Humanity and Animality

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HUMANITY AND ANIMALITY

Tim Ingold

The proper subject of anthropology is humanity. That much is easily stated,but it is more difficult to envision how such a science of humanity should beconstructed. This article is an attempt to show how we might go about it.Perhaps you will think the project absurdly narrow, or on the other handimpossibly broad. Supposing you held the former view, you might respond asfollows: ‘Science of humanity? Don’t be ridiculous. Homo sapiens is just onespecies among hundreds of thousands, and a relatively recent one at that. Dowe have to have a separate science for every species?’ If you were an advocate ofthe latter view, however, these particular objections would seem to miss thepoint. To study humanity, you would say, is not just to probe the idiosyncrasiesof a particular species, of one minute segment of the world of nature. It israther to lay open for investigation that world interminably multiplied in theexuberantly creative minds and activities of people everywhere. The task isimpossible because the subject matter is forever exploding beyond our limitedcompass. Human beings ourselves, our problem is not that we have failed tocut humanity down to size, but rather that we shall never be able to catch upwith it.

These alternative positions rest, in fact, on radically different notions ofwhat humanity is, or might be. The best way to demonstrate this difference isby looking at the ways in which ideas about humanity and human beings haveshaped, and been shaped by, ideas about animals. For those of us reared in thetradition of Western thought, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are terms rich inassociation, fraught with ambiguity, and heavily laden with both intellectualand emotional bias. From classical times to the present day, animals havefigured centrally in the Western construction of ‘man’—and we might add, ofWestern man’s image of woman. Every generation has recreated its own viewof animality as a deficiency in everything that we humans are uniquelysupposed to have, including language, reason, intellect and moral conscience.And in every generation we have been reminded, as though it were some

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startling new discovery, that human beings are animals too, and that it is bycomparison with other animals that we can best reach an understanding ofourselves.

This article is divided into three parts. In the first I consider the definitionof humanity as a species of animal, encompassing all individuals belonging tothe biological taxon Homo sapiens. How do we recognize what is, or is not, ahuman being? This is a question that scarcely troubles us nowadays, for with aworld now fully opened up to travel and communication, we think we know thefull range of human variation. But it sorely troubled our predecessors duringthe early days of colonial exploration, and if we bother to ask it we may find itno easier than they did to come up with an answer that will withstand rigorouscritical scrutiny. In the second part of the article I introduce a contrasting senseof humanity, as a condition opposed to the animal. This is the condition of beinghuman, revealed in a seemingly inexhaustible richness and diversity of culturalforms fully equal to the diversity of organic forms in nature. In the final part Ishow how the popular identification of these two notions of humanity, of thespecies with the condition, has given rise to a peculiar view of humanuniqueness. Far from being different from all other animals as the latter arefrom one another, the difference is attributed to qualities in respect of which allother animals are perceived as essentially the same. In order to overcome theanthropocentrism inherent in this view, we must think again. It is one thing toask what a human being is, quite another to ask what it means to be human. Ibegin with the former.

A QUESTION OF TAILS

In the year 1647, a Swedish naval lieutenant by the name of Nicolas Köpingwas serving aboard a Dutch East-Indiaman in the Bay of Bengal. One day theship approached an island whose naked inhabitants, according to Köping’saccount, had tails like those of cats, and a similarly feline comportment.Coming alongside in their canoes, these natives—evidently bent on trade—threatened to swarm the ship and had to be frightened off with a round ofcannon-shot. The ship’s pilot subsequently took ashore a landing party of fiveof the Dutch crew, to scour the island for provisions. They never returned, anda search mounted on the following morning revealed only their bonesdiscarded beside a still smouldering fire, and their boat systematically strippedof its iron bolts.

Köping’s story was later revived in a treatise of Linnaeus, recited by hispupil, Hoppius, in 1760. The tailed men were classed as a species of ape,appropriately named Lucifer, and illustrated by a picture that Linnaeus hadgleaned from another source (Figure 1).1 One of those who read Hoppius’soration was the learned but eccentric Scottish judge James Burnet, otherwiseknown as Lord Monboddo. In the first of six volumes entitled Of the origin andprogress of language, and published between 1773 and 1792, Monboddo set out

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to establish the continuities and contrasts between humans and other animals,and to characterize the condition of humankind in its original, ‘natural’ or‘brutish’ state. Much intrigued to read of humans with tails, his first concern—quite properly—was to check the veracity of the account. Through personalcorrespondence with Linnaeus he ascertained Köping’s credentials as atruthful and honest reporter, whose descriptions of the animal and plant lifeencountered on his voyage had proved accurate in every other respect. That theisland’s inhabitants did indeed possess tails, then, was not to be doubted. Butwere they actually humans? Of this, again, Monboddo reckoned there could belittle doubt, for Köping’s account reveals that they knew the arts of navigation,were accustomed to trade, and made use of iron (Burnet 1773:234–9).

It is easy for us, with the benefit of hindsight, to recognize the element offantasy in Köping’s story, and to think Monboddo a fool for allowing himself tobe taken in by it. Yet perhaps he was wrong for the right reasons. Anticipatingthe incredulity of his readers, Monboddo deftly turned the tables onconventional belief:

I am sensible, however, that those who believe that men are, and always have been,the same in all ages and nations of the world, and such as we see them in Europe,will think this story quite incredible; but for my own part I am convinced, that wehave not yet discovered all the variety of nature, not even in our own species; and themost incredible thing, in my apprehension, that could be told, even if there were nofacts to contradict it, would be, that all men in the different parts of the earth werethe same in size, figure, shape and colour.

Figure 1 ‘Anthropomorpha’, from C.E.Hoppius, Amoenitates academicae (Linné),Erlangae 1760. Lucifer is the second figure from the left

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It is no good your discounting the evidence for tailed people with the remarkthat ‘humans just aren’t like that’. If some populations have white skins andothers black, if some are immensely tall and others of diminutive stature, whyshould not some have tails and others not? Monboddo was clearly of theopinion that there was nothing more extraordinary about having a tail thanhaving a black skin, and that neither character furnishes a valid criterion forplacing its possessors beyond the pale of humanity. We should not be deceivedby limited, Eurocentric notions of the kind of thing that a human being is. Forhumankind, Monboddo insisted, is not fixed and immutable, rather it is bothgeographically and historically variable. Such variability is the hallmark ofanimal species, indeed of all of living nature, and in this the human is surely noexception (Burnet 1773).2

Modern biology, radically restructured in the wake of Darwin’s revelationsin The Origin of Species (1872; first published in 1859), is on Monboddo’s side:not perhaps on the matter of tails, but certainly in its outright rejection of theidea that there exists an essential form of humanity of which all actual humanbeings, past, present and future, are more or less perfect embodiments. Let usagree, with Monboddo and against many of his contemporaries, that humansare not everywhere the same ‘in size, figure, shape and colour’. Should we thenconclude that they come in a wide variety of standard sizes, figures, shapes andcolours, as do ready-to-wear coats at the tailor’s—large, medium and small,black and white, with tails and without? A notion has persisted well into thiscentury, and in some circles still persists, that one could construct a chart ofdistinctive ‘human types’. This notion is fundamentally wrong. Individualhuman beings are no more embodiments of ‘types’ than they are of a unitary,species-specific essence. In biological terms, humanity presents itself as acontinuous field of variation, compounded of a myriad of finely gradeddifferences. Any divisions of the field are of our own making, artificial productsof our penchant for classification and stereotyping. Real humans cannot beaccommodated within artificial categories: for precisely this reason the ready-to-wear coat, designed to clothe a type rather than a particular customer, isnever a perfect fit.

Individuals of the species Homo sapiens do display a remarkable degree ofvariability. Nevertheless, what holds for our species holds for all others: namely,that they are not classes of entities distinguished by the possession, by everymember of each class, of a unique attribute or cluster of attributes. In otherwords, biological species are not natural kinds (Clark 1988:20–1). Grains of saltconstitute a natural kind, since every grain has the molecular composition andcrystalline structure of sodium chloride. But the molecules that orchestrate theconstitution of living things are vastly more complex, the most important ofthese molecules being deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). As we now know, it is inthe structure of DNA that genes, the basic units of heredity, are encoded. Andalthough species vary in the diversity of their genetic material, for no species isthere a single structure underwriting the development of every individual of

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the class. On the contrary, the uniqueness of the individual most clearlydistinguishes living organisms from lifeless objects (Medawar 1957). Likecrystals, organisms grow, and like crystals they appear to be endowed with aninvariant structure that underlies their surface transformations. But whereasfor every crystal of some inorganic element or compound this structure is thesame, for every organism of a species it is different. Every crystal is a replica,every organism a novelty.

How, then, are we to decide to which species a particular organism belongs?More to the point, on what grounds might we include one animal within Homosapiens, and exclude another? Was the Lucifer of Linnaeus a man or a monkey?Such questions as these have fuelled centuries of bitter controversy, andalthough all of us nowadays might claim to be able to recognize a fellow humanbeing when we see one, arguments still rage over how the principles ofbiological taxonomy should be properly applied. For our purposes, it issufficient to note that these principles are basically genealogical. Organisms aregrouped in the same class not because of their formal, surface resemblance, butbecause of their relatively close genealogical connection. As a rule, humanbeings do resemble one another rather more than they resemble apes, and intheir lack of tails they resemble apes rather more than other primates. Theseresemblances, however, are indices of genealogical proximity, not of anyprescribed conformity to type.

The more closely related individuals are in terms of descent, the more genesthey are likely to have in common. Sometimes, when a conspicuous character iscontrolled by only one or a few genes, the slightest variations in the underlyinggenetic structure (or genotype) can have major consequences for the outwardappearance of the mature individual (or phenotype), so that even closely relatedindividuals can look very different. Other characters, even less conspicuousones, may be controlled by a very large number of genes, so that the sameamount of genotypic variation would be virtually imperceptible in thephenotype. Doubtless if humans had tails, varying from stumpy to pendulousas skin colour varies from white to black, some at least would have cause towonder which is easier to hide: tail or skin. Fortunately perhaps, we do not havethat problem, but for reasons that neither Monboddo nor his contemporarycritics could have known. The amount of genetic modification needed to turnblack skins into white (or vice versa) is minute compared with the amountneeded to lose or gain a tail. The genetic difference between tailed and taillessprimates implies a degree of genealogical unrelatedness that is simplyincommensurate with their membership of a single species. Thus it is notnecessary to invoke an essential form of humanity, or a priori notions of whathuman beings are like, in order to discount the existence of tailed individuals ofthe species Homo sapiens, or, more strictly, to regard the probability of theiroccurrence as vanishingly small.

The first tailless primate (barring cases of accidental mutilation) was not ahopeful monster, a bizarre mutant cavorting in the midst of a band of

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identically long-tailed relatives, upon whom fortune smiled, preserving its kindin future generations. Like every other significant evolutionary modification,tails became shorter by degrees, through an accumulation—over very manygenerations—of minute differences. Nature, according to a venerable maximmuch favoured by Darwin, does not make leaps (Natura non facit saltum; seeDarwin 1872:146, 156). Nor, however, does it proceed along a fixed,preordained course. That ancient, tailless ape, which numbers among itsdescendants both humans and chimpanzees, was no more on its way tobecoming a human than it was to becoming a chimpanzee. It was, purely andsimply, being itself. An ape is an ape, not a botched or half-successful attempt athumanity. And though it may be true that only one possible route can connectthe ancestral ape to the modern human being, that route was only one of anynumber of possible routes that could equally well have been taken. Humans didnot have to evolve.

In relation to the evolution of life as a whole, the human lineage amounts tobut one short and rather insignificant twig of an immense, sprawling bush.Each twig is tracing out a path that has never been traced before, and will neverbe traced again. The chimpanzees of the future may be a lot cleverer than weare today, but they will not be human beings. Humans are animals that, for all Iknow, could turn out to be the co-ancestors of my future descendants. Of whatthese descendants will actually be like a few million years hence, that is if we donot blow up the earth with ourselves, no-one has the slightest idea. In themeantime, like Monboddo, we continue to speculate on the variety of ourspecies, in startlingly similar terms. ‘As late as 1942,’ recalls the anthropologistEdmund Leach, ‘I was myself assured most positively, by an otherwise saneEnglishman, that, in an inaccessible valley just the other side of a visible rangeof mountains, he himself had encountered men with tails’ (Leach 1982:64).

HUMAN BEINGS, AND BEING HUMAN

By and large, philosophers have sought to discover the essence of humanity inmen’s heads rather than in their tails (or lack thereof). But in seeking this essence,they did not ask: ‘What makes humans animals of a particular kind?’ Instead theyturned the question around, asking: ‘What makes humans different in kind fromanimals?’ This inversion completely alters the terms of the inquiry. For once thequestion is posed in the latter form; humanity no longer appears as a species ofanimality, or as one small province of the animal kingdom. It refers rather to aprinciple that, infused into the animal frame, lifts its possessors onto analtogether higher level of existence than that of the ‘mere animal’. Humanity, inshort, ceases to mean the sum total of human beings, members of the animalspecies Homo sapiens, and becomes the state or condition of being human, oneradically opposed to the condition of animality (Ingold 1988:4). The relationbetween the human and the animal is thus turned from the inclusive (a provincewithin a kingdom) to the exclusive (one state of being rather than another).

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The great French naturalist, Count de Buffon, writing in 1749, was in nodoubt as to the immensity of the chasm that separates the most primitivehuman from the ape, ‘because the former is endowed with the faculties ofthought and speech’ whereas the latter is not. Yet in bodily form they are notvery much different, and ‘if our judgement were limited to figure alone, Iacknowledge that the ape might be regarded as a variety of the human species’(Buffon 1866, 2:43). Lord Monboddo, having read Buffon’s Histoire naturelle,was of precisely this opinion. At that time the anthropoid apes were generallyknown as orang-utans—the term is of Malay origin, meaning ‘man of thewoods’, and nowadays denotes a particular species (Pongo pygmaeus) native toBorneo and Sumatra (on the past significance and contemporary taxonomicstatus of the orang-utan, see Tobias’s discussion in Article 3). Monboddo wasfirmly convinced that orang-utans were human:

They are exactly of the human form; walking erect, not upon all-four, like thesavages that have been found in Europe; they use sticks for weapons; they live insociety; they make huts of branches of trees; and they carry off negroe girls, whomthey make slaves of, and use both for work and pleasure…. But though from theparticulars above mentioned it appears certain, that they are of our species, andthough they have made some progress in the arts of life, they have not come thelength of language.

(Burnet 1773:174–5) Unlike Buffon, Monboddo believed that man’s humanity was not installedfrom the start by an act of divine intervention, but was acquired by degrees,and was only completed with the emergence of reason and intellect, the twinfoundations for that uniquely human achievement, the faculty of language.Apart from occasional discoveries of solitary ‘wild men’—the quadrupedalsavages of his account—orang-utans furnished Monboddo with as close aliving approximation as he could find to an entire human population existing inan original state of nature. Lacking language and intellect, orang-utans werehuman beings that had not yet reached the stage of being human. Theybelonged to our species, yet had advanced only a little way towards thecondition of humanity.

Primordial human beings, of which Monboddo could find no directevidence but whose nature could easily be inferred through a backwardextrapolation, would have been wholly ‘without arts or civility’, governed intheir actions by instinct rather than custom, existing in a state that ‘is no otherthan that of the mere animal’ (Burnet 1773:218, 291; see also Bock 1980:19–26). The same, of course, might be said of the human infant, supporting ananalogy that has a long pedigree in Western thought, between the maturation ofthe particular human being and the passage of humanity at large from savageryto civilization. ‘Savages’, as Sir John Lubbock declared in 1865, ‘have oftenbeen likened to children, and the comparison is not only correct but also highly

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instructive…The life of each individual is an epitome of the history of the race,and the gradual development of the child illustrates that of thespecies…Savages, like children, have no steadiness of purpose’ (1865:570).

As a condition opposed to humanity, animality conveys an idea of thequality of life in the state of nature, where we encounter human beings ‘in theraw’, impelled in their conduct by brute passion rather than rationaldeliberation, and totally unconstrained by moral or customary regulation. Thisview of animal life and of ‘human animality’ is an extraordinarily pervasive onein the history of Western thought, which even today colours much ostensiblyscientific discussion in the study of animal and human behaviour. A prominentfeature of the Western tradition is a propensity to think in parallel dichotomies,so that the opposition between animality and humanity is aligned with thosebetween nature and culture, body and mind, emotion and reason, instinct andart, and so on. It is even enshrined in the academic division of labour betweenthe natural sciences, in their concern with the composition and structures ofthe material world (including human organisms), and the humanities,embracing the study of language, history and civilization. And it underlies thecontinuing arguments between scholars on both sides of this academic fenceabout the meaning of ‘human nature’.

The trouble arises because the legacy of dualistic thinking invades our veryconception of what a human being is, for it has given us the vocabulary forexpressing it. We are, according to this conception, constitutionally dividedcreatures, one part immersed in the physical condition of animality, the otherin the moral condition of humanity. In which of these two parts, you may ask,does human nature reside? It all depends on what you mean by ‘nature’, a termthat is perhaps one of the most multivalent in the English language. Of its manymeanings we need at this point to distinguish just two (for these and othermeanings, see Williams 1976:184–9). First, the nature of a thing may be someessential quality that all and only things of its kind may be expected to possess.As such it is a ‘lowest common denominator’ for the kind, what is universalrather than particular to each of its constituent individuals. Second, natureconnotes the material world, the macrocosm of physical entities as distinct fromtheir microcosmic representation on the level of ideas. It is in this sense thatnature stands classically opposed to culture, the former an external reality, thelatter a reality only as it exists ‘inside people’s heads’.

Now to return to our question—does human nature reside in our humanityor in our animality?—we find that the two senses of nature adduced above giveus conflicting answers. Recall Buffon’s view, fairly representative of its time,that it is in their possession of the faculty of mind rather than in bodily formthat humans are distinguished from apes. What is essential to human beings,then, is their humanity: the component which, following orthodox Christiandogma, they owe to God’s preferential bestowal of divine spirit. On the otherhand, human beings also partake of the material world—or of nature in thesecond sense—in their bodily organs, comprehended by the Creator along with

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the bodies of every animal species (as Buffon put it) ‘under one general plan’.Accordingly, human beings may be revealed in their material generation asbiological organisms, by stripping away their essential humanity to leave aninnate residue that they have in common with other animals. This is the layer of‘human animality’ to which Monboddo and many others, both previously andsubsequently, have referred as the ‘brutish state’ of humankind, supposedlyrepresenting an original and universal baseline for all social and culturalevolution.

Despite the theological upheavals that followed in the wake of Darwin’stheory of human evolution, which of course had no place for mind or spiritexcept as the output of a material organ (the brain), the terms of thecontemporary debate between ‘scientists’ and ‘humanists’ on the question ofhuman nature are still very much the same as they were in the days of Buffonand Monboddo. Ethologists and sociobiologists, working within a naturalscience paradigm, explicitly identify human nature with what is animal in us,something normally so overlain with cultural accretions that it is more directlyobservable in species other than our own. They have made it their business todiscover the prototypes for universal human dispositions in the behaviouralrepertoire most notably of non-human primates, though the search for parallelsoften takes them much further afield. Indeed much of the intense popularinterest in ethological work stems from the belief that by studying thebehaviour of other animals we can learn something important about ourselves.This is certainly true, yet when taken to excess it can lead us to rest our accountof human nature on an amalgam of traits drawn from the repertoire ofpractically any species except our own. The readiness with which somesociobiologists are inclined to pronounce upon the human predicament on thebasis of studies of such social insects as ants and bees puts one in mind of WillCuppy’s quip, in How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, that ‘the psychology ofthe Orang-utan has been thoroughly described by scientists from theirobservations of the Sea-urchin’ (Cuppy 1931:38).3

Anthropologists and others of a more humanist bent have naturally beenconcerned to recover the ‘human essence’ that is missing from sociobiologicaland ethological accounts. To adopt Eisenberg’s (1972) phrase, they emphasize‘the human nature of human nature’, replacing the ancient notion of spirit withwhat has come to be called ‘the capacity for culture’. Just what this means is amatter of interminable dispute. Suffice to note, at this point, that in locating thedistinguishing quality of human beings on the moral plane of culture, asdistinct from the physical plane of nature, the eighteenth-century conceptionof man—as torn between the conditions of humanity and animality—isreproduced in all its essentials. Only when they are ‘being human’, it seems, dohuman beings show themselves for what they really are.

However there is not only one way of being human. Whatever else it may be,the capacity for culture is a capacity for generating difference. In and throughthat creative, generative process, played out in the ordinary course of social life,

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the essence of humanity is revealed as cultural diversity. For any particularindividual, caught up in the process, ‘becoming human’ entails becomingdifferent from other humans who speak different languages or dialects, practisedifferent arts, hold different beliefs, and so on. If it is in their thusdifferentiating themselves from one another that human beings are essentiallydistinguished from animals, it follows, of course, that human animality isrevealed as the absence of such differentiation, in sameness. Each one of uscomes into the world as a creature born of man and woman, a biologicallyhuman organism whose physical constitution is entirely indifferent to his or hersubsequent education into the code of conduct of one culture or another. As faras my existence as a member of the human species is concerned, the fact that Ihappen to be English rather than, say, French or Japanese is quite incidental.But with regard to the expression of my humanity, it is vital. It makes mesomeone, rather than just something. Or to put the same point in general terms,culture underwrites the identity of the human being, not as a biologicalorganism but as a moral subject. In this latter capacity, we regard every man orwoman as a person. My personhood is therefore inseparable from mybelonging to a culture, and both are crucial ingredients of my being human.

We are now in a position to resolve a paradox at the heart of Westernthought, which insists with equal assurance both that humans are animals andthat animality is the very obverse of humanity. A human being is an individualof a species; being human is to exist as a person. In the first sense humanityrefers to a biological taxon (Homo sapiens), in the second it refers to a moralcondition (personhood). The fact that we use the same word ‘human’ for bothreflects a deep-seated conviction that all and only those individuals belongingto the human species can be persons, or in other words that personhood isconditional upon membership of the taxon. ‘All human beings’, as Article 1 ofthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘are endowed with reasonand conscience’. By implication, all non-human animals are not (Clark1988:23).

If we accept this tenet as an article of faith, then certain questions cannot beasked, at least not without compromising the principles of genealogicalclassification generally adopted in the definition of biological species. Wecannot ask, as Monboddo did, how reason and speech were acquired in thehistory of human populations, or how these faculties may be lacking ordeficient in particular individuals of human parentage. Nor can we ask whether,or to what extent, animals of other species may be endowed with the faculties oflanguage and thought. Yet these are legitimate questions that cannot beresolved a priori but only through empirical investigation. It is perfectlyreasonable to enquire, for example, whether chimpanzees or dolphins havelanguage, or whether they engage in rational deliberation. It may turn out thatthey do not, except perhaps under quite artificial conditions, and that thesecapacities are indeed possessed only by biologically human animals. But who isto say that they will not eventually evolve, in future times, among species

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descended from the chimpanzees and dolphins of today? If this comes to pass,we would have grounds for treating such thinking and speaking animals aspersons. They could not, however, be regarded as members of the humanspecies, since they would not be of human descent.

Rigid adherence to the doctrine that only human beings can be personswould therefore lead us to the absurd situation of having to deny the possibilityof an evolution that we cannot, at this stage, know anything about. Once again,in his discussion of the humanity of the orang-utan, Monboddo was wrong forthe right reasons: wrong because anthropoid apes do not belong to the humanspecies; right because although he lacked the vocabulary to express the pointwithout contradiction, he recognized that membership of the taxon we now callHomo sapiens does not automatically confer qualities of personhood. Thisconclusion immediately opens up a field of inquiry of potentially inexhaustiblescope, into the personhood of non-human animals or, if you will, into animalhumanity rather than human animality. It suggests that the boundary betweenhuman and other animal species does not run alongside, but actually crosscutsthe boundary between humanity and animality as states of being. And by thesame token, we cannot just assume that approaches from the humanities areappropriate only to understanding the affairs of human beings, and that thelives and worlds of nonhuman animals can be fully comprehended within anatural science paradigm (Ingold 1989:496).

One consequence of this assumption is that whereas human actions aregenerally interpreted as the products of intentional design, the actions of otheranimals—even when ostensibly similar in their nature and consequences—aretypically explained as the automatic output of a ‘wired-in’ behaviouralprogramme (Ingold 1988:6). Of course, when it comes to those few animalswith which we have close and enduring relationships, such as our domestic catsand dogs, we are quick to make exceptions, attributing to them intentions andpurposes just as we do to other humans. For people of many non-Westerncultures, whose practical involvement with other species vastly exceeds ourown, our exceptions may very well be their rule. For example, among theOjibwa, native hunters of subarctic Canada, personhood is envisaged as aninner essence, embracing the powers of sentience, volition, memory andspeech, which is quite indifferent to the particular species form it mayoutwardly assume. The human form is merely one of the many guises in whichpersons may materially manifest themselves, and anyone can change his or herform for that of an animal more or less at will. When you see an animal, andparticularly an animal that is behaving in an unusual way, you wonder who it is,for it may be somebody you know. Thus for the Ojibwa, there is nothingespecially ‘human’ about being a person (Hallowell 1960).

My purpose in presenting this example is to emphasize that ourconventional notion of personhood as a prerogative of human beings is just asmuch embedded in the Western worldview as is the contrary notion of theOjibwa in theirs, and we have no more cause to attribute any absolute validity to

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the former than to the latter. In his Critique of Judgement of 1790, the Germanphilosopher Immanuel Kant summed up Western orthodoxy in the followingwords: ‘As the single being on earth that possesses understanding, [man] iscertainly titular lord of nature, and…is born to be its ultimate end’ (Kant 1952,II S431). This imperialistic conception of ‘man’s place in nature,’ with itsdogmatic denial (accompanied by no evidence at all) of non-human forms ofunderstanding, has done a great deal of damage in its time. Pragmatically, theOjibwa level-pegging of humans and animals in relations of mutualinterdependence enshrines a sound ecological wisdom, and with regard to thelong-term survival of our species it has much to commend it. Scientifically, theinvestigation of the real nature of the similarities and differences betweenourselves and other animals remains in its infancy, and should not be foreclosedby a priori assumptions about human pre-eminence. Such investigation, whichanthropologists have tended to treat as somewhat marginal to their concerns, isin fact of crucial significance, since it strikes at the heart of the dominantconception of human uniqueness. It is to this that we now turn.

ON HUMAN UNIQUENESS

The human species is biologically unique. So is every other species on the faceof the earth (Foley 1987:274). This uniqueness, as we have seen, does notconsist in some one or more essential attributes that all individuals of thespecies have in common, and that no individuals of any other species possess.Rather it lies in the present composition of the total pool of genetic traits ofwhich every individual of the species, by virtue of its descent, represents aparticular combination. The gene pools of different species may overlap a gooddeal, especially when they are phylogenetically close—for example, humanbeings and chimpanzees have been found to be about 99 per cent the same,genetically—but they are never precisely congruent. Moreover thecomposition of the pool for any species is changing all the time, which is simplyanother way of saying that it evolves. With regard to species other than ourown, these facts are well-established and uncontentious. But when it comes tohumans, they meet with obdurate resistance. As one eminent philosopher ofbiology notes, with scarcely concealed exasperation, ‘the desire to find sometrait that all human beings possess and no non-humans possess is all butoverwhelming. But no matter the trait chosen, either some people do notexhibit it or else members of some other species do’ (Hull 1984:35). Why, then,do we go on searching? Whence comes the compulsion to discover that uniqueattribute?

Let us take a look at some of the attributes that have been proposed ascandidates for the human distinction. Every author has a favourite word orphrase to fill the vacant space in the statement ‘man is defined as a——animal’,insisting that it denotes the single key to the essence of humanity. Yet should weattempt to compile a catalogue of such keys, it would soon become very long

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indeed. Undoubtedly ‘language-using’ and ‘rational’ would top the list.Equipped with language, human beings describe, speculate, argue, joke anddeceive. They can lie, conjuring up things and events that have never been, andso they are peculiarly bothered by questions of truth and falsity. Reasoningabout the world and their actions in it they also make mistakes: man is said to bean errant animal. He is moreover self-conscious or self-interpreting, and isconsequently also aware of the passage of time and the transience of his ownlife. He seeks, therefore, to accommodate the facts of birth, ageing and deathwithin a timeless order: man is a religious animal. And he is a designer,imposing symbolic schemes of his own devising upon the world of inanimateobjects in the making of tools and artefacts, upon animals and plants in theproduction (as distinct from collection) of food, and upon fellow humans in theconstruction of the rules and institutions of social life.

All these things can, of course, be said equally of either sex, and though it isto be conventionally understood that in comparisons with other animals theword ‘man’ includes both male and female members of the human species, thestructural bias of the English language has taken its toll in a rather pernicioustendency to attribute to the male all those qualities that are supposed to havemade us human, and to characterize femininity either by their absence or bytheir relatively weak development. Nowhere is this tendency more evident thanin the prevalent origin myth of ‘man the hunter’, according to which anexclusively male activity—the pursuit of big game—is supposed to have placeda selective premium on the concurrent emergence of toolmaking, language andrational intelligence, thereby putting males at the cutting edge of humanevolution (e.g. Laughlin 1968). I do not intend to pursue this theme here, butraise it in order to alert the reader to the lingering resonance of an ancientdoctrine to the effect that men’s superiority over women is a natural and properreflection of the superiority of humanity over animality.

Of more immediate concern is the objection commonly levelled againstattempts to establish a Rubicon that would separate human beings from the restof the animal kingdom, namely that whatever differences exist are of degreerather than kind. Advocates of this view, whom we can call gradualists, arguethat although human language may be supremely versatile, it does not differfundamentally from the systems of communication employed by other animals,and therefore that it is perfectly legitimate to refer to the latter as ‘animallanguages’. Likewise, while agreeing that humans are highly intelligent,gradualists warn against underestimating the intelligence of other animals—which moreover are rather less inclined than we are to make mistakes. Andthough recognizing the unparalleled range and complexity of human designs,they point out that the constructional abilities of non-human animals are by nomeans negligible. To insist, against all the evidence for animal language,intelligence and manufacture, that humans nevertheless differ in kind, is—saythe gradualists—to adopt an attitude of unreflecting anthropocentrism thatshould have no place in rational scientific inquiry (Griffin 1976).

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This accusation of anthropocentrism needs to be examined rather carefully.There is nothing in the least anthropocentric about asserting the uniqueness ofthe human species, for as I have shown, every biological species is unique in itsway. But in assembling the various key attributes of humanity that I havementioned—including language, reason, self-awareness and symbolic design—do we arrive at a description of a unique species that would satisfy the canons ofnatural history? Surely not. For they convey no information at all about thekinds of morphological or behavioural idiosyncrasies that otherwise enablenaturalists to recognize individuals as belonging to one species or another.Reason, for example, cannot be considered as a ‘trait’ on a par with bipedalism,opposable thumb, year-round sexual receptivity and taillessness. The search fordefinitive attributes of humanity has not in fact been motivated by a concern todescribe what human beings are like, along the same lines as we might seek todescribe—say—elephants or beavers. It has stemmed rather from a desire toestablish what is commonly known as the human condition. Bipedalism,opposable thumb and the rest are typical properties possessed by the vastmajority of human beings, just as elephants have trunks and beavers builddams. Reason and self-awareness, by contrast, are essential qualities of beinghuman. The former are based on the data of empirical observation, the latter arederived entirely from a process of introspection.

The anthropocentrism to which gradualists object is one that takes the‘human condition’ to be an all-or-nothing state of existence open only tomembers of the human species and consequently denied to all other animals.We find a precedent for this view in the taxonomy of Linnaeus, set out in hisSystema Naturae of 1735, where the genus Homo is placed within aclassification of animals resting on such observable features as numbers offingers and toes, but distinguished by the injunction Nosce te ipsum, ‘know foryourself’ (Bendyshe 1865:422). Cast your attention inward, to your own soul,not outward onto nature, and there—says Linnaeus—you will discover theessence of human beings. This is clearly to envisage human uniqueness in aform that is not at all comparable to the uniqueness of other species. It is toclaim that human beings are not different from elephants as elephants aredifferent from beavers, for whereas the latter is a difference within animality,the former also—and more significantly—places humans altogether beyondthe bounds of animality, so that the distinction between elephants (or beavers)and humans appears only as a particular instance of the general distinctionbetween animality and humanity.4

We can now appreciate why, in the face of modern biological wisdom,intelligent people in the West continue to appeal to the essential attributes ofhumanity in order to establish the uniqueness of Homo sapiens. It is simplybecause of the popular identification, noted earlier in this chapter, of thehuman species with the human condition, an identification that rests in turnupon an ideological conflation of the biological individual with the moralsubject or person. Once these are properly distinguished, the human species

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may be defined, just like any other species, in genealogical terms, without resortto essential qualities; and the human condition may be defined in terms of suchqualities without prejudging the extent to which biologically human beings orother animals actually partake of it. It is this extent that the gradualists areconcerned to estimate when they assert that humans differ from other animalsin degree and not in kind. Instead of seeing humanity as an all-or-nothing state,they see it as a continuous scale against which the actual performance of humanand animal populations can be gauged. It is not a question of either having orlacking language, reason and self-awareness: these, according to gradualists, arecapacities with which animals may be either more or less endowed.

On this scale, chimpanzees are generally reckoned to come closest tohumans in their level of attainment. An extraordinary amount of effort has beenput into coaxing chimpanzees to demonstrate insightful problem-solvingcapacities, nascent self-awareness, and some rudimentary competence inlanguage use. Up to a point the animals have obliged, enough to generatesurprise and occasional consternation among human observers, as well as agood measure of scepticism about the validity of the experimental results. Buteven the most prodigal of chimpanzees are no match for adult humans. Bycomparison with ourselves, chimpanzees are (hardly surprisingly) not verygood at being human, yet the likeness is such that we are inclined to regardthem—as Monboddo regarded the orang-utan—as incomplete humans ratherthan complete apes. We see the human infant in every mature chimpanzee, andtreat it accordingly as a case of arrested development.

Of this perception, many anthropologists are justifiably suspicious (e.g.Tapper 1988:57–9). They point out, first, that not so long ago, ‘primitive’humans were perceived in very much the same way, as beings whose humanitywas as yet little developed: whose languages were relatively impoverished,whose intelligence was pre-rational and whose powers of self-control wereextremely limited. Second, they observe that the ‘we’ who compare otheranimals with ‘ourselves’ are not representative of humanity at large, but only ofa small and historically rather atypical section of humanity, namely urban andpredominantly middle-class members of what we like to call ‘modern Westernsociety’. From the days when Thomas Huxley (1894) first popularized the viewthat the superiority of the modern European over the savage was akin to that ofthe savage over the ape, and therefore that there was no radical discontinuity inthe passage from animal to human, the gradualist thesis has been loaded with astrong bias of ethnocentrism, that is by an assumption that the only true anduniversally applicable standards are those appropriate in one’s own society.Somewhere far back along the scale of degrees culminating in ‘Westerncivilized man’—supremely intelligent, scientifically enlightened, self-consciously liberated and (of course) male—the most excellent of apes weresupposed to jostle for precedence with the most primitive of people. Eventoday, as we dream of discovering intelligent life on other planets, it is assumed

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that the extraterrestrials’ standards of progress will be ours as well, even if theyhave so overtaken us as to make us appear primitive by comparison.

Alert to the facts of cultural diversity, anthropologists stress that there are asmany standards of humanity as there are different ways of being human, andthat there are no grounds—apart from sheer prejudice—for investing any oneset of standards with universal authority. Yet they hold that this very diversitymanifests a human essence, the capacity for culture, which sets humansradically apart from animals. The anthropologists’ cultural relativism, theirview that the conduct of any group of human beings can only be comprehendedin relation to standards appropriate to the particular culture to which theybelong, seems to rest on just that kind of anthropocentric conception of humanuniqueness to which gradualists are opposed.

There is a serious dilemma here, for it appears that we cannot defeatethnocentrism without taking refuge in anthropocentrism, and vice versa.Gradualism, in asserting differences of degree, cannot avoid positing a

Figure 2 Ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism in views of animal-human differences.The diagram on the left shows the gradualist thesis: a single scale of absolute advanceleads from apes, through ‘primitive’ humans, to modern civilization. On the right isdepicted the counter-thesis of cultural relativism: diverse cultural forms, none of whichcan be judged more advanced than any other, are superimposed upon a universal

substrate of animality

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universal scale of progress, in terms of which humans and other animals maybe judged ‘more’ or ‘less’. If however we reject such a scale on the grounds ofthe ethnocentricity of its criteria of advance, then we are once more left with ananthropocentric view of humanity as an all-or-nothing condition, which admitsof no variation in degree but is boundlessly variable in the manner of itsexpression. This dilemma, illustrated schematically in Figure 2, underliesmuch of the current debate between evolutionary biologists, who stress thecontinuity between humans and other animals and are reluctant to admit todifferences in kind, and anthropologists, who remain committed to a dualisticconception of humankind—one part nature, the other part culture.

Our central problem, I believe, is to resolve the dilemma, to reconcile thecontinuity of the evolutionary process with the awareness we have of ourselvesas living a life beyond that of the ‘merely animal’. This cannot be done bylimiting the study of humanity either to an investigation of the nature andevolution of the species Homo sapiens or to an investigation of the humancondition as it is revealed in culture and history. Our ultimate objective shouldbe to transcend the opposition that divides these alternatives, which havetraditionally fallen into the respective domains of natural science and thehumanities. That is to say, we have to comprehend the relation between thespecies and the condition, between human beings and being human. In thisarticle I have shown not only how this relation is anything but a simple one, butalso how we have been prevented from asking relevant questions about it by anassumption that the two notions of humanity are essentially the same, that thecondition defines the species. To explore a relation, one must begin bydistinguishing the terms which it connects. Our science of humanity musttherefore be rephrased, more precisely, as a science of the relationship betweentwo humanities, between a peculiar biological species and its social and culturalconditions of existence.

NOTES

1 The relevant passages from Hoppius’s Anthropomorpha are reproduced, in Englishtranslation, in Bendyshe (1865:448–58).

2 For an excellent account of Monboddo’s ideas, in relation to those of hiscontemporaries, see Reynolds (1981:38–42).

3 I am grateful to the late Nancy Tanner for drawing my attention to this marvellousbook.

4 In the following article, Tobias discusses Linnaeus’s conception of the genus Homo atgreater length, but advances a somewhat different interpretation.

REFERENCES

Bendyshe, T. (1865) ‘The history of anthropology’, Memoirs of the AnthropologicalSociety of London, vol. I (1863–4):335–458.

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Bock, K. (1980) Human Nature and History: a Response to Sociobiology, New York:Columbia University Press.

Buffon, Count (Georges Louis Leclerc) (1866) Natural history (2 vols), trans. W.Smellie, London: Thomas Kelly.

Burnett, J. (Lord Monboddo) (1773) Of the origin and progress of language, vol. I,Edinburgh: Kincaid and Creech [Facsimile reprint, Menston: Scolar Press, 1967].

Clark, S.R.L. (1988) ‘Is humanity a natural kind?’, in T.Ingold (ed.) What is anAnimal?, London: Unwin Hyman.

Cuppy, W. (1931) How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, New York: Horace Liveright.Darwin, C. (1872) The Origin of Species, 6th edn, London: John Murray.Eisenberg, L. (1972) ‘The human nature of human nature’, Science 176:123–8.Foley, R.A. (1987) Another Unique Species: Patterns in Human Evolutionary Ecology,

Harlow: Longmans.Griffin, D.R. (1976) The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of

Mental Experience, New York: Rockefeller University Press.Hallowell, I. (1960) ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view’, in S.Diamond (ed.)

Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Hull, D. (1984) ‘Historical entities and historical narratives’, in C.Hookway (ed.)Minds, Machines and Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huxley, T.H. (1894) Man’s Place in Nature, and Other Essays, London: Macmillan.Ingold, T. (1988) ‘Introduction’, in T.Ingold (ed.) What is an Animal?, London: Unwin

Hyman.——(1989) ‘The social and environmental relations of human beings and other

animals’, in V.Standen and R.A.Foley (eds) Comparative Socioecology: theBehavioural Ecology of Humans and Other Mammals, Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.

Kant, I. (1952) Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C.Meredith, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Laughlin, W. (1968) ‘Hunting: an integrating biobehavior system and its evolutionary

importance’, in R.B.Lee and I.DeVore (eds) Man the Hunter, Chicago: Aldine.Leach, E.R. (1982) Social Anthropology, London: Fontana.Lubbock, Sir J. (1865) Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the

Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams & Norgate.Medawar, P.B. (1957) The Uniqueness of the Individual, London: Methuen.Reynolds, P.C. (1981) On the Evolution of Human Behavior: the Argument from Animals

to Man, Berkeley: University of California Press.Tapper, R. (1988) ‘Animality, humanity, morality, society’, in T.Ingold (ed.) What is an

Animal?, London: Unwin Hyman.Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana.

FURTHER READING

Bock, K.E. (1980) Human Nature and History: a Response to Sociobiology, New York:Columbia University Press.

Clark, S.R.L. (1982) The Nature of the Beast: Are Animals Moral? Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Eisenberg, J.F. and Dillon, W.S. (eds) (1971) Man and Beast: Comparative SocialBehavior, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

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Griffin, D.R. (1976) The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity ofMental Experience, New York: Rockefeller University Press.

Hirst, P. and Woolley, P. (1982) Social Relations and Human Attributes, pt I, ‘Biologyand Culture’, London: Tavistock.

Horigan, S. (1988) Nature and Culture in Western Discourses, London: Routledge.Ingold, T. (ed.) (1988) What is an Animal?, London: Unwin Hyman.Leach, E.R. (1982) Social Anthropology, ch. 3, ‘Humanity and animality’, London:

Fontana.Leeds, A. and Vayda, A.P. (eds) (1965) Man, Culture and Animals, Washington, DC:

American Association for the Advancement of Science.Manning, A. and Serpell, J. (eds) (1993) Animals and Society: Changing Perspectives,

London: Routledge.Midgley, M. (1979) Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature, Brighton: Harvester

Press.——(1983) Animals and Why They Matter: a Journey Around the Species Barrier,

Harmondsworth: Penguin.Reynolds, P.C. (1981) On the Evolution of Human Behavior: the Argument from Animals

to Man, Berkeley: University of California Press.Sebeok, T.A. and Umiker-Sebeok, J. (eds) (1980) Speakinq of Apes: a Critical Anthology

of Two-way Communication with Man, New York: Plenum Press.Serpell, J. (1986) In the Company of Animals, Oxford: Blackwell.Tanner, N.M. (1981) On Becoming Human: a Model of the Transition from Ape to Human

and the Reconstruction of Early Human Social Life, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Walker, S. (1983). Animal Thought, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Willis, R.G. (1974) Man and Beast, London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon.——(ed.) (1990) Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, London:

Unwin Hyman.

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Humanity and Animality