For Beasts, Against Savages: Towards the Long History of Animal Rights Movement

Summary For Beasts, Against Savages proposes ethnological research into the long history of the animal rights movement and its role in identity formation. The perspective is to think past the altruism-apparent of animal rights movements, reflecting within them a form of bourgeois tendency to distinguish itself from the lower classes. In the first part of research, the focus is on animal welfare activists in 19th-century Trieste and similar associations in nearby cities. Researched sources suggest that the then-growing animal rights movement was an elite ambition. Activists complained against "crass torturers" and "cruel barbarians" who were, in their ideation, grossly mistreating the animals. The critical discourse employed in attempts to influence lower classes sets in question the seemingly self-evident benevolence of the agents. There is grounds to state that the movement, in fact, served as an instrument to culturally distinguish the growing bourgeoisie from the lower classes. Thus, the project will consider human–animal relations as a way to illuminate the process of bourgeois identity formation in the course of the 19th century. Collected, still unexplored sources will be contextualized with an ethnological toolkit, tracking how the narratives around the concept of animal welfare emerged and ripened to constitute an essential segment of bourgeois microcosmology. The longue durée of the animal rights movement is central to the second part of the project, in which the contemporary pattern of human–animal relations is observed. Animal rights movements successfully and permanently changed the societal attitudes and practices towards animals, which we now collectively inherit. In the second part, the project will thus investigate to what extent ideas spread by 19th-century animal rights activists still constitute human–animal relations in modern time. More precisely: can the way humans treat animals today serve as axis of separating the "kind" from the "cruel", the elites from the farmers and workers? These answers will be obtained through an ethnographic study of animal welfare activism and human–animal encounters in contemporary Trieste and Ljubljana. In comparison to the ontological trend that has been resonating among anthropologists, ethnologists and scholars from other disciplines, the project does not center on rejecting the category of "human" as given. Research interest remains tied to people, and the way they make meaning of the world. In fact it returns to the salient question – what does our understanding of the animal world tell us about ourselves? What is more, contemporary studies on human–animal attitudes concentrate solely on the present, and in this manner neglect historical context, opening a gap the present project proposal has the potential to fill. In terms of uniqueness, the project proposes an original exploration in almost two centuries of human–animal relations, for which interdisciplinarity is of vital importance. It is positioned at the intersection of ethnology and history, separated now more than ever in the contemporary Slovenian scholarly world, and thus can also be understood as an attempt to instigate a dialogue between the two.