Category Archives: Animals

February 15, 2013 · 4:29 PM

As Seen on a Greeting Card

A lithographed drawing of a cow, with the text:

“You’re useful and delicious.”

And now for some analysis…

The Humor Angle

So one reason humor “happens” is when two usually unrelated things are presented right next to one another. In this case, the cow is being simultaneously given subjectivity by an unseen speaker (the card/speaker addresses the cow in the second person–you) and is immediately objectified (made an object by the card/speaker telling the cow how useful it is as food and whatnot). So the humor is in the unexpected collision of these two states of being that are bestowed upon the cow: it is given subjectivity only to have it taken away in the service of a human smile.

It is also funny because it combines admiration and brutal honesty. The narrator of the card is writing this ode of appreciation to the cow because it can be killed and used for food and clothing and other human needs. The narrator is defining what the cow is in human terms. It is appreciating it for its lack of agency–its lack of subjectivity–even as it ironically addresses it as if it is a subject, not an object.

Expanding the Analysis

Of course, the entire card objectifies the cow–an icon both standing for itself as an individual who can be addressed (although not easily interpellated*) as a singular subject, as well as a representative of an entire category of non-human animal. The cow is an object that conveys humor to the reader, the consumer of the card. Who is a human. Who identifies with the sentiments expressed on the card in the act of chuckling at their meaning. Haha, cows are delicious and useful! That cow doesn’t know what it’s in for…ha! The narrator could be interpreted as tricking the cow, first lulling it into a false sense of camaraderie (you implies that the speaker and the addressee are equal in the sense that they can communicate with one another as individuals), and then destroying those expectations built just moments before by putting the cow in the place of being a mere representative of a type. A class of animal that humans have categorically created to be the very things that the narrator is seemingly praising the individual cow for being: useful and delicious. See cow? You aren’t a person. You’re just an object. A thing with desired characteristics.

It’s quite an instance of animal cruelty, when you think about it. Albeit a funny one that only the humans are in on. Which is in turn exclusionary and therefore rather mean.
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*I use interpellation here in the Althusserian sense, although I’m also twisting it. For Althusser, the subject is always already existent, created by social processes. While I think the subject still has to interact with the social situation in order to become a subject of the interaction (uptake/use makes meaning!). Althusser contends that the social interaction itself creates subjects; that the structure makes subjects of what the structure hails. Maybe…I’m a bit fuzzy on this, actually. Grad school was a while ago.

ANYWAY, since I am of the nihilistic relativist opinion that there is no way to absolutely know whether or not you are communicating with another species–or even another human being who is ostensibly of “the same” culture–it would be very difficult indeed for the narrator of the card to claim that the cow it is addressing was interpellated with the narrator’s use of “you,” even if the cow chose at that moment to serendipitously look over at the narrator.

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June 4, 2012 · 9:01 PM

NKLA and Participatory Advertising

In the age of the internet, advertisers can rely on consumers to do a lot of work. Because people in this hyper-connected, digital culture are in the habit of constantly looking things up, only to forget them because they can call back that knowledge at will (think wikipedia) less and less information can be provided in advertisements. It is up to the consumer to figure out what’s being sold. What the message is.

To over-simplify a bit, this trend started nearly 100 years ago, when advertisements became less about long-form essays detailing the benefits of a product, and more about images that conveyed the feelings one would get by consuming said products. Now, there’s a type of ad that uses a combined strategy of images and limited accompanying text, relying on consumers to either guess at or go looking for the message and even the very product it’s attached to. These advertisements don’t even have to be about selling something. They can be about conveying an idea; making it “go viral.” It’s propaganda that masquerades as subtle, all the while hoping the masses will whip out their smartphones, find the hidden message on the internet, and hit themselves over the head with it.  Oh, and tell their friends, preferably via tweet. The marketers have passed off their work to us.

Take, for example, the NKLA billboards that popped up in the greater Los Angeles area. These consist of black-and-white photographs of cats and dogs, the letters “NKLA,” and a tiny emoticon-like logo in the bottom corner that suggests a doggie face. That’s it. What the hell are these for? Is it a new clothing line? A rap-group? Soap? Unless the viewer of these ads already knows what they’re supposed to take away from this collection of signifier-less signs, it’s a mystery. And I’d argue it’s designed to be obscure in order to pique the viewer’s interest, igniting a burning curiosity that eventually forces them to take to the interwebs and find out what these billboards and bus-stop ads are supposed to mean. It’s designed to force participation on the part of the view–or in the case of an ad for a product, the potential consumer.

Far be it from me to do the same thing and keep you, my imagined reader, in suspense. It turns out that these “NKLA” ads are for a campaign promoting the idea that no “viable” pet animals be killed in the city of Los Angeles. Here, you don’t even have to go looking. The campaign is backed by a coalition of like-minded organizations, some corporate and some non-profit. What they’re really selling/proposing is an old idea: eugenics. Like Bob Barker used to remind us after every “The Price is Right,” they want us to remember to spay or neuter our pets, and these organizations are mounting an effort to make that easier for people to do. I won’t get into the politics of this or why I find this problematic. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s enough to note that this is not a revolutionary idea that this campaign is trying to promote. Rather, it is the method of promotion and dissemination of this old message that’s somewhat revolutionary. It’s not word of mouth; it’s words from technology.

It is curious that the coalition’s strategy was to rely on viewers to figure out what campaign they were seeing. To do the work to figure out what the message was. Now that is some clever propaganda, and a risky move. Predicting the crowd is not an easy thing to do. And baiting them to do what you want them to do is arguably harder. If not for our digital, internet-connected, give-me-the-info-now culture, this would have no chance of working, of getting the message across. The images would just sit there, not being “read;” not being understood as their makers intended. The message would remain un-conveyed, or at least misinterpreted by the many consumers who were now going to be sorely disappointed the next time they tried to find NKLA’s newest album release.

This type of advertising strategy implicates the viewer–it requires that they participate. It demands their effort and their involvement in the campaign itself. They are part of the advertising team. It is self-directed marketing. Only those with the curiosity bug will exert the effort to get the message. It is self-selected, in a way, as it is more likely that someone with a soft spot for vaguely sad-looking pet animals will be inclined to take the time to find out what those puppies and kitties are trying to tell them. The black-and-white images help set the down-and-out tone, but that only really clicks and becomes part of the message when the viewer looks on the internet and finds out what the ad campaign is “selling”–the idea of a society in which no animals qualifying for the “pet” category have to be killed. (I won’t hold my breath for an “unhappy cows” spin-off.)

It’s all quite clever. And would seem to usher in a new era of marketing methodology.*  The consumer is the partial-producer of the advertisement that encourages them to buy (or in the case of NKLA, buy in to an idea and possibly become involved in either materially realizing it or further disseminating it). The consumer becomes a partial producer of the ad’s message because only after going through the effort of finding the message does the entire campaign gain its layers of meaning. And now, the idea has another follower. Perhaps another member of the movement who is willing to participate even further. Because that viewer searched and found the site and read it and understands. Understands that they now have to decide whether to cruelly say “no” to a campaign that is only trying not to have stray pet animals needlessly die to make room for more stray pet animals. The manipulation is palpable, but is over-ridden by the ostensibly “good” message that is so benign and “right” that no one who took the trouble to find it could possibly, in good conscience, disagree with it. Propaganda’s sneaky that way.

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*Or maybe this strategy has been employed before. It would be worth looking into from a history-of-advertising perspective.

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May 14, 2012 · 10:41 PM

Ruining a Stranger’s Visual Joke

A man is out walking his dog through a large public park. The park contains the ruins of an old zoo, complete with constructed rock outcroppings and caves and rusty partial cages. The man stops at the edge of one row of old cages, then enters it with his dog. He loops the dog’s leash around one of the vertical bars to anchor his pet inside. Then the man exits, coming around front and pulling out his camera phone. The dog strains at the leash but does not seem otherwise distressed. The man quickly gets the desired shot and retrieves his dog. They continue on their walk.

Now, were I a good anthropologist I would have asked this man why he had done this; what had moved him; what he thought it meant. I would have gotten his take on the whole situation by asking sneaky questions and scratching the dog’s ears. But I am not a good anthropologist. Talking to strangers is difficult and I avoid it and that is why I remain in this comfortable theoretical armchair here with nary a threat of fieldwork in sight.

The unfortunate result is a one-sided reading of this zoo-dog photograph situation. Reeking of assumptions and suppositions. What is fairly certain from observation is that the man was amused, and even pleased with himself for having taken this clever picture. You can just tell something like that; it’s in their body language, the smirking. Why bother to stage and take a picture like that if it meant nothing special? He didn’t strike me as a postmodern artist. I base the following on the man’s actions, which tend to be telling of shared cultural categories. Culture in practice. So onward, to inherently limited and problematic analysis!

The man took this picture because the idea of it amused him. He thought it would be funny to place his pet dog in a cage that was once inhabited by a zoo animal. Perhaps he wanted to think of his dog as a killer–as wild, as needing to be caged. If it actually was a dog with violent tendencies, then the picture would be appropriate for underscoring that fact, and dripping with humor of a more sinister type. On the other hand, if the dog was a sweet and gentle animal, then the picture would be hilariously underlining that fact by upending it with a nonsensical context. In either case the picture was taken because it was showing something out of the ordinary, the exact meaning of which is contingent on facts that only the man knows. What is clear is that the meaning is one of humor; of subverting expected alignment of cultural categories. He will show this to his friends or post it on facebook and hope that people get the same kick out of it as he did. People will see his sweet dog in a cage and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

Of course, it’s funny because of this very juxtaposition: this is a tame animal, entirely domesticated, being literally framed as wild. The picture is funny because it collides mutually exclusive categories. Pets are not wild animals, and vice versa. We are quite structuralist in the United States when it comes to the ways we interact with and think of non-human animals. Although the argument could be made that zoo animals are not “wild,” but rather something in between wild and domestic, they are still at a categorical distance from pet dogs, whom we keep closer to our human selves than any non-human animal. The pet dog is one of the most illogical animals one could place in a zoo cage in the United States. It does not belong there. In that context, the dog is a joke.

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May 24, 2011 · 9:28 PM

Sartorial Bovinity: Quick, What’s the Opposite of a Monkey Suit?

Hospital of Make Believe: Bear and Monkey Expected to Make Full Recovery

These stuffed toys grace the display area of a non-profit that deals in durable medical equipment. They demonstrate the friendly, benign nature of a standard hospital bed, serving to cheer up the often more grim realities associated with such equipment. The monkey, especially, adds a note of whimsy by being dressed up as a cow. There is a (small?) trend in the world of stuffed toys to dress one animal species in the “suit” of another. This is generally received to be “cute,” but one wonders what other meanings and implications such sartorial animality has.

Perhaps it is cute because it is odd…odd to see one type of the general category of “animal” pretending to be another type. When humans pretend to be other animals, there is a different reaction, although perhaps I should compare this with humanoid dolls in animal “clothing.” In which case, it is seen to be cute, as well. My point was going to be that humans in Western culture see themselves as set apart from the general category of “animal,” which lumps together all others. It is just difficult to trace out the various categorical intersections, interstices, and radical separations without delving into extreme fieldwork that involves thousands of participants. So I will leave it at this:

What do you think of the monkey above, of animals pretending to be other animals, and of representations of animals (especially those used in play) being dressed up as other animals? And finally, is the other animal necessarily also Other?

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April 20, 2011 · 3:32 PM

Meta-Topic: Animals

Perhaps this should have been posted from the get-go. Come to think of it, there should have been a little series of these “what-to-expect-categorically” posts, in order to orient the focus of this blog. But whatever. It’s happening now.

One of the main topics this blog explores (or will come to explore in more depth as it continues) is that of non-human animals in culture. This is broad, obviously, so it might be good to lay out in general terms what posts under this category might deal with in the future. The theoretical orientations and analytic tendencies will be mainly anthropological, and a little radical in cases where I become un-tethered to scholarly moorings. (Yes, we’re doing nautical metaphors, now. Animals can go on ships, too. Just roll with those waves and sail on.)

People incorporate other animals into their lives to different degrees in various ways. So too, cultures as a whole. This happens on different levels, such as discursive, physical interaction, and broad mental categorizations that can become verbally rationalized when the topic comes up. I hope to have several different series in the future that use non-human animals as their center to explore various culture issues–as well as topics that focus on animal-human relationships specifically. Indeed, there are many avenues to explore, and I just hope these forays into fauna will be as interesting for readers as they are for this writer to think about.

One can explore the tendency to personify or give human qualities to nonhuman animals–especially for use in allegories and literature in general. But this also happens everyday when people talk about animals. Or talk for them.

Another main topic I’d like to explore as this blog continues is the ways in which consumer culture uses various animals to sell things. Closely related is the use of animal imagery or culturally constructed characteristics identified with certain nonhuman animals and how they are used to signify various things. Semiotics for everyone!

Nonhuman animals can be implicated in political discourse, used to embody gender norms, symbolize anything you can think of, and deployed as terms of abuse (thank you, Edmund Leach). They are everywhere and nowhere, and we can even look at issues of agency (see the last post and a particularly good comment from the author of Instruct/Deconstruct). They are differentially valued, thought about, and interacted with based on a complex system of categories enacted daily in cultural practice, and no one animal means the same thing in two situations, for two people, in two cultures. I could go on about this for days, so perhaps I should just end by saying that if you like thinking about animals, stay tuned…

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