Vinciane Despret

The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis

Clever Hans, the famous horse who was believed to be able to count, is generally cited as the paradigm of the influence of the observer. Psychologist Rosenthal has illustrated this phenomenon with his well-known experiment about ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ maze rats. Hans, however, achieved something much more interesting. Hecould not only read human minds through their bodies: he could also influence his questioners to produce gestures he could read as cues for finding the answer. Hans could make human bodies be moved and be affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their owners’ knowledge. The question of ‘influence’ when we read this case becomes therefore far more complicated and interesting. It involves the question of the way bodies can attune, affect and transformeach other. We may follow carefully how scientists of ethological practices create access to the creatures they study, how they are moved by their subjects of interest, and how they give them a chance to be interesting andto articulate other responses. Doing so, we notice that the signs that define subject and object, what talks and what is talked about, subjectivity and objectivity, are redistributed in a new manner. These practices offer a new and pragmatic definition of the body, close to James’s theory of emotions: to have a body is to learn how to feel.

Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human–Animal Worlds

The aim of this paper is to explore the different manners in which scientists’ bodies are actively engaged when interacting with the animals they observe in the field. Bodies are multiple, as are the practices that involve them: sharing the same diet, feeling similar affects, acting the same, inhabiting the same world of perceptions, constructing empathic affinities, etc. Some scientists aim to embody the animals’ experiences. Some are willing to empathetically experience situations ‘from inside’, while others ‘undo and redo’ their own bodies in order to interact more closely with the animals and to respond to them more cautiously. Still others are faced with the question: what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals? All of these practices present a very different version of ‘embodied empathy’, a concept which describes feeling/seeing/thinking bodies that undo and redo each other, reciprocally though not symmetrically, as partial perspectives that attune themselves to each other. Therefore, empathy is not experiencing with one’s own body what the other experiences, but rather creating the possibilities of an embodied communication.

THE ENIGMA OF THE RAVEN

Abstract Bernd Heinrich and Maine ravens are exemplars of Desprets concepts of politeness, “faire connaissance” and recruitment. He was dissuaded by his mentor from studying them due to their intelligence and their recalcitrance against reductive methods. Gaining their confidence would take years. Once he did so they allowed him to see an astonishing range of behaviors and they accepted him as a socius. This was research that took into account the interests of the ravens themselves to answer complicated questions about their behavior. Ravens also practice this intermingling of interests and action with wolves.

Leitura etnopsicológica do segredo

The text presents a critical discussion about psychological practices, focusing on the secret in the psychotherapy. The author rescues the idea of secret as something that separates, that sets apart what’s public and what is private, what can or cannot be showed, including not only cultural subjects, but also, especially, political subjects. The clinical practice can be a device which “treats the secret by itself”, building a sense of inferiority which establishes mandatory treatment models. Then, the author displaces this discussion to the domain of Human science research, checking the imposition of anonymity that, for her, causes the “unnamed effect” and establises an asymmetry relation on the research, promoting a mistaken distribution of power.

Thinking like a rat

Abstract In submitting rats to tests such as running a maze, behaviorist researchers failed to take into account the interest and point of view of the rats. As a result, the research missed important questions and relations at hand. The critiques about experimenter effect and intuitive perception of researchers’ questions by research subjects can be more fully extended to animals as research subjects and interactants in research who perceive and interpret situations, set-ups, and questions. Taking meaning and biosemiotics into account helps give a better model of animal subjectivity as exercised in the interpretation of situations and the pursuit of interest.

Os dispositivos experimentais

From the historical episode of Hans, the horse that could count, psychology continually renews the problem of (the researcher’s) influence as bias to the investigation. In the first part of this text, we will seek to explore two series of researches emerged at the sixties on the antagonistic responses they give to the issue of compliance of the studied subjects: the researches of Martin Orne with hypnosis and of Rosenthal with “the mice from Berkeley”. We will examine then how the complacency of the experimental subjects is effect of the experimental device worried about its inhibition and not an essential characteristic to be controlled. In the second part, in turn, we will explore Valins’ experiment.

Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

In recent decades, in the South of France some young people from urban backgrounds have chosen to become shepherds and to learn to reconnect with the herding practices that many livestock breeders had abandoned under the pressure of agricultural modernization policies. In some cases they have found themselves entrusted with sheep that are as naive about herding as they themselves were. Before their introduction to transhumance— seasonal movement between pastures—these animals were primarily confined and fed indoors or in small fenced areas. The shepherds had to learn how to lead, how to understand other modes of living, how to teach their sheep what is edible and what is not, and how to form a flock; the sheep had to learn how to “compose with” dogs and humans, to acquire new feeding habits, a new ethos, and moreover, new ways of living in an enlarged world. These practices cannot be reduced to a livestock economy: shepherds consider herding a work of transformation and ecological recuperation—of the land, of the sheep, of ways of being together. Learning the “arts of living on a damaged planet,” as Anna Tsing has termed it, humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmoecology, creating cosmoecological connections and contributing to what Ghassan Hage has called alter-politics.

O que as ciências da etologia e da primatologia nos ensinam sobre as práticas científicas

The article discusses known studies conducted with animals, as well as the version in which the results acquired are biased by researcher’s subjectivity. Following the reflections on the research practices, we can consider the animals good models to the investigation about Human beings. They can teach a lot about ourselves, since we have not neglected the way to make them understand our questions and we should know which question, indeed, they answer.

THE PRAGMATICS OF EXPERTISE

Abstract: This chapter from Vinciane Desprets book Être bête underscores the methodological considerations for the work as a whole, setting out a model (dispositif) for further ethological studies of farm animals. Or rather, with farm animals and with their farmers, because this pragmatic (interspecies) sociology is conscious of elaborating its knowledges and competences as it goes along. Neither the farmers’ knowledges nor the researchers’ theories are prioritized, but are mutually adjusted in a self-reflexive manner that seeks eventually to highlight the competences of animals in domestic or industrial farm settings. The fundamental question, “what is the difference between humans and animals?” does not remain a philosophical one, but becomes the basis for the more pragmatic question, often confronting for humans concerned, about to what extent the animals are willing co-workers in these industries.

ANIMAL ABECEDARY: “o for œuvres” and “q for queer”

Abstract: In 2012, Despret published an abecedary entitled What Would Animals Say, If … They Were Asked the Right Questions? Covering a range of subjects, themes, authors, and animals, Despret carefully and playfully demonstrates the ability of animals to continuously force us to re-examine our most basic and arrived at human conceptions, understandings, and biases. Excerpted from this book are two chapters on art and gender. “O for Œuvres” looks at the question of animal agency and intentionality in the making of a work of art. Drawing from Alfred Gell, Étienne Souriau, and bower-birds, Despret expands the notion of agency in art and questions the tendency towards human exceptionalism. In “Q for Queer,” king penguins come out of the closet to reveal and question certain preconceived human ideas about gender, sexuality, and cultures of heteronormativity within animal worlds.