[First published in Cultural Anthropology]
Holding together a pair of texts by a dog lover, and a
self-confessed bird phobe, I found entangled themes and threads of
argumentation: about being with others
in a world of intersubjectivity, a world in which sentient subjects face each
other, where scenes of deadly commotion might suddenly erupt with cycles of
terror spinning out of control. Hoon
Song uses his own “opaque madness”, a fear of the cold flinty beaks and
sewed-in button eyes of pigeons, as a route to circumspectly approach the
delicate theme of whiteness in rural America.
Intimate knowledge of the irrationality of the former, Song suggests,
might illuminate the same in the latter.
Deborah Bird Rose reckons with madness of white settler colonialism in
Aboriginal Australia. Campaigns by
ranchers to poison dingoes have generated what Rose calls “double death”, a
process that uncouples life and death, diminishing life’s capacity to offer
intergenerational gifts, and diminishing death’s capacity to turn the dying
back toward the living.
The mass death of birds in the rural Pennsylvania community
of Hegins, the site of Hoon Song’s Pigeon Trouble, was once bound to an
ethos of charity and communal solidarity amongst humans. In the early 20th century the
residents of Hegins began staging Labor Day Pigeon Shoots—big communal fests
where well-to-do citizens killed birds and donated them as food for the poorest
farmers in town. Song describes how the
gaze of Others—animal rights activists, journalists, and academics like himself—began
to prevent the pigeon shooters from being totally themselves. As legions of activists came to protest and
document the Labor Day Pigeon Shoot, the event became an annual frenzy of
killing by hooligans, a celebratory theatrics of flamboyant lynching.
Mutually invoked misunderstandings threatened to spiral out
of control as Song (who hails from Korea) went about conducting fieldwork in
this rural white milieu haunted by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. Meeting the gaze of racists, and enduring
occasional death threats, Song found himself thrust violently into a terrifying
vortex. “My fear...took the form of a
precipitous anticipation of what scene of commotion might transpire in our
encounter; it was not only fear of [the
racist] but, shall we say, fear for both
of us” (p. 14). Song’s
“ornithophobia” is much like his intersubjective experience of racist
xenophobia. Legions of birds perched on
electric wires, reflect and multiply his fears.
“It is as if my fear of them is never in the present tense...What is so
dreadful is the imminent prospect of...uncontrollably spiraling into a mutually
invoked eruption of convulsive panic” (p. 9).
Song sees “a certain cruel beauty” in the relationship
between birds and their executioners, where “helpless victims find comfort in
the sure grip of confident and thick-skinned handlers” (p. 25). In the “apprehensive and timid” hands of
animal rights activists, each clad in a pair of rubber gloves, wounded pigeons
put up all kinds of struggle, according to Song, on their way to a Wounded Bird
First Aid Station set up outside of the Labor Day Shoot. “What kind of prudent ‘love’ is this?” he
asks, “Love that fears, and fears for both the subject and object?” (p. 39).
Deborah Bird Rose argues for an ethics of love and care that
does not exclude death. “An ethical
response to the call of others does not hinge on killing or not killing,” she
argues. Whereas Song navigates a liminal
space betwixt and between social worlds, refusing an easy alliance with
activists who are uncomfortable touching animals or with hooligan executioners,
Rose clearly casts her lot with Aboriginal Australian ways of being in the
world. Dwelling with people who inhabit
the realm of Dreaming, who live within multispecies kin groups traceable back
to creation, Rose found that dingo people and dingo dogs take care of each
other—watching out for each other’s interests, defending against
outsiders. She also carefully documents
tactics used by outsiders, her own white countrymen, to disrupt indigenous
lifeways and ecologies.
Dingo extermination campaigns by white Australians have, at
times, involved grotesque spectacles of violence. Rose describes trees strung up with the
“strange fruit” of dead dingoes. Quoting
cattle-ranchers, she recalls the massive police actions, uncontrollable scenes
of panic, in Aboriginal villages during the 1940s: “As the bullets flew past
them the women screamed in fright, dragging their animals ever faster behind
them. Pandemonium broke loose. A dog yelped suddenly, leapt into the air,
and rolled kicking in the dust. Another
followed, and another...At last [the Mounted Constable] put down his rifle and
looked around him. No dogs in the camp
now, only a bunch o’ niggers scared half out o’ their wits.” Looking into an emptiness that used to be
dogs, Rose sees not departures that could be twisted back into life, but
one-way trips into nowhere (p. 23-4). In
coming decades, wild dingo poison-baiting programs instigated broader waves of
death in the lands of Australian dreaming.
Poisoned dingoes became agents of double death in the afterlife—living
things who came for sustenance, who ate the dead as food, were harmed or killed
by the poison as well.
Song describes a parallel trajectory in the United States:
the advent of pest poisoning campaigns in urban areas and the use of lead
shotgun shells in rural areas began to transform how people were thinking about
pigeons. If pigeons were once a
wholesome food, emergent killing technologies made them into pests and
outcasts. While the Labor Day Shoot
initially turned dying back toward generous forms of productive life, as the
birds became inedible the event became an instantiation of double death. Bird corpses began piling up in the land of
the living (cf. Rose, p. 92). Animal
rights activists also inadvertently played a role in helping turn pigeons into
vermin. Spreading fears about
interspecies contact and contagion, the campaigners who tried to stop the Labor
Day Pigeon Shoot mobilized biomedical experts, who testified about the
epidemiological dangers of handling birds.
At gun clubs in hidden backwoods
hollows, Song discovered people who were intimately handling pigeons despite
the alleged epidemiological risks. If
“barn birds” used in the Labor Day shoot were regarded as vermin, and confined
the realm of killable “bare life” (zoe),
the daily training of pigeons, or “brushing”, brought them into the realm of bios, with legible biographical lives
(cf. Agamben 1998:2). Fed with a special
diet, and treated with the utmost care, brushed birds were enlisted in an existential
dance with humans and phantom hawks.
Brushing involves tying a auditory simulacrum of a hawk—a whistle,
bottle cap, or bell—to the tails of prized pigeons. Daily training with these “hawks” makes these
pigeons evasive fliers, better able to outmaneuver shotgun blasts during
private head-to-head shooting matches among competing gun clubs.
Writing about avian
existentialism, Song suggests that brushing also makes pigeons think that
“the hawk’s look is always ‘on’. “
Building on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze, he suggests “the hawk’s
look can function as a condition of possibility for the pigeon’s look only
insofar as the former does not appear in the latter’s purview as another look
but only as something whose presence is suspected” (p. 189).
Hoon Song’s own fears and anxieties proliferate, at several
points in the book, when he becomes trapped in a gaze of mutual-recognition
with pigeons. “The creatures regard me
in sidelong glances of apprehensive familiarity,” he writes, “there is a sense
of my being primordially given to their recognition—the recognition of none
other than a birdphobe in me” (p. 9).
Perhaps Song becomes animal himself
during his first contacts with pigeons—his terror of the birds generates
frenzies of creaturely violence (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987:265; Haraway
2008:28). Reckoning with his fears by
becoming the apprentice of a respected bird brusher, Song eventually becomes a
careful student of bird behavior with an ethologist’s eye for detail.
The source of the pigeons used in the Labor Day Shoot was a
closely held secret amongst his interlocutors who feared persecution by
Outsiders. Following the animals, and
adopting clever methods for divining their origin, Song noted birds that were
unfamiliar with the territory. In
contrast to the fast flying and flock-forming “brushed birds”, which were
grounded in the topos of territory
(cf. Derrida 1994: 82; Kirksey 2012), he spotted small groups of birds flying
slowly around the Hegins Valley area in the weeks after the shoot. When Song scattered a bagful of peas—feral
pigeons’ favorite diet—he found “no apparent pecking dominance, no sign of
heavier-looking birds occupying the central position of the feed spread.” (p.
106). Deducing an unstable and
improvised social formation from these pecking behaviors, Song concludes that
they were clearly displaced birds, likely carted in from cities for the Labor
Day Shoot.
In Wild Dog Dreaming Rose also explores the
fragmented social formations amongst dingoes who survive massive extermination
campaigns. She describes interspecies
relations of love, where “people were burying their kin, and as they did so
they looked into a death space in which not only their loved ones, but the
future generations of their loved ones, had been exterminated” (p. 25).
Departing from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who pulled
ethics away from abstractions and located ethical call-and-response within the
living reality of the material world, Rose accounts for interspecies
responsibilities that are up-close, face-to-face, in both life and death. If Levinas ultimately rejected obligations to
animals, creatures he regarded as lacking a “face”, Rose develops her idea of ecological existentialism to think about
how responsibility and accountably works across the species interface. “Ecological existentialism pulls together two
major shifts in worldview: the end of certainty and the end of atomism. From certainty the shift is to uncertainty. From atomism the shift is to connectivity”
(p. 2-3). Whereas the uncertainty of
intersubjective connections generate fear and anxiety for Song, these same
dynamics prompt Rose to assert the need for life-affirming awareness.
Offering a rare and intimate account of anxieties that can
proliferate in encounters with animal Others, Pigeon Trouble will
certainly become a canonical text in the emergent interdisciplinary tradition
of multispecies ethnography (for a review of other foundational texts, see:
Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). Song
betrays an existentialist loneliness, a sense of cosmic isolation, against
which Rose offers an antidote.
“Ecological existentialism,” in her own words, “proposes a kinship of
becoming: no telos, no deus ex machina to rescue us, no clockwork to keep us
ticking along” (p. 44). Situating
ourselves in this rich plentitude, with all its joys and hazards, offers a
route to biocultural hope.
Hoon Song. Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a
Deindustrialized America. 2010. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 262 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4242-3
Deborah Bird Rose. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction.2011.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
169 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8139-3091-6
References
Agamben, Giorgio
1998 Homo Sacer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari
1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
Derrida, Jacques
1994 Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna
2008 When Species Meet. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Kirksey, S. Eben
2012 Freedom in Entangled Worlds. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmereich
2010 The Emergence of Multispecies
Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-687.
