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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Raymond Corbey and Annete Lanjouw (eds.), The Politics of Species. Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals, Cambridge University Press, 2014
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Book Reviews
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17295
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Raymond Corbey and Annete Lanjouw (eds.), The Politics of Species. Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals, Cambridge University Press, 2014
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7
Book Reviews                                                               159

   Raymond Corbey and Annete Lanjouw (eds.)
The Politics of Species. Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp 296

Ane Møller Gabrielsen Norwegian University of Science and
Technology

    The Politics of Species. Reshaping our Relationship with Other Animals
is a collection of 20 essays with a shared objective: To reshape human atti-
tudes towards other species. “Politics” is defined as “the activities that
people engage in to define and exercise power, status, or authority, either
among states or among groups within a state” (1), and it is clear that this
collection represents a deeply critical view of the ways human beings ex-
ercise their power over animals. This view is further elaborated by au-
thors with background from animal activism, science, social science and
the humanities, who offer a broad range of approaches to human-animal
relations and the question of animal ethics.
    The Politics of Species consists of three main sections. The essays in the
first section, “Moving beyond speciesism” explore the roots and effects of
speciesism, i.e. human discrimination of other animal beings on account
of their species membership, and argue in favour of non-hierarchical
thinking about humans and other animals. Section two, “Sentience and
agency” focuses on the emotional and cognitive capacities of different an-
imal species in order to defend their status as moral beings, while the
third section, “Toward respectful coexistence”, explores the conditions
for respectful coexistence between humans and animals through various
approaches.
    Although The Politics of Species is thematically situated within the
emerging field of animal studies and its variants human-animal studies
(HAS) and critical animal studies (CAS), human-animal relations are also
relevant for science and technology studies and have been addressed by
several STS-scholars. One example is Bruno Latour, who in The Politics
of Nature (2004), argues for a “new constitution” that also takes the voic-
es of non-humans into consideration. While The Politics of Species criti-
cizes the political distinctions between humans and non-humans and calls
for respectful coexistence, Latour’s aim is to designate “the right way to
compose a common world, the kind of world the Greeks called a cos-
mos” (Latour 2004, 8) through engaging a collective of humans and non-
humans. Thus, the two books share a common theme.
    A reworking of the relations between humans and non-humans is cru-
cial for Latour’s project, and the first section of The Politics of Species can
be said to lay out the theoretical and philosophical framework for such a
reworking by defining the limits for the non-human animals worthy of in-
clusion in the collective. The contributors to The Politics of Species could
further be seen as examples of Latour’s spokepersons (Latour 2004, 62)
160                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

who speak on behalf of the non-humans. The spokespersons differ in who
they speak for, some speak on behalf of certain species like chimpanzees
or dolphins, others speak for broader categories. An example of the latter
is animal rights advocate Joan Dunayer, who states that the attempts to
overcome speciesism has led to “new speciesism”, reserving rights and
moral obligations only for those beings who are considered most similar
to humans. Non-speciesism, Dunayer argues, must grant rights to life,
liberty and property to all sentient beings, which for Dunayer include “all
creatures with a nervous system” (30).
    The essays in The Politics of Species convey an impressing amount of
knowledge about animals and the mechanisms of exploitation and dis-
crimination. However, as Latour stresses, spokespersons should always be
treated with scepticism (Latour 2004, 62). One problematic aspect is that
the line for moral inclusion is still drawn by the capacities recognizable as
“human”. An example is “Human, dolphins, and moral inclusivity”,
where behavioral neuroscientist Lori Marino argues that the obvious bod-
ily differences between humans and cetaceans make it difficult to
acknowledge how similar they actually are to humans in terms of intelli-
gence, self-awareness and emotional and social complexity. Thus, as simi-
larity with humans constitute the main moral criteria throughout most of
the book, the spokespersons in The Politics of Species argue in favour of
non-humans from a firm human standpoint and in a way that reproduces
the human-animal dichotomy it tries to diminish.
    However, there are exceptions. In “Entangled Empathy: An alterna-
tive approach to animal ethics”, philosopher and gender scholar Lori
Gruen states that simply expanding the circle with (some) humans as the
moral centre is not enough. “[I]n our magnanimous embrace of the oth-
er, we end up reconfiguring a dualism that will inevitably find some “oth-
er” to exclude”, Gruen writes (224), and suggests exercising moral agency
not by including, but by responding to the multitude of beings we are al-
ready engaged and entangled with.
    Another interesting essay is philosopher David Livingstone Smith’s
“Indexically yours: why being human is more like being here than like be-
ing water”. According to Livingstone Smith, both those in favour of and
those against the moral inclusion of non-humans confuse the human/non-
human distinction with the distinction between Homo sapiens and other
species. However, discrimination of “non-humans” is not simply a matter
of discrimination on biological grounds, he argues, but rather a phenom-
enon rooted in the ways “human” is constructed through language. Thus,
Livingstone Smith’s claim is not that Homo sapiens discriminate against
other species, but rather that “we”, whoever we might be, tend to dis-
criminate against “others”.
    Gruen and Livingstone Smith’s approaches to animal ethics resonate
with the work of another STS-scholar, Donna Haraway, who in When
Species Meet (2008) relentlessly stresses that “[e]very being is a multi-
species crowd” (Haraway 2008, 165) and “[t]o be one is always to be-
Book Reviews                                                                   161
come with many” (Haraway 2008, 4). This could be termed a posthuman-
ist view on human-animal relations (Wolfe 2010), a view that is also pre-
sent in cultural anthropologist Eben Kirksey’s contribution, “Interspecies
love: being and becoming with a common ant, Ectatomma ruidum (Roger)”.
    Referring to the works of Latour, Haraway and philosopher Isabelle
Stenger, Kirksey describes the ants as “agents of cosmopolitical assembly,
conscious beings who become involved with other creatures through rela-
tions of reciprocity, kinship and accountability” (165). As also humans
are capable of being enrolled in these elaborate networks of relations,
Kirksey suggests that “we should learn to better embrace species such as
Ectatomma, cosmopolitical creatures that are good for humans to live
with in common worlds” (175).
    Kirksey’s account of the ants is the most explicitly STS-oriented essay
in The Politics of Species. The ants are described as agents in material-
semiotic networks (167), the larvae are viewed as obligatory passage
points for food (168), and the building of “cosmopolitical worlds” thro-
ugh “political articulations” with plants and insects (173) resonates with
Latour’s understanding of politics as “the entire set of tasks that allow the
progressive composition of a common world” (Latour 2004, 53). It is
somewhat amusing that it is the ants that fuse STS and animal studies.
Latour once wrote that the acronym was the reason he chose to stay with
the term actor-network theory, stating that “A.N.T. was perfectly fit for a
blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler. An ant
writing for other ants, this fits my project very well!” (Latour 2005, 9).
The ants also fit the project of The Politics of Species; through their inter-
species associations, they offer a promising prospect of a multispecies pol-
itics for “respectful coexistence” in shared worlds, or cosmos.

References
Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
   Press.
Latour, B. (2004) The Politics of Nature. How to bring the sciences into democracy,
   Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An introduction to actor-network-
   theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Wolfe, C. (2010) What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
   Press.




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