Literature and the Environment – Ethics and Anthropomorphism
Connecting Film to Theory – Instructions and Submission
1250 words
This 1250-word analytical writing assignment in either MLA or APA format asks you to connect the films you’ve viewed and the articles you’ve read back to the theory you’ve covered in this unit. Focus your analysis on both Timothy Treadwell and Charlie Russell and their approaches to bears. Although the men experienced different successes along the way in regard to their experiences with the bears, they had much in common. Drawing from the articles and the films in this unit, as well as from the two chapters you’ve covered on “Ethics and the Non-Human Animal” and “Anthropomorphism,” how would you analyze Treadwell’s and Russell’s philosophies when it comes to interacting with bears? How can you link their approaches back to what you’ve read in the
Cambridge text in regard to the ethics of representing non-human animals and the dangers or uses of anthropomorphism? Make certain, in your response, to clearly connect to the articles and films, as well as to the two Cambridge chapters and the theory contained therein. Include a citation page.
When citing the films, follow the guidelines for citation outlined at this website: (MLA) https://www.scribbr.com/mla/how-to-cite-a-movie/
or (APA) https://www.scribbr.com/apa-examples/movie/#:~:text=To%20cite%20a%20movie%20in%20APA%20Style%2C%20list%20its%20director,the%20director%2C%20and%20the%20year.
Assignment Criteria
Assignment appropriately connects Treadwell to Russell through reference to the films and articles covered in this unit
Assignment connects focal argument back to the appropriate Cambridge text chapters
Assignment provides supporting textual evidence to back up argument
Assignment provides insightful analysis of the films, not merely synopsis
Assignment shows evidence of clear and thorough proofreading to remove errors in grammar and word choice
Movie Links referenced above:
https://archive.org/details/WalkingWithGiantsTheGrizzliesOfSiberia
Course Notes:
Overview
In this unit, you’ll explore and challenge the boundaries that humans set between themselves and the non-human world. You’ll begin with a study of some of the defining characteristics that humans believe separate them from animals, and the destabilizing of these characteristics, as well as the ways in which animal terms have come to be derogatory in human speech (“rat,” “pig,” “dog,” and so on). In exploring these terms, you’ll have a chance to look at the separation of connotation (emotional meaning ascribed to a word) and denotation (the dictionary definition of a word) peculiar to the ways in which humans use these terms.
You’ll look at the way the non-human world is portrayed as the backdrop to human action in much of popular media and literature, and what happens when you foreground the non-human world instead. In your exploration of anthropomorphism, you’ll have the chance to look at the reasons humans tend to ascribe human traits to non-human creatures, specifically animals. Two different articles and accompanying films will be shown to provide examples of this: Werner Herzog’s documentary feature Grizzly Man, wherein Timothy Treadwell’s biography is set against the second story of his work with, and death by, bears; and “Walking With Giants: The Grizzlies of Kamchatka, Siberia,” a Nature documentary exploring Charlie Russell’s decades-long work with grizzly bears between Canada and Siberia. As you explore these films and the accompanying articles on Treadwell’s life and infatuation with bears, and Russell’s life and study of bears in Kamchatka, you’ll look at the ways in which both men related to bears, the dangers or benefits of each viewpoint, and the trouble with anthropomorphism.
In order to give yourself some useful background on the debate between scientific fact and value when it comes to human relationship with the non-human world, we suggest a few pages of pre-reading from the Cambridge text. Pages 145–151 give you a solid overview of the friction points between scientific fact and value, as well as an example of a text (Annie Dillard’s “Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos”) that opens a discussion about how we are to craft works of literature that bridge both areas. As we discussed at the start of this course, ecocriticism is a lens through which we can explore the ways we approach texts and choose to take an environmental view instead of a human-focused one.
Ecocriticism seeks a blended approach to literature that crosses both scientific and literary lines in order to fully represent the non-human world around us without privileging human needs above all else. But this cross-border view is also one that creates controversy between “objective” science and “subjective” value systems. As pages 145–151 of the Cambridge text question, unless one is both scientist and writer, how can one accurately and fully bridge both ways of viewing the world? As Clark claims, Dillard’s essay attempts to do this by representing a scientific phenomenon, the creation of the Galápagos in geological time, in poetic, engaging language. By doing this, she is both blending the two areas of thought and challenging potential critics; after all, she may be writing about an event that can be explained scientifically (the formation of the Galápagos), but it is not an event that occurred within recorded human memory. Is it, then, scientific? Thus, even a text that blends science and literature is subject to the debates inherent to its component parts. It is an ongoing controversy: if you adhere to science alone, you lose the human, the values-based, and the body; if you adhere to values alone, you struggle to provide a burden of proof for your ideas, at least as far as expert-based scientific thinking goes. Blending both the scientific and the literary asks writers and thinkers to balance the power and selective prestige accorded to science with the human ability to craft a beautiful story that reflects human values. You’ll see this challenge at play in both films featured in this chapter.
In a modern world with large urban populations that don’t often have the chance to see animals in their natural environments, it’s nearly impossible to look at the animal world (and the non-human world in general) without considering how it’s portrayed in literature and popular media. Is the animal world really as violent as shown in film and television, or is this violence a result of the condensing of images for the sake of audience interest? What do we make of
Disney portrayals of animals, with their exaggerated features and their sweet demeanours? How do we represent animals truthfully and completely when our own relationship with them and the rest of the non-human world is so unstable, and how do we know what animals’ worlds are really like, in all their complexity?
Perhaps the main issue underlying these questions is the time we spend trying to differentiate ourselves from animals in the first place. Throughout history, science and religion have sought to separate humans from animals in an effort to ascribe greater value to humanity. Many of the cultures that have sought to preserve the links between humans and animals in a more holistic worldview have been denounced as “primitive,” since such a worldview threatens human ability to use animals, and by extension all the non-human world, in any way we see fit.
In a more environmentally conscious modern world, however, and one in which humans and animals are increasingly forced to inhabit the same spaces, it behooves us to turn a critical eye on the ways in which we justify our understanding, our portrayals, and our treatment of animals. Not only is this of paramount importance in our day-to-day interactions with animals and the industries they drive (for instance, fishing or large animal agriculture), but it is also vital as science continues to challenge the divisions we have set up for ourselves between the human and the animal.
As humans, we pride ourselves on being intelligent and adaptable, emotive and compassionate. So often, however, our behaviour toward animals reveals us as being as conflicted in our own definitions of what constitutes human/humane conduct as in our debates over what separates us from animals in the first place. Perhaps, in order to truly relate to animals and to be able to honestly portray them in our media, we first need to understand that binaries are troublesome (as we alluded to in our last unit on ecofeminism). In order to improve upon our relationships with animals, maybe we first need to acknowledge that our creation of human/animal hierarchies is just as fraught as our creation of human/human hierarchies.
In Chapter 18, Clark touches on a number of critical and literary works on the subject of ethics and how it relates to human interaction with non-human animals. His overview serves to broaden the exploration of ethics in the Cambridge text, and a number of the supplemental works he draws from will be explored in greater detail in this introduction. The chapter opens with a scene from David Garnett’s 1924 novella A Man in the Zoo, in which a young man, following an intense fight with his fiancé, installs himself in a cage in the Ape House at the London Zoo. The image of him walking up and down behind the bars (183) is striking, since the reader is suddenly pushed to confront the frailty of the boundary separating human and animal. In every sense, the young man is akin to any caged zoo animal, seemingly bored at his incapacitation, and goggled at by spectators. If humans are truly separated from animals by behaviours alone, how then can we fail to see zoo animals as disquietingly human after reading the selection from Garnett’s novella? After all, if a human can so easily take the place of an animal in a cage, can the distinction not work the other way?
According to Kate Soper, “It is as if through the semiotic use of animals we are spared the embarrassment of a more direct confrontation with our own follies and aggression” (Clark 184). The term Soper uses, “semiotic,” refers to the study of meaning-making in communication. She speaks further of our use of derogatory terms for animals when describing one another (for instance, one might say another human is a “pig” when in a conflict with that person), and this use of animal terminology serves to permit us to distance ourselves from the repercussions of our own angry behaviour. It is a human-to-human conflict, but the invocation of the non-human, the animal, serves to divert some of our ire.
Although we might try to prevent derogatory animal terminology being used to disempower women or invoke racist comparisons, Cary Wolfe and Peter Singer argue (Clark 185) that this does little to break down the inherent “institution of speciesism” (185) behind the words. The difficult truth is that many humans consider non-human beings to be lesser (though not all think this way—cast back to Unit 2 on Indigenous worldviews). This permits a hierarchical view of the world that encourages the use of non-human life for human benefit, often regardless of the cost to environmental stability or the perpetuation of communities.
In our twenty-first century world, we’re more likely to encounter animals, especially megafauna (large animal species), in the media than in everyday life. Because of this, we are susceptible to portrayals of animals that might only show one part of an animal’s existence: for instance, the ravenous hunger of lions as shown on nature television, or the docile temperament of deer as portrayed in Disney’s Bambi. We tend to overgeneralize in regard to animal nature, and again, we do so through a completely human lens. French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls us to account for this wilful blindness in lumping all animals together (the human versus the animal), for how can all non-human beings in the world be thrown into the same basket (qtd. in Clark 186)?
Literary study is behind the times in this regard. Think of all the books you’re read that polarize the human and the animal, or that set a human-focused story against the vague backdrop of a world populated by “lesser” animals. Aside from the ecocritical lens, there is no coherent literary movement that seeks to challenge this human-dominant way of perceiving the world. As Wolfe notes, species is often invoked in literature to cover for another discussion: that of race, for instance, or of ethnicity or gender (qtd. in Clark 187-188). It is rarely explored in and of itself. Instead of staying focused on the human characteristics shared by animals, Wolfe challenges, perhaps we ought to focus our analysis on the problematic and changeable nature of the human in the first place, for if we cannot fully understand ourselves, how can we then presume to judge the world around us? The animal is not simply a brute “other”; it is more complex than that.
Wolfe also critiques Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order, a text that speaks out against deep ecology and nature as a source of values. In his analysis of Ferry’s text, Wolfe notes that it serves to create a hierarchy that places animals below humans, since animals, according to Ferry, are incapable of reciprocal behaviour. Thus, animals cannot enter into ethical contracts with humans; they cannot recognize human rights the way humans have the ability to recognize animal rights. As such, Ferry argues, animals do not have the same rights as humans. Wolfe takes issue with this viewpoint, perceiving it as setting up a troubling binary in which only humans possess ethical consideration. Yes, animals possess some characteristics in common with humans. Yes, animals are also, in many ways, unabashedly other. But does this make them less, or simply different?
The chapter ends with a reading of the animal as construct through an exploration of Lisa J. Kiser’s “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature.” Through an analysis of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, Kiser argues that Chaucer’s aggressive appropriation of the non-human (Lady Nature and the birds), crafted in such a way that the reader notes the appropriation, serves to draw attention to the non-human world outside the text that is silenced by the human world. Kiser’s analysis points out a troubling issue in literary study: How does one write from a non-human viewpoint without simply creating another ironic text poking fun at the human tendency to overwrite the non-human?
Anthropomorphism is, as cited in the textbook, “the attribution [usually falsely] of a human form or personality to a god, animal, or thing” (Clark 192). This human focus is something we’ve touched on throughout the course, right from our first unit with its focus on anthropocentrism (a human-centred way of seeing). We’ve looked at the ways in which this perception of the world creates barriers between humans and non-humans, and sets up a view of the world in which nature serves human needs. Anthropomorphism, then, can be seen as a critical element of anthropocentrism: by attributing human traits to non-human beings, we are failing to adjust the lens through which we perceive the world around us.
Why do we anthropomorphize animals? It’s a nuanced discussion, and one that comes down to human intent. Oftentimes, this anthropomorphizing happens as a result of our attempt to understand or represent the non-human world. Perhaps you saw a Disney movie as a child and fell in love with the outsized features, sweet demeanours, and kind voices of the animals portrayed therein. Presenting animals as good-natured and approachable is one way of telling a story in which the human encounters the non-human and feels a sense of connection: “They’re just like us!” For children, this is both instructive and destructive. Yes, this attitude may make children feel as though they understand and appreciate animals as no different from themselves, an attractive emotion in a modernizing world that puts humans and animals into closer and closer contact. But this attitude also poses problems: What happens when that child goes camping, encounters a bear, and figures “It’s kind and patient, just like me! I’ll go and stroke its fur.” In this case, our tendency to anthropomorphize animals can work against us.
Another way in which we give animals human characteristics is in our relation to what’s called charismatic megafauna (see the References section for further information). These large animals (whales, elephants, pandas, polar bears, and so on) are the large-scale representations of the animal world. They’re much more attractive for advertising campaigns than, say, banana slugs or cockroaches. Think of all the ways in which you’ve seen such charismatic megafauna anthropomorphized for advertising purposes: Smokey Bear talking about forest fire prevention, polar bears talking about Coca-Cola, tigers advertising breakfast cereal, etc. In this case, these large animals are given human characteristics and human language capabilities so that we as consumers feel a greater accord when purchasing these products or heeding the proffered advice. After all, who wouldn’t be more likely to listen to a talking bear whose home is threatened by wildfire than a human fire ranger talking about the necessity of putting out your campfire?
Whether consciously or unconsciously done, the act of anthropomorphizing is one of failing to understand the essential differences between humans and non-humans. Perhaps we’re afraid that understanding animals as they truly are might take too much work on our part. Perhaps we’re worried that, ultimately, recognizing those differences would require us to celebrate, appreciate, and protect something other than ourselves, and to recognize that the human scale is not necessarily the one by which to judge all living beings.
Introduction
We’ve talked about the basic reasons behind human tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but we haven’t yet dealt with attempts to honestly represent animals in all their complexity. After all, these attempts to show animals as complex beings, whether in popular media or in literature, are still filtered through a human viewpoint. So how do we talk about animals in a way that does them justice?
The Cambridge text first explores extreme views of anthropomorphism, giving as an example those who argue against any attribution of human traits or feelings to animals at all. What does this do, though, but serve to drive a determined wedge between the human and the animal? After all, if animals can’t even be perceived as happy or content or angry, then there is a strict difference being created between human and animal.
Another, more moderate perspective discussed in the book simply avoids ascribing unneeded human traits or emotions to animals—not, as the text says, “accusing a garden snail of religious heresy” (Clark 193). This view allows for animals to possess human traits, or emotions such as happiness or sadness, that link animals to humans, without going overboard. It’s a more nuanced view, but still a human-centred one.
Chapter 19 returns to Eileen Crist, whose video on anthropocentrism we watched in the first unit in this course. Crist, while recognizing it as a flawed concept, argues in favour of anthropomorphism as a means by which we acknowledge the coherence and importance of animal worlds; it is “a pragmatic shortcut for understanding animal life” (Clark 194).
One of the root problems with anthropomorphism is that it requires us to know whether a behaviour or emotion is characteristically human before we then ascribe it to a non-human being. But how can we know whether compassion or benevolence is the purview of humanity alone? If a wolf brings its injured partner food, for instance, doesn’t that indicate compassion of a kind for its partner’s suffering and a desire to keep that partner alive? Can we then argue that compassion is, at its roots, only a human trait?
The textbook speaks of “an ‘animal hermeneutics’” (Clark 195) in literature—a body of work that attempts to explore the lives of other species through a careful shaping of human language; for instance, Thomas Nagel’s article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In cases such as these, the authors are attempting to portray the non-human as having its own agency, instead of merely having importance through its relationship with, or meaning to, humans. This approach can be acknowledged as an example of what ecocritics Kull and Torop call “biotranslation” (195), where one species tries to understand or make meaning from another.
Perhaps this more tentative approach, less focused on human knowing and more focused on remaining open and attentive to animal signification, is the way forward in our discussion of anthropomorphism. As Stephen W. Laycock argues, the sense of mystery inherent in animal actions and ways of being is not a negative thing; instead, mystery is necessary and generative when contemplating an “Other” (Clark 196). When we interact with non-human beings, we need to remain open to thinking outside a human scale, whether that be in regard to movement, seasonality, intent, or time. Ultimately, as John Simons argues, the animal offers “a transgressive route not only across species boundaries, but also between the closed formal universe of the linguistic artefact and into the material world in which it exists” (qtd. in Clark 197). Just as interaction with animals asks us to cross species barriers in our observations and attempts to understand their behaviour, this same interaction also allows us to cross from representations of animals in texts to the real and complex worlds of animals. Thus, animal writing becomes an interface of sorts, where different worlds interact. Consider, for instance, the supplemental excerpt below from Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography. This text, a blending of fiction and non-fiction, chronicles the courtship of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, but this quirky biography is presented from a remarkable viewpoint: that of Flush, Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The text, linked in its entirety for you in the References section of this unit, critiques city life in an increasingly modernized world, and the character of Flush allows Woolf both the literary distance to level this criticism and the chance to craft a novel style of animal-based writing:
“As she strode through the long grass, so he leapt hither and thither, parting its green curtain. The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of iridescent spray about his nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold, stung, teased and tickled the soft pads of his feet. Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any—a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories—the smell of hare, the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish drawn in a rush through water further and further. He forgot his mistress; he forgot all humankind. He heard dark men cry ‘Span! Span!’ He heard whips crack. He raced; he rushed. At last he stopped bewildered; the incantation faded; very slowly, wagging his tail sheepishly, he trotted back across the fields to where Miss Mitford stood shouting ‘Flush! Flush! Flush!’ and waving her umbrella.”
In this excerpt, one can observe Flush’s training (the duty to come when called) abandoned when his instincts take over and he dashes off into the underbrush. Flush’s encounters with the world around him, rather than being overburdened by human meaning, are simply instinctual and allow the reader to experience a type of writing that permits a different sort of focus and intention. Woolf’s writing in Flush is but one example of the sort of writing that doesn’t privilege the human and that challenges the human reader to see the non-human world from a very different perspective.
Returning to the Clark text, a final example of writing from a non-human perspective is given in the form of Gareth Lovett Jones’s The Wind in the Pylons, a tongue-in-cheek take on the popular children’s series The Wind in the Willows. In Jones’s version, the character of Mole suddenly appears in a 1990s landscape and is forced to deal with the modernization and industrialization of the natural world. The type of anthropomorphizing made famous in Kenneth Graeme’s original text is given an environmental twist here, as Mole is forced to come to terms with the changes that have occurred since the story’s original Edwardian setting. Along the way, Mole comes into contact with some “true animals,” or non-anthropomorphized animals, and here too, another conflict is created: human to anthropomorphized animal, and anthropomorphized animal to “dumb brute creature.” How are we to understand this sliding scale?
“Fatal Attraction” introduces you to Timothy Treadwell, a struggling former actor, addict, and self-professed “environmental warrior” from the United States. In an effort to recover from a number of failed relationships and a difficult past of substance abuse, Treadwell began summering unarmed with grizzlies in Katmai National Park in Alaska and sharing his experiences with young audiences back home, a pattern that would come to an abrupt end 13 years later with the discovery of two bodies in a tent in the Alaska wilderness. Treadwell and his girlfriend at the time, Amie Huguenard, had been partially eaten by grizzlies after extending their usual summer stay in grizzly country into the early fall.
Treadwell’s death sparked great controversy about human relationship with these huge bears. For many who had observed his travels north over the years, Treadwell’s death was a logical end to what they saw as an unbalanced attempt to become a bear himself. The tragedy in this case is very much a human one, played out against the backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness and the lives of the bears Treadwell spent so much of his life observing.
Grizzly Man was released in 2005, following the 2003 deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard in Katmai National Park, Alaska. The film proved highly successful and instantly controversial, blending Treadwell’s honest but amateur attempt to understand the bears’ behaviour and to share his love of these huge animals with the world, and his struggles with depression and addiction.
By using Treadwell’s own footage of his summers amongst the grizzlies, director Werner Herzog attempts to show the hidden world of these tremendous animals that few have the opportunity to see. By adding in interviews with Treadwell’s former girlfriend and others who knew him, Herzog strives to craft a more balanced portrayal of a man many condemned outright for summering with grizzlies while possessing no background in animal science.
A complex and fraught tale, the Timothy Treadwell story explores the impact of anthropomorphizing animals and the reasons humans do it, and delves into Treadwell’s desire to live amongst the grizzlies in a way that obscured the point at which he himself ended and the bears began.
Like Timothy Treadwell, Charlie Russell did not have a formal education in bear biology. A rancher from southern Alberta, Canada, Russell became fascinated with bears at an early age and began wondering whether the traditional view ranchers held of bears—that they were dangerous enemies—was true, or whether there was more to the animals than met the eye. With the sense that bears were more complex, Russell devoted decades of his life to the study of these huge animals in the wild.
Russell decided that observing bears in his local area wouldn’t suit his purpose, since the bears had already been exposed to hunters and ranchers with guns and had developed a deep fear of humans. Thus, he took his studies to Kamchatka, Russia, where, with his partner Maureen Enns, he spent a number of summers observing grizzlies in the wild. These were bears who had never before encountered humans, and they were unafraid and open in their behaviour.
Russell and Enns’s life alongside bears drew controversy, as Treadwell’s did, but Russell’s decades-long work with bears also stirred deep admiration in park workers, naturalists, and nature writers alike. Although he lived closely with the bears, even fostering brown bear cubs from a Russian zoo in an attempt to successfully introduce them to the wild, he did not see himself as one of the bears. In this way, he was able to closely study their behaviour without stepping over the line into a dangerous anthropomorphism that might have seen him, like Treadwell, killed.
After eight years of their work with the fostered bear cubs, Russell and Enns returned to Kamchatka to find that the bears had been killed. Do you agree with Russell that their failure to teach the young bears to fear humans had been the cause of their deaths? Do you perceive any chance of humans and bears sharing an environment without threat or danger?
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