1 Loving, Being, Killing Animals An Afterword for the forthcoming book “Centering Animals” Neil L. Whitehead Since the appearance of Singer's Animal Liberation in 1975, followed by Regan and Singer's Animal rights and human obligations in1976, an incremental but clearlyvisible shift in the public view of human-animal relations has occurred, inspired by a 2 growing output of books, articles, and films, the appearance of organizations and grassroots movements, and lifestyle changes. Previously obscured from critical inquiry, nonhuman nature became the object of philosophical discourse, mostly confined to universities in Europe and the United States (Wolfe 2003). The result has been a series of reforms leading to more humane treatment of animals, the spread of direct-action politics around such issues as hunting, trapping, lab testing, and animal farming, and greater public readiness to take animal interests seriously, leading, for example, to stiffer prison sentences in cases of animal cruelty. There is a general heightened awareness, thanks partly to the Darwinian legacy, that humans and animals occupy the same temporal space, their fates organically bound together within the same planetary ecology. However this liberal cultural framework fails to escape the logic of capitalism and colonialism since the universalization of “human” rights and the extension of those rights to “animals” begs many questions as to animality and humanity as well as the emancipatory potential of the human rights discourse itself. This issue is important since, as Duarte suggests in this volume, “During the first decades of the twentieth century, the processes of constructing national identities in various Latin American countries were decisively linked to the sciences of the natural world”. Moreover the logic of domination is inherent in our attempts to write animals in, just as with the category of “children”, the perceived lack of opportunity or ability to “speak for oneself” invites the rescuing discourse of inherent “rights” to supplant this silence. Thus there are both political and theoretical issues at stake here, on the one hand the advocacy of inherent value and moral rights which are part of our progressive liberal modernity, and on the other a scientifically and medically inflected perception of the human as an integral category of ontology. If we are to move forward from the arguments made over thirty years ago by Singer and Regan then, as do authors in this volume, we must begin to not just centre the “animal” but simultaneously de-centre the “human”. (see also Fudge et al., 1999). As Soluri writes in his chapter for this volume, “I am hesitant to reject liberal notions of “human rights” or to affirm “animal rights” where animals are implicitly understood to be individuals. The historical and ecological meanings of animals are always contextual – conditioned by when and where they live.” In the same 3 way that the “human rights” discourse has been welded to the exercise of global domination by Western governments, so too restricting animals to playing the role of historical “victims.” threatens to reproduce the way in which liberal discourse on human social justice is apt to confine political resistance to symptoms of trauma or historical victimization and so erase the eruptive political meanings of such resistance1. In this way the uncritical call for “animal rights” can become a disguised form of neo-colonial control, as in contemporary Asia, Africa or South America (Knight 2001). The legal and moral necessity for Western governments, NGO’s and liberal activists to intervene in local contexts is then advanced under the guise of a “deep ecology” and rhetorically driven by a variety of preservationist and conservationist discourses2. So even as we need to reject anthropomorphism as a means to construct an animal historiography, and even though the authors in this volume show that writing a specific history of animals is itself problematic, the purposes of writing histories must at the least be redirected to excavating the human-animal dyad as an historically dynamic, and largely ignored, feature of those “histories of humans”. Just as the idea of “landscape” began to permit new kinds of histories in which human agency, even if not abandoned, was seen as only one component of a set of complex relationships amongst humans and their landscapes which necessitated closer attention to ecological process and non-human behaviors, so the challenge going forward is to, in turn, breach the ecologicalanimal/human divide. This is partly achieved in this volume through the examination of what Ahuja terms “transpsecies formations” created through the exercise of imperial biopower, that is the ways in which power over humans is often via power over animals, or the animalization of humans. Equally, as Duarte suggests for Brazil, in both colonial and post-colonial contexts “the search for institutions which would serve the country’s entry into the modern world were also serviced by a “preservationist discourse” such that,” the denunciation of the extermination of birds was a recurring theme that was certainly in accord with international movements then on the rise:” Likewise, as McCrea cogently demonstrates with regard to Mexico, not just the animal but the microbial was part of this emergent modernity, and the eradication of cholera or malaria could become a means for the spread of governmentality to the wild and untamed regions beyond the rule of law. Indeed the establishment of the modern state in North America and Europe in the 4 late nineteenth century also hinged in part on analogous campaigns of public health, as in the iconic case of “Typhoid Mary” in the United States3. Whether through the construction of scientific knowledge or the practice of medical health campaigns the eradication of insects as vectors for viruses, pathogens, bacteria, microbes and so forth, all part of living systems if not animal life, has been at the core of attempts to establish modernity. McCrea notes the central role played by the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board in encouraging and aiding the campaigns against yellow fever, malaria and cholera in Mexico, and this imperial interest in “public health” was no less evident inside the United States itself. As one of the organizations4 that led to the foundation of the contemporary Center for Disease Control (CDC) there is a linear connection between the construction of bio-regimes of health and sanitation in South America and the bio-power of the contemporary US state. As McCrea argues, “animals, insects, and frequently the indigenous Maya were all alike cast as perpetrators of filth and illness” and so we are still battling “Mexican” or “Asian” flu viruses emanating from pigs and chickens that would invade the national space. This in turn gives rise to “The ideal of the healthy state [that] required regulating and controlling animals, insects, and indigenous populations according to popularized notions associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ species and racial hierarchies” (McCrea this volume). The advent of the “healthy state” is also the moment for the invention of the modern, racially biologized human5. So too, analogous campaigns against the disease of drug-use, or even “jihadism” are part of this formulation of modern state power. It is not surprising to learn then that the CDC also hosted all kinds of bio-experiments on US citizens, especially the relatively powerless populations of African-Americans, mental patients and orphaned children, often in conjunction with the CIA and military6. Likewise the United States Park Service and Departments of Natural resources at the State level are continually engaged in battling “invasive” species – zebra mussels, lampreys, Asian carp, Japanese beetles, ashborers, elm-beetles, and snakehead fish alongside a host of plants such as garlic mustard, millefoil and knotweed provide a constant stimulus to the idea of the agencies of the state as defender of our bio-integrity and political freedoms. Just as the garrapata flies, discussed in McCrea’s chapter, dramatize the voracious and endemic threat from the foreign that modernity must eradicate, so too, in a dystopian vision of bio-mutation, 5 “killer-bees” now iconically track the advance of the threatening biology of the other. As Few also notes in her chapter, pathogens, and insects seem not to count as “animals” but our zoological attitudes are certainly informed and shaped by ideas about pathogens and insects. A “plague of sheep” is the title of a classic work (Melville 1994) on the explosion of sheep populations in Mexico and how they literally ate out the indigenous humans, which neatly and saliently conjoins those ideas. As Crosby (1972) documented more widely of this “Columbian Exchange” in the Americas, and as the chapters in this volume more precisely demonstrate, the changing landscapes and biotic taxa of the Americas were perhaps the first evidence of the stirrings of that modern bio-power which has now moved from the exterior body into the interior body of neurological mind and somatic chemistry, mediated through medical science (Whitehead 2009). To begin an escape from this discourse of power and domination over a threatening and foreign “nature”, and following many of the chapters in this volume we might direct our attention to that aspect of non-Western thinking about animals which has been called its “perspectival quality” (Århem 1993). This perspectival character to classificatory and cosmological systems, common to many indigenous peoples of the Americas, and indeed elsewhere, results in viewing the world as inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, who apprehend reality from distinct points of view. This is not simply a relativism (Viveiros de Castro 2000), but in fact challenges an opposition between relativism and universalism. As many anthropologists have already concluded, the classic distinction between Nature and Culture cannot be assumed to describe domains internal to non-Western cosmologies. Indeed the results of ethnographic research over the last two decades implies a redistribution of the predicates subsumed within the two paradigmatic sets that traditionally oppose one another under the headings of “Nature” and “Culture”: universal and particular, objective and subjective, physical and social, fact and value, the given and the instituted, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and transcendence, body and mind, animality and humanity, among many more (Derrida 2008). This has led to the suggestion that “multi-naturalism”, as opposed to Western “multi-culturalism” is a key and revealing difference here. Multi-culturalism, the plenitude of culture, is founded for Western thought on an assumption of the unity of 6 nature but the plurality of cultures. The Natural proceeds from a supposedly objective universality of body and substance, the Cultural is generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning. In this scheme indigenous conceptions suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity in which culture or the subject would be the form of the universal, whilst nature or the object would be the form of the particular. So critique of the distinction between Nature and Culture is relevant here for the light it may shed on perspectivist cosmologies and how they can inform the attempt to “center animals”. Viveiros de Castro has neatly summarized the ethnographic materials as follows; “Typically, in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators).” In this way the houses or villages of peccaries or jaguars, their places, give rise to their own particular habits and characteristics, forms of culture. Fur, feathers, claws, beaks are indeed seen as body decorations and as such cultural instruments for loving and killing. So too, in a direct inversion of sociobiology (Wilson 1975), they see their social system as human institutions of chiefs, shamans, rituals and marriages. As the editors to this volume point out, “The number of works dealing with indigenous conceptions of animals in the Americas attests to the astrological and cosmological significance they had in many communities”. However, indigenous perspectivism is not just a latent a-historical symbolic category but a theory of cultural practice. For example, in hunting and war, we encounter a perhaps the most fundamental way of loving, being and killing animals (others) and humans (ourselves). In this way hunting and war are the primordial relationship through which humanity and animality are created. Nor is it a given as to who occupies what position across this putative divide. As Few writes in this volume “In other ways locusts acted like humans—swarming and flying together across the land, acting as a kind of community and eating human food, not insect food “. This humanity of the animals is usual not exceptional in indigenous Amazonia where, as the Huaorani say – “We blow hunt and spear kill”. The material partners in these violent exchanges are monkeys and peccaries in our eyes, but for the Huaorani the peccaries are human for the 7 way I which they attack villages in groups, destroying gardens houses and property and even taking life if they find someone in the village. So the peccaries are fought with the weapons of war not hunting, spears not blowpipes. Blowpipes are used to hunt monkeys for food. Moreover because the gift of food is not to be taken lightly the violence of killing is supplanted by love and identification, it is the weapon, the dart which kills the beloved monkey, nor the human person. Kinship with monkeys, also the title of a recent ethnography of the Guajá (Cormier 2003), takes this metaphor to a logical outcome in which the relations of love and identity yield to the ultimate intimacy of cannibalism. For Guajá and the Patamuna, with whom I am familiar, all forms of plant and animal life, and especially monkeys, have ekati (animation) and are woven into a comprehensive kinship system or webs of affinity or love (Santos-Granero 1991) Therefore, all consumption can be considered a form of incestuous cannibalism, and an act of loving and killing. Monkeys, as are dogs, may be breast fed by a human mother and achieve a social status that recalls but exceeds that of Western “pets”, as discussed in Tortorici’s chapter. For captives of war are also understood as “pets”, and like monkeys may be finally (if terminally) fully absorbed into the socio-cultural matrix through cannibalism. The sexuality of love is displaced into bodily proximity as the rules of incest track those of cannibalism. However, the intimacy of killing and eating is at least as strong as that of copulation, especially in an un-Freudian world. Loving, being and killing animals thus dissolves the binaries of nature/culture, human/animal, lover/pet and through a deictic perspectivism opens the possibility for corporeal transformation as spirits (subjectivities, identities) occupy variant material forms. The logics of killing and loving are therefore guided through reference to a spiritual terrain in which appropriate and inappropriate actions are articulated in a theory of practice as ritual. In turn shamanism, the mastery of ritual as practice and performance, legitimately can be understood as the “high-science” of indigenous society7. Thus the Guajá monkeys are very different “persons” to the monkeys of Ahuja’s chapter who have a “contradictory status as, on the one hand, figures of universal progress aligned with technoscientific modernity, and, on the other, as “invasive species” that symbolize the multiple violences of United States imperialism and neoliberal development policy”. As the pioneering work of Emiko Ohnuki Tierney has already made clear, the monkey is a mirror that reflects a shifting not stable boundary to 8 the human, and which may be crossed in either direction (Ohnuki-Tierney 1989). For this reason also even mainstream primatologists, whose commitment to zoological science might suggest otherwise, now question not just the culturally dependent character of scientific knowledge but also the ultimate feasibility of its purposes as a mode of inventing the human (Atlan and De Waal 2007). As Ahuja writes in this volume; “a history of imported monkeys in Puerto Rico might help scholars theorize knowledgeproduction in the humanities, as well as… biopolitical theory, critical species studies, and social and cultural studies of science”. Also writing of Puerto Rico and the popular identification of the former dictator Trujillo with a goat, Derby reminds us that not just monkeys but also goats might come to play such a role, since it is not just the analogical character of the bio-anatomical properties of monkeys or goats when viewed alongside the humans that is important, but also how this phenomenon reveals the way in culture, power and symbolization unfolds through time. The commercial seal hunters discussed by Soluri, if they can be considered hunters at all, clearly do not occupy such subject positions and are arguably themselves so alienated from their labor as to make the possibility of loving and being all but unattainable. Although this did not preclude a kind of mawkishness which might have affected sealers, Soluri writes; “With few exceptions, the sealers’ descriptions of local fauna encountered – be it seals, sea lions, penguins, or guanacos – are unsentimental. In the few cases where an author expressed a sentiment toward an animal, the objects of affection were invariably mascots.” Here the relations of production are those of killing as an industrial process, a ghastly portent of holocausts to come, just as animal husbandry foreshadows human slavery. What is seen as cultural transcendence or universalism from the perspective of multi-culturalism becomes shared experience in a multi-natural viewpoint. This then might also be the start point for centering animals in histories informed not by a politics of identity but that of experience. Hunters experience is shared with their prey as hunting itself is always a mimesis of prey – what they do you must do to find and kill them. Killing by being an animal gives rise to affinity. Even in the musthave commodity and gadget driven world of US sport hunting this mimesis of prey is evident even to non-hunters in the endless reproduction of their images, a hyper-reality of baleful but grateful prey (Brightman 1993) Nevertheless, most hunters will certainly 9 assent to the idea that animals are all individuals who fail to match expectations generated by scientific zoologies in endless ways. However, that indigenous cosmologies centered animals in different ways to those of Europe should not obscure for us how, both in Europe or America, local or “folk” ideas and practices were under heavy pressure from the burgeoning modernity of science and associated systems of classification. Just a Keith Thomas (1983) has shown for Europe that there were fundamental changes in attitudes to the “natural world” from the sixteenth century on, so too Warren in this volume reveals how a particular native healing system was melded with European medical taxonomy: “By the eighteenth century, in fact, such local practices involving animal-based treatments had spread beyond indigenous communities, constituting a key feature of popular home medical guides known as recetarios in Peru.” Such a situation might also be interpreted as one in which the indigenous was modernized through appropriation of its healing practices involving animals and their “translation” into pharmacy. Given the conjunction of humoral ideas in both Peruvian and European magical healing this process may appear almost invisible, even a valuable “rescuing” of vanishing cultures. It may be that, as Warren notes of the particular recetario he discusses, such a work “….clearly reflects the complex concepts and theories of animal and plant-based healing central to southern Andean indigenous medical thought, bringing them into popular colonial medical practice.” But such a process of translation, however benign, necessarily subtly alters the frameworks of thought that had previously informed Peruvian “humoral” healing. This is certainly the case today with the explosion of neo-shamanism8. Culturally unappealing aspects of indigenous practices, such as sacrifice (human and animal), dark shamanism and the use of ecstatic narcotics are apt to be erased, while bio-pirates from international corporations traverse the Amazon searching for pharmaceutical elements derived from indigenous manipulations of animals and plants. This means that we still need to assess the overall significance of animal manipulations in indigenous systems before we can better evaluate the place of animals in both Peruvian and European healing practices. Another potential form of history - informed not by a politics of identity but that of experience – emerges from another way in which “zoology” fails to properly represent animals. Queering the non-human and noting the biological “exuberance” of animals 10 which our human identity otherwise acts to constrains, could be the basis for histories in which interpreting animal actions become much more central (Bagemil 1999, Giffney and Hird 2008). Animals are not passive recipients of human agency but are active in shaping our culture as both McCrea and Soluri emphasizes. However, Soluri rightly concludes in his discussion of sealers that there are major difficulties left to resolve in how this agency night be read from “human” documents, “Finally, we remain with the provocative question of whether the fur seals themselves played a role in this history beyond that of passive victim. Can sources such as logbooks be read “against the current” to reveal any historical dynamism on the part of seals? “. Even if history is apparently only a human cultural practice it is not universally so in any one sense of the idea of history (Whitehead 2003). But in fact the work of ethnohistorians and debates on memory and history in anthropology over the last two decades, strongly suggest that actually we have yet to recognize how animals are historical agents and how their historicities are constituted, in the same way that previously non-Western histories among small-scale societies were obscured, or thought not to exist at all, because of the absence of textual forms of recording. A war with the jaguars or the peccaries, as narrated in the histories of Huaroni or Patamuna hunters, is most certainly centered on the agency of animals. The chiefs and warriors of the jaguars are known as individuals and recognized if encountered. In the case of the Patamuna the whole of the Siparuni Mountain is the jaguar’s kingdom and for that very reason no–one goes there. Should one of those Siparuni jaguars trouble the Patamuna then this indeed a reason for war, as it would be with their human neighbors, and sometimes jaguars are more agreeable neighbors than men. Those rapacious goats, rats and cats, as much as the animals held in closer bondage – horses, sheep, cattle and pigs – all were involved in the “conquest” of the Americas, as has often been noted. Perhaps then we should picture the feral animals in particular as historical agents in their own right, for their social projects were necessarily no less colonial than those of the humans who enabled their passages to the “new” world. As Tortorici writes in his chapter on marrying dogs: “Part of the project of “centering animals” in Latin American history is to shift the focus from the discourses on and about animals to the actual histories of those animals in order to better understand their mutable relationships with the humans around them”. 11 This also entails acknowledging the dark side of animal behaviors. So even as we may note the power relations inherent in such acts as the turkey rape committed by Pedro Na, as discussed by the editors in their Introduction, there is no reason to suppose that animals are always or merely human victims. For example, several cases of elephants raping and attacking rhinos have been reported with up to sixty-three rhinos being killed in just a short space of time. Video footage of such rape and other trans-species forms of aggression are widely available9. Just as the newly “human” peoples of indigenous America came to occupy the noble savage cultural slot in the eighteenth century, so in similar fashion today the animals have come to express the ethically purest, even if robustly Darwinian, behavioral capacities, since they are untrammeled by the contamination of culture, uncomplicated by religions and politics and uninflected by the moral imperatives of society and law. “Without faith, law and reason” was how the early missionaries famously characterized the native peoples of South America and as such they were precisely then “natural” men (Pagden 1987). Today it is the naturalness of animals that makes them worthy and apposite emblems of a condition of moral integrity that our dystopian narratives of humanity have undermined. If then historical meaning does not emanate from the human alone, the key issue is to write histories which are meaningful from the animal’s point of view. Certainly, as Few and Tortorici suggest, even without this ideal outcome, centering animals leads to a more complex historiography in the conventional sense. As Alfred Crosby first showed through the notion of a “Columbian exchange”, histories need to take account of ecological and biological processes and “centering animals” reminds us of the way in which human history is inseparable from and profoundly defined by ideas of the animal. In intellectually reaching the “species” boundary we have anyway vastly improved the writing and thinking about the past, but whether that boundary can in some sense be crossed requires further thought not just about animals but also about how history itself is constituted. Beyond the animal as historical agent is the context of action through which human-animal relationships are established. The interpretation of landscape or habitat is no less important than issues of agency to this effort to center animals since landscapes are a form of history and memory that is material in the way that human texts are. The 12 changing course of a river, the falling of an ancient tree, a stormy excess of snow, rain, wind, sunlight or shade all dynamically alter the field of animal - human interaction. Too exclusive a concentration on particular moments or forms of interaction as historiographically significant or prominent may be to miss the significance evinced in behavior which can only be considered in this broader temporal and spatial plane. In this way shared experience of place, not just experience of the other as other can be relevant here (Feld and Basso 1996). The direct experience of the deep Amazonian forest may produce epistemic possibilities that cannot be imagined from the urban contexts of most academic practice. Here a general lack of visual sight-lines, the relative absence of mammals and the prevalence of insects over even the birds is experientially an inherent challenge to normative ideas of dominion over the natural. This is why the “green hell” of Amazonia is such a standard trope in travel and fictional writing (Whitehead 2002). Indeed the order of natural things is changed dramatically in the depths of the forest, for here insects, often the least considered of animals, dominate all. As Few also shows in her chapter on locusts, “…sources, written by European travelers, include descriptions of locust plagues in ways that work to further exoticize the New World and its animal species for its European audiences”. Leading to that classic Western trope through which “…it can be said that while swarming, locusts acted as a kind of conquering “army”, though the end goal was simply to eat and reproduce and not to establish a colony”. This exactly echoes more recent fictive accounts, such as the famous short-story by Carl Stephenson, Leinigen Versus the Ants (1938). So it is relevant to know that for many Amazonian dwellers the “invasion” of such ants is a welcome opportunity to be rid of all the roaches, mice and other household “pests” which the ants so eagerly devour. The short ethnographic narrative that follows might serve also as an exemplar to begin a history of animals as agents; “So the ants are known as o coração, but Brasilino said that it was really two words run together: corre chão (running floor). I have not yet found out what species they are, but there are black ones and red ones and they do sting. They arrive (seemingly at random) and invade usually new houses at night. They all come in cleaning the walls and roof and floor of anything in their way. One must 13 stem the tide to avoid complete invasion with some kind of deterrent such as buckets of water. However, when one ant begins the exodus back into the forest, they all follow. We were invaded twice while we were there, but no one else's house was targeted by the ants. On another note, Brasilino and Dona Luiza were driven from their fine sítio inside of Lago Grande by saúva (leaf-cutter ants). They had lived there a number of years already when the ants moved in. They had several dwellings and a flour house and Dona Luiza planted many fruit trees. But the ants were determined and resisted all kinds of attempts to extinguish them including fire and water. Finally Brasilino moved his family to the mouth of the lake where they live now. We visited the old homestead site in 2005 and the ants were still living there, thirty-five years later. (Kent Wisniewski, personal communication, 01/11/10) Even the “great white hunter” may experience animality in surprising ways. The famed missionary to Africa in the nineteenth century, David Livingstone, writes the following of a lion hunt, a vignette which incidentally, as it occurs in the opening passages of the book, inaugurates an image of Livingstone in Christ-like sacrifice: “When in the act of ramming down the bullets, I heard a shout. Starting, and looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me. I was upon a little height; he caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. This singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death.” (1858: 12) 14 Sustained engagement with other ontologies and epistemologies through ethnography, hunting (or fishing), or even domesticity and husbandry, thus open new channels for centering the animal in history while attention to the meaning-laden contexts of action and behavior that provide an extended hermeneutic for the interpretation of ultimately ineffable others, whatever their forms of speciation. So the editors are certainly right in their observation that: “Another strand of the work on animals in colonial Latin America evokes considerable sophistication in the analyses of hybrid human-animal deities, shapeshifting and diabolical animals, animal metaphors, and animal symbolism as represented in archival documentation and codices. Real animals, however, have rarely been the primary focus of such works.” Which prompts the question what then is an animal? The perennial instability in that category, as much as in that of the “human”, suggests that “real animals” will forever elude us for it is ultimately an impossible desire, familiar from ethnography, of trying to occupy the subject position of the other. By definition this cannot be achieved, for to do so would to be that other whose ineffable nature cannot be explained in its own terms, for that is where the project of knowledge of others begins, with un-interpreted utterance and behavior. So knowing others, including the animals, must always be a matter of trying to make exotic experience accessible rather than explicable. Explanation may well function as mode of access but in itself can never exhaust the meanings in and of the actions of others. Anthropology, in the field of the human, has long realized that totalizing “holistic” explanation is impossible. No one can say why another does as they do, since we cannot even do that for ourselves. So it is the purposes of knowledge rather than hope for its completeness that needs to drive our explanatory projects of both humans and animals. 1 The notion of “trauma” is deployed to suggest that, rather than making political or cultural choices, enactors of “suicide-bombing” and other forms of violent resistance are in effect responding to the their condition of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). In fact the analysis in the Fassin volume is deeply flawed since it ironically fails to 15 recognize that, in the Palestinian case which is extensively discussed, the very notion of “martyrdom” has explicitly changed to avert this inference. Thus, while the notion of shahid (martyr) implies victimization, the more recent and relevant idea of istishhadi (martyrous one) is a proactive notion that emphasizes the heroism in the act of sacrifice over the victimization that is also part of the act (Whitehead and Abufarha 2008: 4). 2 See discussion in Wolfe 2003:26-27. 3 Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the United States to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. As a cook, she is known to have infected over fifty people, three of whom died from the disease. Due to her denial that she war responsible for spreading the disease she was forcibly quarantined twice and finally died in quarantine. 4 Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities (1942), Office of Malaria Control in War Areas (1942–1946), Communicable Disease Center (1946–1967), National Communicable Disease Center (1967–1970), Center for Disease Control (1970–1980), Centers for Disease Control (1980–1992) 5 Just as the Christian missionaries of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries pursued the proper and moral arrangement of domestic space to guard against the sin-disease of unregulated sexuality so too mosquito nets hung around hammocks or beds dividing the home life into smaller “safe” zones as part of the campaigns against malaria meant that those who did not abide by these new arrangements became the new ‘primitive” in a regime of modern medical science and state public health committees. 16 6 The MK-Ultra experiments with LSD and the protocols of medical experiments in which syphilis was purposely left untreated are just two of the more egregious examples of this hidden history (Whitehead 2009) 7 , A term derived from a Patamuna gloss of the term “piaii”, more usually translated as “shamanism” 8 Sir Walter Ralegh, it the sixteenth century, returned from the Orinoco River with three shamans Ragapo, “Harry”, and Cayoworaco. They had lodgings near the Tower of London and frequently visited Ralegh who busied himself with teaching them English and various experiments in medicinal preparations (Whitehead 1997: 30-31), 9 On YouTube for example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ7lruKlzK8. The original NYT story is here http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?_r=1