, pp. 126¬–134, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2017.1394165

Sugiyama, Yukimaru; Fushimi, Takao; Sakura, Osamu; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. Hand preference and tool use in wild chimpanzees. Primates, v. 34, pp. 151–159, 1993. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02381386

THE OBP Tasmanian Program. Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, Tasmania, 2 April 2025. Available at: https://nre.tas.gov.au/conservation/threatened-species-and-communities/lists-of-threatened-species/threatened-species-vertebrates/orange-bellied-parrot/the-obp-tasmanian-program. Accessed on: 20 June 2025.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom, vol. 1, 6th ed. London: Murray, 1920.

van Dooren, Thom. Authentic crows: identity, captivity and emergent forms of life. Theory, Culture & Society, v. 33, n. 2, pp. 29–52, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415571941

van Dooren, Thom. Invasive species in penguin worlds: an ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation. Conservation and Society, v. 9 n. 4, pp. 286–298, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.92140

Viciana, Hugo. Animal culture: but of which kind? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, v. 90, pp. 208–218, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.10.012

Vico, Giambattista. The first new science. Ed. and trans. Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139163705

von Frisch, Karl. The dance language and orientation of bees. Trans. Leigh E. Chadwick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Wadiwal, Dinesh. Restriction, norm, Umwelt: a response. New Literary History, v. 51, pp. 751–763, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0047

Williams, Raymond. Culture is ordinary. In: McGuigan, Jim (ed.). Raymond Williams on culture & society: essential writings. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2014. pp. 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473914766.n1

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, rev. ed. London: Fontana, 1988.

Worden, Bradley D.; Papaj, Daniel R. Flower choice copying in bumblebees. Biology Letters, v. 1, pp. 504–507, 2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0368