July 15, 2024 • 53 mins
Religious stories and symbolism very often feature animals of all kinds. Over the last few decades, scholars have taken more notice of these non-human actors that often play an important role in religious belief and practice. Today's conversation features Arthur Walker-Jones and Suzanna Millar, the co-editors of a new book at the intersection of Animal Studies and Biblical Studies entitled Ask the Animals: Developing a Biblical Animal Hermeneutic. Our discussion explores the ways that we think about the appearance of animals in Biblical texts and considers, more generally, new approaches to understand the confluence of animals and religion.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Chip Gruen (00:04):
Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip
Gruen. Today we have a littlebit of a different kind of an
episode in that it isprecipitated by the publication
of a book. This is a book calledAsk the Animals - Developing a
Biblical Animal Hermeneutic thatis published as a part of the
Semeia series from the Societyof Biblical Literature. And just
(00:28):
in the interests of beingforthright, I will just mention
that I have a an essay in thiscollection. Today we have the
two editors of this volume,Arthur Walker-Jones, who's
professor of religion andculture at the University of
Winnipeg, and Suzanna Millar,who's a lecturer in Hebrew Bible
at the University of Edinburgh.
So we have a conversation aboutthe confluence of animal
(00:53):
studies, and we'll talk aboutthe viability of that term with
biblical studies thatincorporates both Hebrew Bible
and New Testament. This is atopic that is really interesting
to me, although I think thatyou'll hear some indications
that the field itself is iscontested, that different people
(01:13):
imagine it in different ways.
Different people include notonly different methods, but but
even different boundaries as towhat is included in it, what is
a part of field itself. How muchof this is about ethics, how
much of this is about studyingcultural practice, how much of
this is about biology, etc, justsort of personal narrative for
(01:35):
me, I've taught a class calledAnimals and the Sacred for near
on 15 years here at MuhlenbergCollege, and so it was a delight
when I was invited to contributeone of my pieces to this work.
But the the field itself is isinteresting, not only in its
relationship to animal studies,but but imagine all of the
(01:57):
religious communities and thereligious stories and rituals
that you know that includeanimal imagery, or animals
within ritual, or animals withinmythology, or animals as
symbols, that animal studies,kind of goes beyond that. Sort
of takes that as a startingpoint, or at least that's my
starting point in Animals andthe Sacred but then we can go
(02:19):
beyond that and think also aboutanimals as sentient beings in
their in their own right, oranimals as actors, as the
collection, another collectionon some of these topics that's
more broadly religious studiesthat I use by Paul Waldau and
Kim Patton. The title is theCommunion of Subjects that goes
(02:42):
off of a Wendell Berry quotethat we should not just imagine
animals as objects, but thatthey are subjects in their own
right. If you are not anacademic yourself, you can sort
of peek behind the curtain alittle bit and think about how
much categorization and the waythat we think about the topics
(03:03):
we talk about is both reflectiveof the world we live in, but
also reflective of the politicsand culture of higher education.
And I think that that comescomes through loud and clear
here as well. The final thingthat I'll say, just to set up
this episode, is that you'llhear both Suzanna and Arthur
(03:26):
relate personal stories aboutinteractions with animals, in
both cases, their interactionswith companion animals or pets.
And I think that it's tellingthat even in our information
economy, in our post domesticworld, we have lots of
(03:48):
interactions with animals,whether they're squirrels in
your local park or dogs or catsor whether you're a hunter or a
fisherman or an agriculturalist,that we certainly have less
contact with animals than, say,an agro pastoral community might
have, but animals are still apart of our world and a part of
(04:10):
our imagination. And I think oneof the things that we might take
from these conversations is thatit's a challenge to think about
what those interactions are, andnot to take them for granted,
but to imagine that they areculturally determined, that they
don't have to always be the waythat they are, and that this is
(04:33):
something that we sort ofmetacognitively can not only
think about, but think about theway that we think about animals
in our world. So without furtherado, here's that conversation. I
hope you enjoy it. Dr. ArthurWalker-Jones and Dr. Suzanna
Millar, thanks for being onReligionWise. I appreciate you
being here.
Arthur Walker-Jones (04:53):
Thank you so much for having us.
Suzanna Millar (04:55):
Thank you for having us.
Chip Gruen (04:57):
All right, so as I explained in the introduction,
the occasion for thisconversation is the publication
of the collection that youedited together entitled Ask the
Animals - Developing a BiblicalAnimal Hermeneutic, which came
out from the Society of BiblicalLiterature press in the Semeia
series just last month in June.
A good deal of our conversationtoday will be unpacking some of
(05:22):
those terms. There's a lot goingon in that title. But before we
get to that, I would like eachof you to introduce yourselves.
How did you come to this work,and how is this collaboration
between the two of you on thisparticular project born?
Suzanna, can we start with you?
Suzanna Millar (05:37):
Of course, yeah.
And so I really came to thefield of study of animals in the
Bible after my PhD. So Ifinished my PhD in 2018 and then
I was thinking about whatdirection I wanted to take my
research in. And at the time, Iwas attending the Society of
Biblical Literature AnnualConference, which is a big
conference in the area, andthere was a consultation going
(06:00):
on about animals in the Bible atthe time, and I remember going
to one of the sessions of thatconsultation and just finding it
an incredibly exciting place tobe. It felt like things were
happening in the field and thatthere was actual, real important
work to be done. So from that, Isort of got interested in the
field, and it's a quite a whileago now. So I may be
(06:21):
misremembering things, and I'msure Arthur can correct me if
I'm misremembering things, but Ibelieve I presented a paper, and
then subsequently Arthur had hadbeen thinking of this idea of
putting together a volume, andhe contacted me to ask whether I
would like to contribute mypaper to the volume, at which
point I said, Oh, I'm sorry thatpaper is going to be published
(06:44):
elsewhere. However, would youlike a co editor? And so I think
that was the way that I becameinvolved in the project and but
I'm sure Arthur speak moreeloquently to it than I.
Arthur Walker-Jones (06:56):
That's a you have a better memory than
mine, I think, actually, butit's basically what I remember.
I remember you appearing in oneof the sessions. I've been
interested in animals for a longtime. Though, my interest in
animal studies was sort ofprecipitated when we had a
family dog that we had got formy son. We had spent five and a
(07:20):
half years in Fiji, and he washaving trouble readjusting. We
went there when he was sixmonths old, and came back to
Canada when he was six, and hewas having trouble readjusting
to Canadian culture. And he hada had had a dog that he loved in
Fiji. So we thought, Well, maybeif we get, get him a dog that
will help him, so that this dog,JoJo, was important to our
(07:42):
family, and as he got older, hegot unable to take himself out,
and so I had spent severalmonths taking carrying him
outdoor. And I think it was thatI had to go to a Society of
Biblical Literature meeting, andmy partner said, you know, I
can't carry him, so we're goingto have to put him down before
you go to SPL. And everybodyassured me that that was fine,
(08:07):
but when we went to the vet togive him the injections, the vet
gave him the first injection, hewas, by the way, in a lot of
pain. The reason I was having tocarry him out was that he had
very severe arthritis and andhad for quite some time. So and
everybody assured me it was timeto put him down, but the vet
(08:29):
gave him the first shot, andafter he'd given him, he
struggled to get up and leave,and so then the vet had to give
him another shot, and he wasstill struggling to try to get
out, and so I felt I had madethis choice for a sentient
being. All of us that have petsknow that they're persons, that
(08:52):
they have thoughts and feelingsand personalities, and I didn't
feel good about my decision toput down, uh, Jojo. And so
that's how I started readingabout animals and dogs. And
started reading, I guess, a veryscholarly kind of thing to deal
with grief is to start readingabout dogs. And I started
(09:13):
reading animal studies scholarsand and they were referring to
the Bible. But I realized thatthere weren't very many people
in Biblical Studies engagingwith animal studies, and there
was huge potential there. I hadfor a long time been involved in
the ecological hermeneuticssection and the earth Bible
(09:34):
project, and was really gratefulas as a younger scholar, when
Norman Habel had asked me tocontribute to the first of those
volumes, and then I got involvedin ecological hemaritics because
it gave me a community in whichto do what I was interested in
(09:55):
doing. And so I thought, well,I've chaired an SBL group before
I could start an animal studiesanimals in the Bible group at
SBL to see if to provide acommunity and see if there is
other other scholars. So it'sactually quite gratifying for me
to hear that it functioned thatway for Susanna and and it has
(10:18):
been a nice part of the projectfor me a number of the
contributors to this volumes areyounger scholars who either I
also decided to have an animalsand religion conference. So some
of them, like Dong and Beverlycame to that first animals and
religion conference that I gave.
And then And then more more likeSuzanna arrived in the animals
(10:40):
in the Bible consultation. So,so and I, I've been really
grateful that Suzanna offered tohelp me, because, as anyone who
knows who's done an editedvolume, it's, it's a huge amount
of work, and she has compensatedfor lacks of mine. And it sort
of worked well in that when oneof us didn't have time the other
(11:02):
and maybe had time to do things.
Chip Gruen (11:05):
Well, great. Thanks for that. So you've mentioned
animal studies, and when wethink of this, depending on who
you ask, this is either a fieldthat emerged in the 1970s in the
wake of the postmodern turn, orit's a really nascent field
that's continuing to develop andbuild its questions and methods.
And I guess my take on this isthat it's probably somewhere in
(11:30):
between those, or simultaneouslyboth of those. What is your take
on this category, or on thisfield, animal studies, and how
it represents something distinctfrom the other fields that we
work in.
Suzanna Millar (11:43):
I mean, it's a, it's a huge question. And I
think, I think the quote,unquote, field of animal studies
is in a constant process of,kind of trying to dispatch
define itself. And as you'vesaid, different people have
different takes on its originstory and its particular
distinctiveness and things likethat. So I think you'll probably
(12:04):
get a different answer fromwhoever you ask on this
question. And I think I thinkyou're right that part of it is
this kind of post modern turnaway from sort of conventional
methods of doing scholarshipwithin Western humanist
discourse, and so ties in withthings like post structuralism
and the kind of dissolution oflike binary thinking and stuff
(12:29):
like this. But I think anotheraspect of it which has really
been important, particularly asthe field has developed in
recent years, has been this kindof edge towards ethics and
justice, which I think has comeup a lot through things like
feminist and post colonialscholarships as well, which have
quite strongly influenced animalstudies in recent years. And so
(12:51):
I think while there is this kindof more like post modern theory
aspect to it, I would also wantto press quite heavily on the
more justice oriented angle toit as well. And of course,
there's lots of debates withinthat of whether justice
struggles for non human animalsare the same as justice
struggles for different humangroups, or whether they're
different in what ways theyintersect, and things like that.
(13:13):
So I think that, at least fromfrom my understanding, a lot of
that really kicked off in the90s with the work of
ecofeminists particularly, andthen has continued on and very
recent work in this area aswell.
Chip Gruen (13:27):
Yeah, I wonder. I want to jump ahead just a little
bit, because this does emergealongside more explicitly
activist movements that worktowards the care and protection
of non human animal species.
Would you say that animalstudies is, I mean, what is
relationship between, betweenthe subfield and ecological
rights, animal rights movements?
(13:51):
I mean, I am all the time, sortof negotiating this in lots of
ways, about talking about likewe're not like what we do might
inform activism, but it mightnot be, you know, training
activists itself. How do you seethe dance between those two
things?
Suzanna Millar (14:06):
Yeah, well, I think there is some animal
studies scholarship that isexplicitly activist. So
sometimes that gets calledcritical animal studies, which
is quite confusing, because youthink that would be more kind of
theoretical, actually, that theactivist wing. And so there is
some scholarship whichexplicitly does this. And I also
potentially would want to pushback a little bit on the framing
(14:27):
of this within a kind of animalrights discourse, which I know
is is traditionally how animalethics has been conceived in the
West. But I think quite a lot ofcontemporary scholars is
problematizing whether rights isthe best way to think about
this, but that's a kind ofcaveat. And to go back to the
main point, I think there is alot of crossover with things
(14:49):
like feminist scholarships inthe way that structures of
domination and oversubordinategroups work. So be they sort of
women or ethnic minorities or, Iwould say non human animals. I
think there is a deep connectionbetween those things. You ask
also about ecologicalhermeneutics. I know that Art
has done a lot in ecology, so Iwonder whether he might jump in
(15:12):
on that question.
Arthur Walker-Jones (15:15):
Yeah. I mean, I, I had been involved in
ecological hermeneutics, andalthough looking back, I realize
animals have always been part ofmy ecological hermeneutics, I
noticed that it was possiblefrom for some people to think
about ecological issues and notthink about the other species
that were involved. And so in away, thinking about it in a very
(15:38):
human centered concern aboutecology. And you can see in the
volume that there are some ofthe authors that locate
themselves within ecologicalhermeneutics and relate what
they're doing to the earth Bibleseries and commentaries, partly
because we ran a joint sessionwith the ecological hermeneutics
(16:00):
section. So they were presentingfor that, that that section, I
sort of think of of differentstreams that sometimes come
together and sometimes separate.
And I'm not exactly sure aboutthe chronology, but And Suzanne
and I had had a discussion earlyabout on, about whether we would
talk, have a discussion in theintroduction of different
(16:24):
terminology, I had chosen animalstudies to be kind of a neutral
umbrella term that would take ina lot of things, so that it
would include animal rights. Thedifferent authors in the volume
use different terminology. Socritical animal studies is often
concerned with issues ofjustice, usually means
(16:46):
explicitly vegan. So I had sortof avoided critical animal
studies to avoid the implicationthat this was somehow vegan
studies. And I guess there is aseparate vegan studies now
started by people who thoughtcritical animal studies was not
vegan enough. We haven'tmentioned animality studies.
Brian Tipton uses that thatlanguage and this also
(17:11):
interrelates with the way thevolume is set up. Is that I, I
felt that quite a bit had beendone in Biblical studies with
Derrida and animality studies,and coming from an ecological
perspective that seems sort ofanthropocentric to not ask about
to focus just on human animalityand not ask about animal other
(17:35):
animals. I mean, my interestswere political and ethical
around animals, but I wanted toprovide an umbrella term that
would also allow people to docultural or biological studies
that would not necessarily beinterested but could I mean
(17:57):
would necessarily informpolitical and ethical concerns
around other species.
Suzanna Millar (18:04):
So I just wanted to jump off Art's reflections on
the use of terminology in thisarea. And I think I would echo
what he said about potentialproblems with animal term
animality, which, on the onehand, is, I think is a very
useful term because it'sgenerally used to speak about
human animality. That is to saythat humans are animals, and so
(18:27):
it's kind of intrinsicallyanimal nature. So in that sense,
it's really helpful for breakingdown the binary between humans
and non humans. But then, on theother hand, it often becomes a
kind of way for anthropocentrismto slip, to slip in through the
backdoor. You talk about humananonymity, you talk about
humans. So I think that that'sproblematic terminology from
(18:48):
that perspective. But then Iwould also say that the term
animal studies can be veryproblematic in itself,
particularly because the termanimal is problematic, and this
is discussed all the time inanimal studies, that the term
animal kind of sets up a binaryopposition already with the term
(19:09):
humans, and it assumes, in theway that it's used
conventionally, that humans arenot animals, even though we
obviously are. So it kind ofcreates us both binary and then
it also homogenizes all the vastvariety of different different
species. And when you'rethinking about how to relate
this into Biblical studies, Imean, there's no singular Hebrew
(19:31):
word which maps precisely ontothe English word animals. So
then that throws up another setof issues and how you relate
these fields together. And soyeah, I think the terminology is
is very difficult to negotiateas well.
Chip Gruen (19:44):
Yeah, although it's funny how much that difficulty
just echoes the difficulty wehave in English in our sort of
cultural landscape, anyway, thatwe can that the you know, sort
of person on the street can sayanimal and that can include a
worm and a chimpanzee, but not ahuman...
Suzanna Millar (20:04):
Precisely.
Chip Gruen (20:05):
...you know. So that there's, yeah, there's
something, there's somethingthat is actually true about the
problems with these categories,because they're mapping onto the
world that we live in. Ibelieve,
Suzanna Millar (20:13):
Yeah, the respondent in one of the
respondents to our volumes bothabout Western cultural zoo
ontologies, which I think is areally interesting way to think
about it, that even the way ourzoo ontologies, the way we
categorize the animal world,even that is cultural, there's
no such thing as a kind ofobjective categorisation of
animals. It's all sort ofrefracted through our cultural
(20:36):
frameworks in the way that wethink about the world, rather
than being a sort of, quote,unquote, true representation of
the world.
Chip Gruen (20:45):
Right, right. The platonic form of animal is not
something that we would sign onto right?
Suzanna Millar (20:50):
Exactly, exactly.
Chip Gruen (20:52):
So. So let's Yeah, so let's go back and let's think
also about, sort of the breadthof fields like animal studies
are almost always described asinterdisciplinary, though we'll
get to the Biblical Studies andthe religious studies angle in a
minute, which both can bedescribed as interdisciplinary
fields as well. Sounsurprisingly, in this volume
in Ask the Animals, there arearticles that incorporate
(21:15):
perspectives from a wide rangeof epistemologies and
methodological frameworks. Canyou talk about the breadth of
the collection, what can readersexpect to find from among all of
these essays? From amethodological perspective?
Suzanna Millar (21:28):
I think Art mentioned the way that the
volume is structured, and Ithink that's a kind of helpful
way to explore the breadth,because you're right, it's a
really diverse volume, and westructured it, and this was
Art's idea, a very good idea, Ithink, to structure it according
to a framework drawn from ananimal study scholar called
Matthew Calarco. And he talksabout some methodologies look at
(21:54):
the identity between animals andhumans the way they're really
similar to each other. Somemethodologies look at the
differences between not onlybetween animals and humans, but
also between different animals,as we've just been talking
about, and the way that ethicsis structured by otherness
rather than by similarities. Andthen some methodologies and
(22:16):
epistemologies and perspectivesjust do something very different
and talk about he calls itindistinction approaches. We
referred it to it as alternativestories, just different ways of
thinking about it. And so wekind of tried to map the essays
into those three broadcategories, which, in
themselves, are very diverse.
They didn't always mapprecisely, but I think that's
testament to some of the waysthat actually there's lots of
(22:38):
exciting diversity and breadth
Chip Gruen (22:42):
Great. So I want to jump to sort of a different
going on here.
question that sort of is, on theone hand, thinking about
discipline, and the other handthinking about this category of
animal studies. This might justbe semantics. It might not be
particularly interesting. And ifnot, you can let me know it's
not an interesting question. Butit seems like most of us are
(23:02):
dealing in what we woulddescribe as humanities
disciplines, right? Like, if youthink about the broad range of
what happens in the academy,have the natural sciences, the
social sciences, the humanitiesand maybe the arts as distinct
from the humanities. But it'sinteresting the basic
assumptions that go into animalstudies or or however we
(23:24):
describe this subfield, orhowever we label the subfield,
is a moving away from thatcentering of the human right
within our scholarship. And Iwonder how you you think about
this right, because, Lord knows,the humanities are embattled
enough we don't need to, youknow, chop at its foundations
and think about that, that thatlabel and question that label
(23:48):
too much. But I wonder how youdeal with the semantic or
categorical problems that thehumanities might offer for this
burgeoning field.
Arthur Walker-Jones (23:56):
Yeah, so the I mean, in North America,
the humanities are under threat,and I don't know if universities
here will continue and collegeswill continue to be structured
that way, that there'll be thesciences, social sciences and
humanities, or however it'sconstructed in individual
institutions. But I think thisfield is, to me, an example of
(24:21):
why whatever we call them, butthe things that are done within
the humanities are essential toeducation. So Michael Gilmore
has an article where he tracesthe way that literature and
appeals to the Bible inliterature were very important
for the development of theSociety for Prevention of
(24:43):
Cruelty to Animals and movementsagainst cruelty to animals. So
the function that the humanitiesliterature plays in our thinking
as a society and imagining whatkind of ethics, what kind of
politics, what kind of societywe want to have. And so that's
going to to me is it's almost areligious function to me that
(25:04):
education has, though it's notframed that way, but in
increasingly secular society,education is the only place
where we have common formationof citizens of the society. And
there's ways in which I thinkthe humanities needs to do that
better. Maybe I'm getting wayaway from animal studies here.
I'm haunted by an article in theChronicle of Higher Education
(25:27):
from a number of years ago thatsaid, the reason in North
America that English had splitinto English and rhetoric, or
English and English writingdepartments, was that if you did
contemporary criticism, it's asit's done in English
departments, it incapacitatedyour ability to write. Like you
(25:49):
became too worried about whetheryou were being patriarchal or
specious or whatever, so youcouldn't be creative anymore. So
to me, there's a problem in theway we do criticism, it needs to
somehow take into in morepositive creative but it's to
get back to animal studies theliterature like Black Beauty
(26:11):
that was important in thedevelopment of the movement to
stop cruelty to animals. Culturecontinues to have that to be
that place where we as asociety, imagine what kind of
future we want to have. And theBible, surprisingly, even in a
secular society, and I have tosay, in my own training in
(26:36):
Biblical Studies, I'm not verygood at analyzing the way the
Bible works and functions... insociety, I was sort of trained
to think about the Bible andtheology, not the Bible and
culture, but it seems to me, theBible, even in a secular
society, continues to play amajor role in politics and
ethics and what kind of futureswe are imagining. And that's
(26:57):
tremendously important work andthe Robert McKay's piece on
cultural zoo ontologies, as hecalls it, I think, points to
this important function of thehumanities. So he's pointing out
that science also is open tocultural critique. It's not
(27:19):
objective, and people in thehumanities come with those
skills that they can offer toscientists. Scientists sometimes
don't appreciate it, but to me,it feels like a really important
cultural and political work forus to be doing, and a reason why
the human humanities will remainimportant.
Suzanna Millar (27:37):
And I would also, I mean, I completely
agree. I'm completely sold onthe value of those traditions,
those disciplines that havetraditionally been called
humanities. I think they'reincredibly invaluable. To the
question of whether humanitiesas a term is the right way to
think about them, is somethingthat I struggle with. I'm
actually working on a book atthe moment, and was discussing
(27:59):
with an editor for publicationand the series has humanities in
the title of the series, andthere's part of me which really
pushes back against publishingsomething which is has human
when I'm thinking about animals,and it's like because I don't
want to constrain it feels likean [inaudible] starting point to
say that what we're doing ishumanities, and there have been
(28:22):
some moves towards thinkingabout this as the post
humanities. But then that itselfis a is a loaded term, and post
humanities, as well, often gets,is often spoken about in terms
of the way that technology is,is integrating with humanhood,
and you have cyborgs and thingslike this. So it's in some ways
(28:43):
similar, but some ways differentfrom what folks in animal
studies are doing. And also, Ithink this traditional binary
that we have between the quote,unquote, humanities and natural
sciences is an artificialbinary. Art just spoke about how
the sciences are themselvescultural and can be open to
cultural critique. The oppositeis also true in that the natural
(29:06):
sciences can really influencethe way that we work in the
humanities. So in our volume,for example, many of our authors
draw explicitly from the naturalsciences to try and understand
the lives of these non humanspecies in the text.
Chip Gruen (29:21):
So one of the things we keep kind of coming back to,
but haven't dealt withexplicitly, is not only the
place of this in animal studies,but the place of this in
Biblical studies as well. So I'dmentioned that the subtitle,
which again to me, seems ratherdaunting, Developing a Biblical
Animal Hermeneutic, it soundslike that is a big promise, but
(29:42):
given the wide range ofperspectives in the volume, and,
you know, the relative messinessof the term, you know, animal
studies, as we've been talkingabout, what does a hermeneutic
look like? In what ways can thiscontribute to that goal? Is that
a singular thing? Is that, um,you know, is that a multiplicity
of things? What, what is loadedinto that subtitle?
Suzanna Millar (30:05):
Yeah, it's a difficult question. And people
always ask, Oh, what is ananimal hermeneutic? When you say
that that's the title? I'malways a little bit stumped.
It's a really difficult questionto answer. I think, at its most
basic, it's a way ofinterpreting text that
explicitly vocalizes non humananimal lives. I think that at
its most basic, that's what itis. But as we've already said,
(30:29):
in practice, that can be really,really varied. I think one of
the interesting things when wewere putting together the volume
was despite the fact thatdespite all that diversity,
there were some common threadsthat came through. So, for
example, this concern forjustice, which you've already
spoken about, which oftenbecomes integrated with drawing
on feminist and post colonialanalysis, or things like
(30:54):
problematizing the humanboundary that comes up
repeatedly throughout the volumeas a as a kind of helpful way
for us to interrogate difficulttexts. Equally things like sort
of recovering the agency ofmarginalized players in the
narrative, which for us would bethe animal players in the
(31:14):
narrative, but parallels the waythat feminists recover the
voices of women in the text andthings like this. So I think it
is a very broad hermeneuticalframe. And yet, in in the way of
this practice, you often do findthese common threads running
through the work of people whowho self define within this
framework.
Arthur Walker-Jones (31:33):
Yeah, we say in the introduction that we
we discussed this. We hadhesitated to define animal
hermeneutics from the beginningthat we wanted to see what a row
arose and leave it open. And wedo try to highlight things at
the end that we some of whichSuzanna's mentioned already,
(31:54):
that we think will be and just afocus on animals as as as
subjects and voices in the inthe narrative is and with with
agency is probably going to bepart of all forms of animal
hermeneutics, but we wanted toleave it open to develop in
whatever way in scholars thoughtit thought best to them.
Chip Gruen (32:17):
Yeah. So moving on.
I mean thinking about that, thatcategory of Biblical Studies.
And again, it is, you know, Ithink our listeners will grow
tired of us saying that. Itdepends on who you talk to, how
these things are defined. Butthinking about this as a
Biblical Studies volume, itincludes studies from both
Hebrew Bible or treatment ofmaterials from both Hebrew Bible
and the New Testament. Andthough, without a lot of
(32:41):
thought, that makes sense. Imean, from a theological
perspective, that makes sensefrom kind of a you know,
certainly the way that we divideand think about religions, it
makes sense. The cultural milieuof the Near East and Roman
Empire, respectively, are verydifferent. So thinking through
the lens of that animal studiesperspective. How do the articles
(33:02):
that span these two verydifferent chronological contexts
fit together? How does this, youknow, does animal studies help
us see these things as a moreunified whole than than we might
think about if we were justthinking from a historical
perspective?
Arthur Walker-Jones (33:20):
I was struck by that, that we we frame
the history in terms of humanempires, and began wondering
about how we might frame thingsdifferently. And I think
actually what we see, and thereare continuity, a lot of
continuities, if you look fromthe view of animals. And I just
started to wonder if, if youarrange things instead,
(33:44):
according to...Israel,Palestine, is quite unique in
that there are severalecological zones all within a
very small area. And then thatmeans also with different types
of relationships with betweenhumans and other species. And I
think running across bothTestaments you have, older,
(34:09):
almost indigenous, closer towhatever kind of agriculture is
is being carried on, forms ofunderstanding. You can disagree
with me as a New Testamentscholar, if you want Chip but to
me, I see the difference in thedifference between Jesus and
(34:29):
Paul, in that in Jesus, you seea closeness to an agricultural
lifestyle, and in Paul, you seemore of an urbanite who's more
separated from those metaphorsand experiences, but that, I
think that's true in both and itwould interrelate with
(34:51):
economics. So you know, in bothTestaments, you have colonial
powers, and they have adifferent more exploitative
relationship with other speciesthan maybe individuals still
living within smaller so I guessI'm also suggesting, instead of
(35:11):
being linear, you would haveolder, more indigenous forms of
understanding in each area thatare being overlain by broader
colonial understandings.
Chip Gruen (35:24):
Yeah, so I'll throw my hat in here a little bit too,
just because when I teach aclass Animals and the Sacred
have taught it for a very longtime, and have used Richard
Bulliet, a Columbia historianwho talks about domesticity as
sort of the dividing line, predomesticity, domesticity, and
(35:46):
then post domesticity. And itseems to me that I mean the
colonial angle, I think is areally great one. But the other
thing is just the mode ofproduction, right? The I the way
that you know, the milieu of ofJesus, or the milieu of, I don't
know, take your pick, HebrewBible. In the Hebrew Bible,
which, whichever epic you wantto deal with, there are, do you
(36:09):
know the majority of people areconnected to land for the
production of their own food.
That you know, has a verydifferent ring than, I think,
your comparison here to Paul,the sort of Paul the urbanite. I
think there's a lot a lot lessgoing on there. I mean that
being said, what's what'sinteresting, and I promised my
wife this morning I wouldn'tsay, Okay, now let's talk about
(36:29):
about my article in thecollection. But you know that,
on the one hand, I think themost important thing going on
with animals here is thedomestic but what I want to do
is highlight when you have notdomesticated animals, and what
does that mean, mean as well inthis whole, in this whole
landscape. So anyway, I don'tknow. What do you think? What do
(36:50):
you think about domesticity assort of, or, as you say,
economic, both economic andpolitical and social models,
sort of holding some of thismaterial together as well.
Suzanna Millar (37:00):
Yeah. I mean, I think the whole topic of
domestication is a reallyfascinating and very disputed
one. I know that David Carr,that is a really important work
on the Bible and domestication,both kind of the domestication
of animals in the Bible and kindof the domesticating legacy of
the Bible. And his line on this,and I hope that I'm not
(37:22):
misrepresenting him here, but hewould press quite strongly on
the domestication as domination,kind of thing that by by
domesticating non human species,humans are taking control of the
life worlds of these non humansin ways that are fundamentally
to the benefit of those humans.
And so he draws on people likeTim Ingold for this, who's a
(37:43):
seminal writer in this area, whospeaks about domestication as a
move from a relationship oftrust with animals to a
relationship of domination overanimals. And that's that's one
very well thought out andsensible set of ideas. Others,
and I think I would put myselfmore in this camp, actually
stress that domestication itselfinvolves a kind of a
(38:06):
relationship with a non humanspecies. And the
agriculturalists who lived everyday with their sheep probably
had some sort of a relationshipwith their sheep. And so
scholars like KristenArmstrong-Oma, for example, talk
about practices of care as beingreally fundamental to
domestication and theestablishment of some sort of a
social contract between species,rather than it simply being
(38:28):
humans dominating non humans.
And so I think we see littleglimpses of this all the way
through. I mean, I'm a HebrewBible scholar, I can't
particularly speak to the NewTestament, but I believe in both
Testaments, little glimpses ofthis kind of relationship of
care, whether it's the shepherdgoing after the sheep um or, in
the book of Samuel, they've gota little vignette about a poor
man who feeds his sheep in hisarms and this sort of thing. So
(38:52):
I think the domestication issueis is a very disputed one, and
can kind of cut in both ways, asit were.
Chip Gruen (38:58):
Yeah. And I think the other part of that too, is
that we are, of course, readingthese from at least what
Bulliet, if I can continue touse him for a minute, from a
post domesticated, you know,post domestic world. So, you
know, when you talk about thatethic of care, and then think
about industrial farming, or,you know, the sort of the
manufacturing of meat and eggsand things like that, like we're
(39:20):
in a very different place. Youknow, that both sort of
culturally and ethically vis avis animals non human animals as
well.
Suzanna Millar (39:29):
Yeah, and I think that really shapes the way
that we think about these textswhen we're reading them. That I
should say most of us don't comefrom the context where we're
having daily interactions withnon human species. We think in
human frameworks, and we don'tconsider animal to be members of
our societies in the way thatprobably the biblical authors
would have thought about them.
And I think I've been personallychallenged in this regard
(39:50):
recently, because I've um soI've just adopted two cats, two
little kittens. They're the bestthe Coco and Sol, which is short
for Qoheleth and Solomon, which,for any sort of Biblical
Studies, people, is funnybecause Qoheleth was the author
of Ecclesiastes. Solomon is theauthor of ostensibly
Proverbs...Solomon. But anyway,[inaudible], The point is that
(40:12):
through kind of my actual dailyinteractions with non humans, it
sort of forces you outside ofyour I mean, actually, one
response is to humanize youranimals. I think, well, they're
just like little fluffy versionsof children. And another
response is to try and thinkabout what it might actually be
like to be a cat or to be theclassic example is a bat
(40:34):
actually, of course, and I thinkwe don't do that very much,
maybe a little bit with pets,but very few of us actually
think about what it would belike to be a sheep on a farm or
a chicken on a factory farm orwhatever. So yeah, so I think
we're in a really differentcontext where animals just
aren't part of our social worldin the same way that they were
(40:56):
in these agro pastoral societiesof the ancient world.
Chip Gruen (41:02):
Yeah, and it's interesting, I mean, from a
Biblical Studies perspective, tosort of push this further, if
you have a milieu where not onlyanimals are considered and
thought about differently, butyour metaphors for God and the
way that you think about theDivine is predicated on
agricultural images that wecan't get or don't understand
(41:24):
because of our sort of differentmode of production. I mean,
it's, I don't know. There has tobe something lost in translation
there I think.
Suzanna Millar (41:32):
Yeah.
Arthur Walker-Jones (41:33):
I've often thought the or in recent years,
that the pastoral imagery isI've wondered whether people
realize that that's troubling.
Like if you say that Lord is myshepherd, you really mean that
at some point God is going todecide to kill you for meat.
Probably Suzanna will say weshouldn't take the metaphor so
literally. But I suspect thatancient pastoralists who were
(41:57):
caring for their sheep and andand goats, and had a
relationship with them andrecognized that eventually, that
they were, they would be killedbut were caring caring for them
were okay with the with thatmetaphor for God and what it
what it in implied, I justwanted to say about I liked your
(42:19):
your categories you had becausethey had domestic in the first
two, which indicates a mode ofproduction that relates us to
other species, and it disappearsin the last one, which sort of
feels represented our period intime where It's not that we're
any less related to otherspecies, but it's just not part
(42:42):
of our consciousness. We're veryhuman centered in the way we
think and talk. But just toconcur with what Suzanna was
saying with about domestication,I think a view that, although
I'm sympathetic to it, a viewthat sees domestication at just
as domination, is maybe notpolitically useful, because it
(43:07):
would imply we needed to do awaywith all domestication. It might
be more political and realisticto instead talk about different
different types of domesticationand how exploitative they may or
may not be to the speciesinvolved. And I think that's
what the cultural feminist,Marxist cultural critic Donna
(43:30):
Haraway has been doing with herstudies of agility dogs and dogs
themselves are interesting, andit doesn't seem like humans
forced dogs into subservience.
It seems that dogs startedfollowing humans around, and co
created an ecological nichewhere they were benefiting from
(43:54):
their association with humans.
And so I'm sort of interestedsince Suzanna is being pushed
back, I kind of push backagainst the wild, domestic
binary, and look at all thecases where that's kind of a
little slippery, that we're inassociation with a lot of other
species that we have co evolvedwith, that we're co creating
ecological niches with.
(44:17):
Certainly, we need to ask aboutdomination and be aware of
domination, exploitation. But togo back to Donna Haraway's
agility dogs, I think she'srecognized in the problem of
understanding what's going on inagility, an agility dog's mind,
but when they seem to beenjoying working with her in
(44:40):
agility, even to have joy indoing it, and in some ways be
better than her at doing it, andput her in situations where she
has to follow the dog becauseshe can't think and react as
quickly as the dog if they wantto be successful and but anyway,
just that. The dog appears tolove doing this, to take joy in
(45:06):
in agility competitions. Soagain, it's problematic to try
to think that we can know what'sgoing on in a in a in a dog's
mind, but they are also mammals.
And so biologists are alsosaying, and it's been part of
the recognition that otherspecies suffer. If they're
making having all theneurological responses to
(45:27):
stimulus that we have, andexpressing the same kind of
things that we would when we'resuffering, then we can probably
say they're suffering too.
Anyway, there's all kinds oftheoretical problems there. But
I think there's interestingconversations to have about
different modes of production,different ecological niches, and
(45:49):
to what extent the other speciesare. You know what the ethics?
It means a more complex andambiguous discussion about what
the ethics is. If it's justdomination, you just need to get
rid of it. It's simple, but Iguess I'm suggesting it's not
quite that, that simple. It's acomplex issue about the species
we've co evolved with, and howwe go forward to relationships
(46:16):
that are less exploitative, inwhich all species can flourish.
Chip Gruen (46:21):
So in the concluding remarks that you both co
authored to the volume, youexpress your hope that this book
will be widely used in collegeclassrooms. You even go to
introduce classroom exercisesand really imagine a world in
which this is not only a book onthe shelf of an interested
(46:44):
person, but also something thatis being, you know, used to
develop syllabi and to develop,you know, classroom activities.
Can you talk a little bit aboutthe importance of that? I mean,
that's not something you see atthe end of every scholarly
volume, right? So that thefronting of that pedagogical,
the fronting of the use of thiswithin classrooms in our higher
(47:06):
educational institutions, reallystood out to me. And I'd love to
hear your comments on why youchose to do that and what your
hopes for the book are.
Suzanna Millar (47:15):
Yeah, and I think, Well, I think both Art
and myself are quite passionateteachers that I certainly
wouldn't see myself as just aresearcher like I'm very much
also a teacher, and I think someof the best conversations happen
with students. And I think wealso didn't want the book to be
something which was just forjust the old academics sitting
(47:36):
on the shelf somewhere, as yousay, or in a library somewhere,
or just for the occasional PhDstudents, and I think it matters
that these issues are spokenabout in classrooms. And I think
also students care. Studentscare about these issues. They
care about animals. They careabout what's happening with the
climate crisis and the waythat's impacting on other
species. They care about socialjustice, whether that's social
(47:58):
justice for non humans or othermarginalized groups, and so I
think it's the sort of thingthat actually students could
really get on board with. Imean, the other aspect of it is
because, because it is sodiverse and so kind of
imaginative in many ways andinnovative, it almost gives
students a bit more license tothink, think a bit more outside
(48:19):
the box, maybe not to say thatyou should sort of totally get
away with sort of traditionalBiblical Studies training or
whatever, or religious studiestraining, but that it explores
the scope of what's possible andnew ways of thinking and not
just hemming itself into thesevery traditional forms of
knowledge that have sort of beenvery tried and tested in the
(48:40):
classroom, and actually possiblyopens, just a new opening into
other ways of thinking and doingand being, which I think
potentially could be quiteexciting. And obviously the book
is only just out. It's not beenused in any classrooms so far to
my knowledge, but I really hopethat it might be, and that that
might impact some studentssomewhere.
Arthur Walker-Jones (49:02):
Let me just acknowledge that it's a little
dangerous in academia, whereit's of secondary value, often
in promotion. So it was Suzannawho suggested putting this in
here, and I was glad that shedid, because I think it's
important.
Chip Gruen (49:16):
That's great. I mean, I teach at, I mean,
Muhlenberg College is a, youknow, liberal arts college in
the Northeast, where teaching isincredibly important. So I for
one, found it super edifying.
You know that you all called outand highlighted right the
importance of the work we do,not just as writers and
researchers, but as you know,interacting with these 18 to 22
(49:36):
year olds in many cases, or nontraditional students as well,
and that this can be a benefit,like you say, not only to
researchers and scholars, but tothem as well. So I thank you for
including that. So I know we'reabout at time, and I want to
value your time, but I like toend up by asking the question. I
want both you all to chime in onthis one, what am I not asking
(50:00):
about? What is the you know, Iam very aware of my own myopia
in lots of ways. So what is thething that is really important
to you about this project, orabout this field, or about the
work that you've done in animalstudies in its conjunction to
biblical studies, that Ihaven't, that I haven't
highlighted or asked you about,that you think we should, we
(50:20):
should make sure that wemention?
Suzanna Millar (50:23):
I think, I think we've covered a lot in this
conversation. I think most ofthe things that I'd want people
to know about book we've alreadysaid. I just have one kind of
reflection, which I don't quiteknow what to do with, but sort
of often comes back to me. And Ithink I've mentioned a few times
that I've been inspired a lot byfeminist scholarship and other
scholarships that centralized asmarginalized humans. And
(50:45):
oftentimes what that scholarshipdoes is to a feminist
scholarship, tries to get womento do the scholarship and or
scholarship with disadvantagedcommunities, empowers those
communities themselves to speakout and to do the stuff
themselves, which I would loveto say we could do an animal
studies, but it's really hard toknow how to do that. Like, how
(51:06):
on earth do we get a dog or acat or a maggot? I know my
chapter in the book aboutmaggots, like, how on earth do
we, quote, unquote, hear theirvoices? Um, within, within
scholarship. And so I thinkthat's a kind of insoluble issue
that I don't know what to dowith, but I think potentially
warrants further reflectionwithin our field.
Arthur Walker-Jones (51:27):
Yeah, I would agree with that. That's a
unique problem of this field,and so within ecological
hermeneutics, theanthropocentrism has been
questioned as as a category, andI think even more so in animal
(51:48):
studies, it's useful, but ourour perspective on other species
is also always going to be, tosome extent, anthropocentric. So
how we deal with that is isgoing to be ongoing question.
This isn't nothing that you'vemissed Chip, but something that
(52:09):
we didn't say in the book, thatI think is maybe an implication.
It's an implication for theHumanities broadly, but I think
this kind of work, and alsoecological hermeneutics. I mean
both fields I find difficult inthat I have to study science as
I can't even keep up withbiblical studies, and now I'm
having to study other fieldstoo. So although I was trained
(52:34):
in very kyriarchalindividualistic ways, it's made
me aware of the need forresearch to be done in
interdisciplinary teams, which Isee some places, but I think we
we need to develop morecommunal, interdisciplinary
research projects to effectivelydo this kind of work.
Chip Gruen (52:57):
Well, that seems like a good call to action and
maybe a good place to end soArthur Walker-Jones and Suzanna
Millar, thanks again for comingon ReligionWise. This has been
fun.
Suzanna Millar (53:08):
It's been great.
Thank you so much.
Arthur Walker-Jones (53:09):
Thank you so much for having us.
Chip Gruen (53:14):
This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced
by the Institute for Religiousand Cultural Understanding of
Muhlenberg College. ReligionWiseis produced and directed by
Christine Flicker. For moreinformation about additional
programming, or to make aninquiry about a speaking
engagement, please visit ourwebsite at
religionandculture.com There,you'll find our contact
(53:34):
information, links to otherprogramming and have the
opportunity to support the workof the Institute. Please
subscribe to ReligionWise,wherever you get your podcasts,
we look forward to seeing younext time.
Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip
Gruen. Today we have a littlebit of a different kind of an
episode in that it isprecipitated by the publication
of a book. This is a book calledAsk the Animals - Developing a
Biblical Animal Hermeneutic thatis published as a part of the
Semeia series from the Societyof Biblical Literature. And just
(00:28):
in the interests of beingforthright, I will just mention
that I have a an essay in thiscollection. Today we have the
two editors of this volume,Arthur Walker-Jones, who's
professor of religion andculture at the University of
Winnipeg, and Suzanna Millar,who's a lecturer in Hebrew Bible
at the University of Edinburgh.
So we have a conversation aboutthe confluence of animal
(00:53):
studies, and we'll talk aboutthe viability of that term with
biblical studies thatincorporates both Hebrew Bible
and New Testament. This is atopic that is really interesting
to me, although I think thatyou'll hear some indications
that the field itself is iscontested, that different people
(01:13):
imagine it in different ways.
Different people include notonly different methods, but but
even different boundaries as towhat is included in it, what is
a part of field itself. How muchof this is about ethics, how
much of this is about studyingcultural practice, how much of
this is about biology, etc, justsort of personal narrative for
(01:35):
me, I've taught a class calledAnimals and the Sacred for near
on 15 years here at MuhlenbergCollege, and so it was a delight
when I was invited to contributeone of my pieces to this work.
But the the field itself is isinteresting, not only in its
relationship to animal studies,but but imagine all of the
(01:57):
religious communities and thereligious stories and rituals
that you know that includeanimal imagery, or animals
within ritual, or animals withinmythology, or animals as
symbols, that animal studies,kind of goes beyond that. Sort
of takes that as a startingpoint, or at least that's my
starting point in Animals andthe Sacred but then we can go
(02:19):
beyond that and think also aboutanimals as sentient beings in
their in their own right, oranimals as actors, as the
collection, another collectionon some of these topics that's
more broadly religious studiesthat I use by Paul Waldau and
Kim Patton. The title is theCommunion of Subjects that goes
(02:42):
off of a Wendell Berry quotethat we should not just imagine
animals as objects, but thatthey are subjects in their own
right. If you are not anacademic yourself, you can sort
of peek behind the curtain alittle bit and think about how
much categorization and the waythat we think about the topics
(03:03):
we talk about is both reflectiveof the world we live in, but
also reflective of the politicsand culture of higher education.
And I think that that comescomes through loud and clear
here as well. The final thingthat I'll say, just to set up
this episode, is that you'llhear both Suzanna and Arthur
(03:26):
relate personal stories aboutinteractions with animals, in
both cases, their interactionswith companion animals or pets.
And I think that it's tellingthat even in our information
economy, in our post domesticworld, we have lots of
(03:48):
interactions with animals,whether they're squirrels in
your local park or dogs or catsor whether you're a hunter or a
fisherman or an agriculturalist,that we certainly have less
contact with animals than, say,an agro pastoral community might
have, but animals are still apart of our world and a part of
(04:10):
our imagination. And I think oneof the things that we might take
from these conversations is thatit's a challenge to think about
what those interactions are, andnot to take them for granted,
but to imagine that they areculturally determined, that they
don't have to always be the waythat they are, and that this is
(04:33):
something that we sort ofmetacognitively can not only
think about, but think about theway that we think about animals
in our world. So without furtherado, here's that conversation. I
hope you enjoy it. Dr. ArthurWalker-Jones and Dr. Suzanna
Millar, thanks for being onReligionWise. I appreciate you
being here.
Arthur Walker-Jones (04:53):
Thank you so much for having us.
Suzanna Millar (04:55):
Thank you for having us.
Chip Gruen (04:57):
All right, so as I explained in the introduction,
the occasion for thisconversation is the publication
of the collection that youedited together entitled Ask the
Animals - Developing a BiblicalAnimal Hermeneutic, which came
out from the Society of BiblicalLiterature press in the Semeia
series just last month in June.
A good deal of our conversationtoday will be unpacking some of
(05:22):
those terms. There's a lot goingon in that title. But before we
get to that, I would like eachof you to introduce yourselves.
How did you come to this work,and how is this collaboration
between the two of you on thisparticular project born?
Suzanna, can we start with you?
Suzanna Millar (05:37):
Of course, yeah.
And so I really came to thefield of study of animals in the
Bible after my PhD. So Ifinished my PhD in 2018 and then
I was thinking about whatdirection I wanted to take my
research in. And at the time, Iwas attending the Society of
Biblical Literature AnnualConference, which is a big
conference in the area, andthere was a consultation going
(06:00):
on about animals in the Bible atthe time, and I remember going
to one of the sessions of thatconsultation and just finding it
an incredibly exciting place tobe. It felt like things were
happening in the field and thatthere was actual, real important
work to be done. So from that, Isort of got interested in the
field, and it's a quite a whileago now. So I may be
(06:21):
misremembering things, and I'msure Arthur can correct me if
I'm misremembering things, but Ibelieve I presented a paper, and
then subsequently Arthur had hadbeen thinking of this idea of
putting together a volume, andhe contacted me to ask whether I
would like to contribute mypaper to the volume, at which
point I said, Oh, I'm sorry thatpaper is going to be published
(06:44):
elsewhere. However, would youlike a co editor? And so I think
that was the way that I becameinvolved in the project and but
I'm sure Arthur speak moreeloquently to it than I.
Arthur Walker-Jones (06:56):
That's a you have a better memory than
mine, I think, actually, butit's basically what I remember.
I remember you appearing in oneof the sessions. I've been
interested in animals for a longtime. Though, my interest in
animal studies was sort ofprecipitated when we had a
family dog that we had got formy son. We had spent five and a
(07:20):
half years in Fiji, and he washaving trouble readjusting. We
went there when he was sixmonths old, and came back to
Canada when he was six, and hewas having trouble readjusting
to Canadian culture. And he hada had had a dog that he loved in
Fiji. So we thought, Well, maybeif we get, get him a dog that
will help him, so that this dog,JoJo, was important to our
(07:42):
family, and as he got older, hegot unable to take himself out,
and so I had spent severalmonths taking carrying him
outdoor. And I think it was thatI had to go to a Society of
Biblical Literature meeting, andmy partner said, you know, I
can't carry him, so we're goingto have to put him down before
you go to SPL. And everybodyassured me that that was fine,
(08:07):
but when we went to the vet togive him the injections, the vet
gave him the first injection, hewas, by the way, in a lot of
pain. The reason I was having tocarry him out was that he had
very severe arthritis and andhad for quite some time. So and
everybody assured me it was timeto put him down, but the vet
(08:29):
gave him the first shot, andafter he'd given him, he
struggled to get up and leave,and so then the vet had to give
him another shot, and he wasstill struggling to try to get
out, and so I felt I had madethis choice for a sentient
being. All of us that have petsknow that they're persons, that
(08:52):
they have thoughts and feelingsand personalities, and I didn't
feel good about my decision toput down, uh, Jojo. And so
that's how I started readingabout animals and dogs. And
started reading, I guess, a veryscholarly kind of thing to deal
with grief is to start readingabout dogs. And I started
(09:13):
reading animal studies scholarsand and they were referring to
the Bible. But I realized thatthere weren't very many people
in Biblical Studies engagingwith animal studies, and there
was huge potential there. I hadfor a long time been involved in
the ecological hermeneuticssection and the earth Bible
(09:34):
project, and was really gratefulas as a younger scholar, when
Norman Habel had asked me tocontribute to the first of those
volumes, and then I got involvedin ecological hemaritics because
it gave me a community in whichto do what I was interested in
(09:55):
doing. And so I thought, well,I've chaired an SBL group before
I could start an animal studiesanimals in the Bible group at
SBL to see if to provide acommunity and see if there is
other other scholars. So it'sactually quite gratifying for me
to hear that it functioned thatway for Susanna and and it has
(10:18):
been a nice part of the projectfor me a number of the
contributors to this volumes areyounger scholars who either I
also decided to have an animalsand religion conference. So some
of them, like Dong and Beverlycame to that first animals and
religion conference that I gave.
And then And then more more likeSuzanna arrived in the animals
(10:40):
in the Bible consultation. So,so and I, I've been really
grateful that Suzanna offered tohelp me, because, as anyone who
knows who's done an editedvolume, it's, it's a huge amount
of work, and she has compensatedfor lacks of mine. And it sort
of worked well in that when oneof us didn't have time the other
(11:02):
and maybe had time to do things.
Chip Gruen (11:05):
Well, great. Thanks for that. So you've mentioned
animal studies, and when wethink of this, depending on who
you ask, this is either a fieldthat emerged in the 1970s in the
wake of the postmodern turn, orit's a really nascent field
that's continuing to develop andbuild its questions and methods.
And I guess my take on this isthat it's probably somewhere in
(11:30):
between those, or simultaneouslyboth of those. What is your take
on this category, or on thisfield, animal studies, and how
it represents something distinctfrom the other fields that we
work in.
Suzanna Millar (11:43):
I mean, it's a, it's a huge question. And I
think, I think the quote,unquote, field of animal studies
is in a constant process of,kind of trying to dispatch
define itself. And as you'vesaid, different people have
different takes on its originstory and its particular
distinctiveness and things likethat. So I think you'll probably
(12:04):
get a different answer fromwhoever you ask on this
question. And I think I thinkyou're right that part of it is
this kind of post modern turnaway from sort of conventional
methods of doing scholarshipwithin Western humanist
discourse, and so ties in withthings like post structuralism
and the kind of dissolution oflike binary thinking and stuff
(12:29):
like this. But I think anotheraspect of it which has really
been important, particularly asthe field has developed in
recent years, has been this kindof edge towards ethics and
justice, which I think has comeup a lot through things like
feminist and post colonialscholarships as well, which have
quite strongly influenced animalstudies in recent years. And so
(12:51):
I think while there is this kindof more like post modern theory
aspect to it, I would also wantto press quite heavily on the
more justice oriented angle toit as well. And of course,
there's lots of debates withinthat of whether justice
struggles for non human animalsare the same as justice
struggles for different humangroups, or whether they're
different in what ways theyintersect, and things like that.
(13:13):
So I think that, at least fromfrom my understanding, a lot of
that really kicked off in the90s with the work of
ecofeminists particularly, andthen has continued on and very
recent work in this area aswell.
Chip Gruen (13:27):
Yeah, I wonder. I want to jump ahead just a little
bit, because this does emergealongside more explicitly
activist movements that worktowards the care and protection
of non human animal species.
Would you say that animalstudies is, I mean, what is
relationship between, betweenthe subfield and ecological
rights, animal rights movements?
(13:51):
I mean, I am all the time, sortof negotiating this in lots of
ways, about talking about likewe're not like what we do might
inform activism, but it mightnot be, you know, training
activists itself. How do you seethe dance between those two
things?
Suzanna Millar (14:06):
Yeah, well, I think there is some animal
studies scholarship that isexplicitly activist. So
sometimes that gets calledcritical animal studies, which
is quite confusing, because youthink that would be more kind of
theoretical, actually, that theactivist wing. And so there is
some scholarship whichexplicitly does this. And I also
potentially would want to pushback a little bit on the framing
(14:27):
of this within a kind of animalrights discourse, which I know
is is traditionally how animalethics has been conceived in the
West. But I think quite a lot ofcontemporary scholars is
problematizing whether rights isthe best way to think about
this, but that's a kind ofcaveat. And to go back to the
main point, I think there is alot of crossover with things
(14:49):
like feminist scholarships inthe way that structures of
domination and oversubordinategroups work. So be they sort of
women or ethnic minorities or, Iwould say non human animals. I
think there is a deep connectionbetween those things. You ask
also about ecologicalhermeneutics. I know that Art
has done a lot in ecology, so Iwonder whether he might jump in
(15:12):
on that question.
Arthur Walker-Jones (15:15):
Yeah. I mean, I, I had been involved in
ecological hermeneutics, andalthough looking back, I realize
animals have always been part ofmy ecological hermeneutics, I
noticed that it was possiblefrom for some people to think
about ecological issues and notthink about the other species
that were involved. And so in away, thinking about it in a very
(15:38):
human centered concern aboutecology. And you can see in the
volume that there are some ofthe authors that locate
themselves within ecologicalhermeneutics and relate what
they're doing to the earth Bibleseries and commentaries, partly
because we ran a joint sessionwith the ecological hermeneutics
(16:00):
section. So they were presentingfor that, that that section, I
sort of think of of differentstreams that sometimes come
together and sometimes separate.
And I'm not exactly sure aboutthe chronology, but And Suzanne
and I had had a discussion earlyabout on, about whether we would
talk, have a discussion in theintroduction of different
(16:24):
terminology, I had chosen animalstudies to be kind of a neutral
umbrella term that would take ina lot of things, so that it
would include animal rights. Thedifferent authors in the volume
use different terminology. Socritical animal studies is often
concerned with issues ofjustice, usually means
(16:46):
explicitly vegan. So I had sortof avoided critical animal
studies to avoid the implicationthat this was somehow vegan
studies. And I guess there is aseparate vegan studies now
started by people who thoughtcritical animal studies was not
vegan enough. We haven'tmentioned animality studies.
Brian Tipton uses that thatlanguage and this also
(17:11):
interrelates with the way thevolume is set up. Is that I, I
felt that quite a bit had beendone in Biblical studies with
Derrida and animality studies,and coming from an ecological
perspective that seems sort ofanthropocentric to not ask about
to focus just on human animalityand not ask about animal other
(17:35):
animals. I mean, my interestswere political and ethical
around animals, but I wanted toprovide an umbrella term that
would also allow people to docultural or biological studies
that would not necessarily beinterested but could I mean
(17:57):
would necessarily informpolitical and ethical concerns
around other species.
Suzanna Millar (18:04):
So I just wanted to jump off Art's reflections on
the use of terminology in thisarea. And I think I would echo
what he said about potentialproblems with animal term
animality, which, on the onehand, is, I think is a very
useful term because it'sgenerally used to speak about
human animality. That is to saythat humans are animals, and so
(18:27):
it's kind of intrinsicallyanimal nature. So in that sense,
it's really helpful for breakingdown the binary between humans
and non humans. But then, on theother hand, it often becomes a
kind of way for anthropocentrismto slip, to slip in through the
backdoor. You talk about humananonymity, you talk about
humans. So I think that that'sproblematic terminology from
(18:48):
that perspective. But then Iwould also say that the term
animal studies can be veryproblematic in itself,
particularly because the termanimal is problematic, and this
is discussed all the time inanimal studies, that the term
animal kind of sets up a binaryopposition already with the term
(19:09):
humans, and it assumes, in theway that it's used
conventionally, that humans arenot animals, even though we
obviously are. So it kind ofcreates us both binary and then
it also homogenizes all the vastvariety of different different
species. And when you'rethinking about how to relate
this into Biblical studies, Imean, there's no singular Hebrew
(19:31):
word which maps precisely ontothe English word animals. So
then that throws up another setof issues and how you relate
these fields together. And soyeah, I think the terminology is
is very difficult to negotiateas well.
Chip Gruen (19:44):
Yeah, although it's funny how much that difficulty
just echoes the difficulty wehave in English in our sort of
cultural landscape, anyway, thatwe can that the you know, sort
of person on the street can sayanimal and that can include a
worm and a chimpanzee, but not ahuman...
Suzanna Millar (20:04):
Precisely.
Chip Gruen (20:05):
...you know. So that there's, yeah, there's
something, there's somethingthat is actually true about the
problems with these categories,because they're mapping onto the
world that we live in. Ibelieve,
Suzanna Millar (20:13):
Yeah, the respondent in one of the
respondents to our volumes bothabout Western cultural zoo
ontologies, which I think is areally interesting way to think
about it, that even the way ourzoo ontologies, the way we
categorize the animal world,even that is cultural, there's
no such thing as a kind ofobjective categorisation of
animals. It's all sort ofrefracted through our cultural
(20:36):
frameworks in the way that wethink about the world, rather
than being a sort of, quote,unquote, true representation of
the world.
Chip Gruen (20:45):
Right, right. The platonic form of animal is not
something that we would sign onto right?
Suzanna Millar (20:50):
Exactly, exactly.
Chip Gruen (20:52):
So. So let's Yeah, so let's go back and let's think
also about, sort of the breadthof fields like animal studies
are almost always described asinterdisciplinary, though we'll
get to the Biblical Studies andthe religious studies angle in a
minute, which both can bedescribed as interdisciplinary
fields as well. Sounsurprisingly, in this volume
in Ask the Animals, there arearticles that incorporate
(21:15):
perspectives from a wide rangeof epistemologies and
methodological frameworks. Canyou talk about the breadth of
the collection, what can readersexpect to find from among all of
these essays? From amethodological perspective?
Suzanna Millar (21:28):
I think Art mentioned the way that the
volume is structured, and Ithink that's a kind of helpful
way to explore the breadth,because you're right, it's a
really diverse volume, and westructured it, and this was
Art's idea, a very good idea, Ithink, to structure it according
to a framework drawn from ananimal study scholar called
Matthew Calarco. And he talksabout some methodologies look at
(21:54):
the identity between animals andhumans the way they're really
similar to each other. Somemethodologies look at the
differences between not onlybetween animals and humans, but
also between different animals,as we've just been talking
about, and the way that ethicsis structured by otherness
rather than by similarities. Andthen some methodologies and
(22:16):
epistemologies and perspectivesjust do something very different
and talk about he calls itindistinction approaches. We
referred it to it as alternativestories, just different ways of
thinking about it. And so wekind of tried to map the essays
into those three broadcategories, which, in
themselves, are very diverse.
They didn't always mapprecisely, but I think that's
testament to some of the waysthat actually there's lots of
(22:38):
exciting diversity and breadth
Chip Gruen (22:42):
Great. So I want to jump to sort of a different
going on here.
question that sort of is, on theone hand, thinking about
discipline, and the other handthinking about this category of
animal studies. This might justbe semantics. It might not be
particularly interesting. And ifnot, you can let me know it's
not an interesting question. Butit seems like most of us are
(23:02):
dealing in what we woulddescribe as humanities
disciplines, right? Like, if youthink about the broad range of
what happens in the academy,have the natural sciences, the
social sciences, the humanitiesand maybe the arts as distinct
from the humanities. But it'sinteresting the basic
assumptions that go into animalstudies or or however we
(23:24):
describe this subfield, orhowever we label the subfield,
is a moving away from thatcentering of the human right
within our scholarship. And Iwonder how you you think about
this right, because, Lord knows,the humanities are embattled
enough we don't need to, youknow, chop at its foundations
and think about that, that thatlabel and question that label
(23:48):
too much. But I wonder how youdeal with the semantic or
categorical problems that thehumanities might offer for this
burgeoning field.
Arthur Walker-Jones (23:56):
Yeah, so the I mean, in North America,
the humanities are under threat,and I don't know if universities
here will continue and collegeswill continue to be structured
that way, that there'll be thesciences, social sciences and
humanities, or however it'sconstructed in individual
institutions. But I think thisfield is, to me, an example of
(24:21):
why whatever we call them, butthe things that are done within
the humanities are essential toeducation. So Michael Gilmore
has an article where he tracesthe way that literature and
appeals to the Bible inliterature were very important
for the development of theSociety for Prevention of
(24:43):
Cruelty to Animals and movementsagainst cruelty to animals. So
the function that the humanitiesliterature plays in our thinking
as a society and imagining whatkind of ethics, what kind of
politics, what kind of societywe want to have. And so that's
going to to me is it's almost areligious function to me that
(25:04):
education has, though it's notframed that way, but in
increasingly secular society,education is the only place
where we have common formationof citizens of the society. And
there's ways in which I thinkthe humanities needs to do that
better. Maybe I'm getting wayaway from animal studies here.
I'm haunted by an article in theChronicle of Higher Education
(25:27):
from a number of years ago thatsaid, the reason in North
America that English had splitinto English and rhetoric, or
English and English writingdepartments, was that if you did
contemporary criticism, it's asit's done in English
departments, it incapacitatedyour ability to write. Like you
(25:49):
became too worried about whetheryou were being patriarchal or
specious or whatever, so youcouldn't be creative anymore. So
to me, there's a problem in theway we do criticism, it needs to
somehow take into in morepositive creative but it's to
get back to animal studies theliterature like Black Beauty
(26:11):
that was important in thedevelopment of the movement to
stop cruelty to animals. Culturecontinues to have that to be
that place where we as asociety, imagine what kind of
future we want to have. And theBible, surprisingly, even in a
secular society, and I have tosay, in my own training in
(26:36):
Biblical Studies, I'm not verygood at analyzing the way the
Bible works and functions... insociety, I was sort of trained
to think about the Bible andtheology, not the Bible and
culture, but it seems to me, theBible, even in a secular
society, continues to play amajor role in politics and
ethics and what kind of futureswe are imagining. And that's
(26:57):
tremendously important work andthe Robert McKay's piece on
cultural zoo ontologies, as hecalls it, I think, points to
this important function of thehumanities. So he's pointing out
that science also is open tocultural critique. It's not
(27:19):
objective, and people in thehumanities come with those
skills that they can offer toscientists. Scientists sometimes
don't appreciate it, but to me,it feels like a really important
cultural and political work forus to be doing, and a reason why
the human humanities will remainimportant.
Suzanna Millar (27:37):
And I would also, I mean, I completely
agree. I'm completely sold onthe value of those traditions,
those disciplines that havetraditionally been called
humanities. I think they'reincredibly invaluable. To the
question of whether humanitiesas a term is the right way to
think about them, is somethingthat I struggle with. I'm
actually working on a book atthe moment, and was discussing
(27:59):
with an editor for publicationand the series has humanities in
the title of the series, andthere's part of me which really
pushes back against publishingsomething which is has human
when I'm thinking about animals,and it's like because I don't
want to constrain it feels likean [inaudible] starting point to
say that what we're doing ishumanities, and there have been
(28:22):
some moves towards thinkingabout this as the post
humanities. But then that itselfis a is a loaded term, and post
humanities, as well, often gets,is often spoken about in terms
of the way that technology is,is integrating with humanhood,
and you have cyborgs and thingslike this. So it's in some ways
(28:43):
similar, but some ways differentfrom what folks in animal
studies are doing. And also, Ithink this traditional binary
that we have between the quote,unquote, humanities and natural
sciences is an artificialbinary. Art just spoke about how
the sciences are themselvescultural and can be open to
cultural critique. The oppositeis also true in that the natural
(29:06):
sciences can really influencethe way that we work in the
humanities. So in our volume,for example, many of our authors
draw explicitly from the naturalsciences to try and understand
the lives of these non humanspecies in the text.
Chip Gruen (29:21):
So one of the things we keep kind of coming back to,
but haven't dealt withexplicitly, is not only the
place of this in animal studies,but the place of this in
Biblical studies as well. So I'dmentioned that the subtitle,
which again to me, seems ratherdaunting, Developing a Biblical
Animal Hermeneutic, it soundslike that is a big promise, but
(29:42):
given the wide range ofperspectives in the volume, and,
you know, the relative messinessof the term, you know, animal
studies, as we've been talkingabout, what does a hermeneutic
look like? In what ways can thiscontribute to that goal? Is that
a singular thing? Is that, um,you know, is that a multiplicity
of things? What, what is loadedinto that subtitle?
Suzanna Millar (30:05):
Yeah, it's a difficult question. And people
always ask, Oh, what is ananimal hermeneutic? When you say
that that's the title? I'malways a little bit stumped.
It's a really difficult questionto answer. I think, at its most
basic, it's a way ofinterpreting text that
explicitly vocalizes non humananimal lives. I think that at
its most basic, that's what itis. But as we've already said,
(30:29):
in practice, that can be really,really varied. I think one of
the interesting things when wewere putting together the volume
was despite the fact thatdespite all that diversity,
there were some common threadsthat came through. So, for
example, this concern forjustice, which you've already
spoken about, which oftenbecomes integrated with drawing
on feminist and post colonialanalysis, or things like
(30:54):
problematizing the humanboundary that comes up
repeatedly throughout the volumeas a as a kind of helpful way
for us to interrogate difficulttexts. Equally things like sort
of recovering the agency ofmarginalized players in the
narrative, which for us would bethe animal players in the
(31:14):
narrative, but parallels the waythat feminists recover the
voices of women in the text andthings like this. So I think it
is a very broad hermeneuticalframe. And yet, in in the way of
this practice, you often do findthese common threads running
through the work of people whowho self define within this
framework.
Arthur Walker-Jones (31:33):
Yeah, we say in the introduction that we
we discussed this. We hadhesitated to define animal
hermeneutics from the beginningthat we wanted to see what a row
arose and leave it open. And wedo try to highlight things at
the end that we some of whichSuzanna's mentioned already,
(31:54):
that we think will be and just afocus on animals as as as
subjects and voices in the inthe narrative is and with with
agency is probably going to bepart of all forms of animal
hermeneutics, but we wanted toleave it open to develop in
whatever way in scholars thoughtit thought best to them.
Chip Gruen (32:17):
Yeah. So moving on.
I mean thinking about that, thatcategory of Biblical Studies.
And again, it is, you know, Ithink our listeners will grow
tired of us saying that. Itdepends on who you talk to, how
these things are defined. Butthinking about this as a
Biblical Studies volume, itincludes studies from both
Hebrew Bible or treatment ofmaterials from both Hebrew Bible
and the New Testament. Andthough, without a lot of
(32:41):
thought, that makes sense. Imean, from a theological
perspective, that makes sensefrom kind of a you know,
certainly the way that we divideand think about religions, it
makes sense. The cultural milieuof the Near East and Roman
Empire, respectively, are verydifferent. So thinking through
the lens of that animal studiesperspective. How do the articles
(33:02):
that span these two verydifferent chronological contexts
fit together? How does this, youknow, does animal studies help
us see these things as a moreunified whole than than we might
think about if we were justthinking from a historical
perspective?
Arthur Walker-Jones (33:20):
I was struck by that, that we we frame
the history in terms of humanempires, and began wondering
about how we might frame thingsdifferently. And I think
actually what we see, and thereare continuity, a lot of
continuities, if you look fromthe view of animals. And I just
started to wonder if, if youarrange things instead,
(33:44):
according to...Israel,Palestine, is quite unique in
that there are severalecological zones all within a
very small area. And then thatmeans also with different types
of relationships with betweenhumans and other species. And I
think running across bothTestaments you have, older,
(34:09):
almost indigenous, closer towhatever kind of agriculture is
is being carried on, forms ofunderstanding. You can disagree
with me as a New Testamentscholar, if you want Chip but to
me, I see the difference in thedifference between Jesus and
(34:29):
Paul, in that in Jesus, you seea closeness to an agricultural
lifestyle, and in Paul, you seemore of an urbanite who's more
separated from those metaphorsand experiences, but that, I
think that's true in both and itwould interrelate with
(34:51):
economics. So you know, in bothTestaments, you have colonial
powers, and they have adifferent more exploitative
relationship with other speciesthan maybe individuals still
living within smaller so I guessI'm also suggesting, instead of
(35:11):
being linear, you would haveolder, more indigenous forms of
understanding in each area thatare being overlain by broader
colonial understandings.
Chip Gruen (35:24):
Yeah, so I'll throw my hat in here a little bit too,
just because when I teach aclass Animals and the Sacred
have taught it for a very longtime, and have used Richard
Bulliet, a Columbia historianwho talks about domesticity as
sort of the dividing line, predomesticity, domesticity, and
(35:46):
then post domesticity. And itseems to me that I mean the
colonial angle, I think is areally great one. But the other
thing is just the mode ofproduction, right? The I the way
that you know, the milieu of ofJesus, or the milieu of, I don't
know, take your pick, HebrewBible. In the Hebrew Bible,
which, whichever epic you wantto deal with, there are, do you
(36:09):
know the majority of people areconnected to land for the
production of their own food.
That you know, has a verydifferent ring than, I think,
your comparison here to Paul,the sort of Paul the urbanite. I
think there's a lot a lot lessgoing on there. I mean that
being said, what's what'sinteresting, and I promised my
wife this morning I wouldn'tsay, Okay, now let's talk about
(36:29):
about my article in thecollection. But you know that,
on the one hand, I think themost important thing going on
with animals here is thedomestic but what I want to do
is highlight when you have notdomesticated animals, and what
does that mean, mean as well inthis whole, in this whole
landscape. So anyway, I don'tknow. What do you think? What do
(36:50):
you think about domesticity assort of, or, as you say,
economic, both economic andpolitical and social models,
sort of holding some of thismaterial together as well.
Suzanna Millar (37:00):
Yeah. I mean, I think the whole topic of
domestication is a reallyfascinating and very disputed
one. I know that David Carr,that is a really important work
on the Bible and domestication,both kind of the domestication
of animals in the Bible and kindof the domesticating legacy of
the Bible. And his line on this,and I hope that I'm not
(37:22):
misrepresenting him here, but hewould press quite strongly on
the domestication as domination,kind of thing that by by
domesticating non human species,humans are taking control of the
life worlds of these non humansin ways that are fundamentally
to the benefit of those humans.
And so he draws on people likeTim Ingold for this, who's a
(37:43):
seminal writer in this area, whospeaks about domestication as a
move from a relationship oftrust with animals to a
relationship of domination overanimals. And that's that's one
very well thought out andsensible set of ideas. Others,
and I think I would put myselfmore in this camp, actually
stress that domestication itselfinvolves a kind of a
(38:06):
relationship with a non humanspecies. And the
agriculturalists who lived everyday with their sheep probably
had some sort of a relationshipwith their sheep. And so
scholars like KristenArmstrong-Oma, for example, talk
about practices of care as beingreally fundamental to
domestication and theestablishment of some sort of a
social contract between species,rather than it simply being
(38:28):
humans dominating non humans.
And so I think we see littleglimpses of this all the way
through. I mean, I'm a HebrewBible scholar, I can't
particularly speak to the NewTestament, but I believe in both
Testaments, little glimpses ofthis kind of relationship of
care, whether it's the shepherdgoing after the sheep um or, in
the book of Samuel, they've gota little vignette about a poor
man who feeds his sheep in hisarms and this sort of thing. So
(38:52):
I think the domestication issueis is a very disputed one, and
can kind of cut in both ways, asit were.
Chip Gruen (38:58):
Yeah. And I think the other part of that too, is
that we are, of course, readingthese from at least what
Bulliet, if I can continue touse him for a minute, from a
post domesticated, you know,post domestic world. So, you
know, when you talk about thatethic of care, and then think
about industrial farming, or,you know, the sort of the
manufacturing of meat and eggsand things like that, like we're
(39:20):
in a very different place. Youknow, that both sort of
culturally and ethically vis avis animals non human animals as
well.
Suzanna Millar (39:29):
Yeah, and I think that really shapes the way
that we think about these textswhen we're reading them. That I
should say most of us don't comefrom the context where we're
having daily interactions withnon human species. We think in
human frameworks, and we don'tconsider animal to be members of
our societies in the way thatprobably the biblical authors
would have thought about them.
And I think I've been personallychallenged in this regard
(39:50):
recently, because I've um soI've just adopted two cats, two
little kittens. They're the bestthe Coco and Sol, which is short
for Qoheleth and Solomon, which,for any sort of Biblical
Studies, people, is funnybecause Qoheleth was the author
of Ecclesiastes. Solomon is theauthor of ostensibly
Proverbs...Solomon. But anyway,[inaudible], The point is that
(40:12):
through kind of my actual dailyinteractions with non humans, it
sort of forces you outside ofyour I mean, actually, one
response is to humanize youranimals. I think, well, they're
just like little fluffy versionsof children. And another
response is to try and thinkabout what it might actually be
like to be a cat or to be theclassic example is a bat
(40:34):
actually, of course, and I thinkwe don't do that very much,
maybe a little bit with pets,but very few of us actually
think about what it would belike to be a sheep on a farm or
a chicken on a factory farm orwhatever. So yeah, so I think
we're in a really differentcontext where animals just
aren't part of our social worldin the same way that they were
(40:56):
in these agro pastoral societiesof the ancient world.
Chip Gruen (41:02):
Yeah, and it's interesting, I mean, from a
Biblical Studies perspective, tosort of push this further, if
you have a milieu where not onlyanimals are considered and
thought about differently, butyour metaphors for God and the
way that you think about theDivine is predicated on
agricultural images that wecan't get or don't understand
(41:24):
because of our sort of differentmode of production. I mean,
it's, I don't know. There has tobe something lost in translation
there I think.
Suzanna Millar (41:32):
Yeah.
Arthur Walker-Jones (41:33):
I've often thought the or in recent years,
that the pastoral imagery isI've wondered whether people
realize that that's troubling.
Like if you say that Lord is myshepherd, you really mean that
at some point God is going todecide to kill you for meat.
Probably Suzanna will say weshouldn't take the metaphor so
literally. But I suspect thatancient pastoralists who were
(41:57):
caring for their sheep and andand goats, and had a
relationship with them andrecognized that eventually, that
they were, they would be killedbut were caring caring for them
were okay with the with thatmetaphor for God and what it
what it in implied, I justwanted to say about I liked your
(42:19):
your categories you had becausethey had domestic in the first
two, which indicates a mode ofproduction that relates us to
other species, and it disappearsin the last one, which sort of
feels represented our period intime where It's not that we're
any less related to otherspecies, but it's just not part
(42:42):
of our consciousness. We're veryhuman centered in the way we
think and talk. But just toconcur with what Suzanna was
saying with about domestication,I think a view that, although
I'm sympathetic to it, a viewthat sees domestication at just
as domination, is maybe notpolitically useful, because it
(43:07):
would imply we needed to do awaywith all domestication. It might
be more political and realisticto instead talk about different
different types of domesticationand how exploitative they may or
may not be to the speciesinvolved. And I think that's
what the cultural feminist,Marxist cultural critic Donna
(43:30):
Haraway has been doing with herstudies of agility dogs and dogs
themselves are interesting, andit doesn't seem like humans
forced dogs into subservience.
It seems that dogs startedfollowing humans around, and co
created an ecological nichewhere they were benefiting from
(43:54):
their association with humans.
And so I'm sort of interestedsince Suzanna is being pushed
back, I kind of push backagainst the wild, domestic
binary, and look at all thecases where that's kind of a
little slippery, that we're inassociation with a lot of other
species that we have co evolvedwith, that we're co creating
ecological niches with.
(44:17):
Certainly, we need to ask aboutdomination and be aware of
domination, exploitation. But togo back to Donna Haraway's
agility dogs, I think she'srecognized in the problem of
understanding what's going on inagility, an agility dog's mind,
but when they seem to beenjoying working with her in
(44:40):
agility, even to have joy indoing it, and in some ways be
better than her at doing it, andput her in situations where she
has to follow the dog becauseshe can't think and react as
quickly as the dog if they wantto be successful and but anyway,
just that. The dog appears tolove doing this, to take joy in
(45:06):
in agility competitions. Soagain, it's problematic to try
to think that we can know what'sgoing on in a in a in a dog's
mind, but they are also mammals.
And so biologists are alsosaying, and it's been part of
the recognition that otherspecies suffer. If they're
making having all theneurological responses to
(45:27):
stimulus that we have, andexpressing the same kind of
things that we would when we'resuffering, then we can probably
say they're suffering too.
Anyway, there's all kinds oftheoretical problems there. But
I think there's interestingconversations to have about
different modes of production,different ecological niches, and
(45:49):
to what extent the other speciesare. You know what the ethics?
It means a more complex andambiguous discussion about what
the ethics is. If it's justdomination, you just need to get
rid of it. It's simple, but Iguess I'm suggesting it's not
quite that, that simple. It's acomplex issue about the species
we've co evolved with, and howwe go forward to relationships
(46:16):
that are less exploitative, inwhich all species can flourish.
Chip Gruen (46:21):
So in the concluding remarks that you both co
authored to the volume, youexpress your hope that this book
will be widely used in collegeclassrooms. You even go to
introduce classroom exercisesand really imagine a world in
which this is not only a book onthe shelf of an interested
(46:44):
person, but also something thatis being, you know, used to
develop syllabi and to develop,you know, classroom activities.
Can you talk a little bit aboutthe importance of that? I mean,
that's not something you see atthe end of every scholarly
volume, right? So that thefronting of that pedagogical,
the fronting of the use of thiswithin classrooms in our higher
(47:06):
educational institutions, reallystood out to me. And I'd love to
hear your comments on why youchose to do that and what your
hopes for the book are.
Suzanna Millar (47:15):
Yeah, and I think, Well, I think both Art
and myself are quite passionateteachers that I certainly
wouldn't see myself as just aresearcher like I'm very much
also a teacher, and I think someof the best conversations happen
with students. And I think wealso didn't want the book to be
something which was just forjust the old academics sitting
(47:36):
on the shelf somewhere, as yousay, or in a library somewhere,
or just for the occasional PhDstudents, and I think it matters
that these issues are spokenabout in classrooms. And I think
also students care. Studentscare about these issues. They
care about animals. They careabout what's happening with the
climate crisis and the waythat's impacting on other
species. They care about socialjustice, whether that's social
(47:58):
justice for non humans or othermarginalized groups, and so I
think it's the sort of thingthat actually students could
really get on board with. Imean, the other aspect of it is
because, because it is sodiverse and so kind of
imaginative in many ways andinnovative, it almost gives
students a bit more license tothink, think a bit more outside
(48:19):
the box, maybe not to say thatyou should sort of totally get
away with sort of traditionalBiblical Studies training or
whatever, or religious studiestraining, but that it explores
the scope of what's possible andnew ways of thinking and not
just hemming itself into thesevery traditional forms of
knowledge that have sort of beenvery tried and tested in the
(48:40):
classroom, and actually possiblyopens, just a new opening into
other ways of thinking and doingand being, which I think
potentially could be quiteexciting. And obviously the book
is only just out. It's not beenused in any classrooms so far to
my knowledge, but I really hopethat it might be, and that that
might impact some studentssomewhere.
Arthur Walker-Jones (49:02):
Let me just acknowledge that it's a little
dangerous in academia, whereit's of secondary value, often
in promotion. So it was Suzannawho suggested putting this in
here, and I was glad that shedid, because I think it's
important.
Chip Gruen (49:16):
That's great. I mean, I teach at, I mean,
Muhlenberg College is a, youknow, liberal arts college in
the Northeast, where teaching isincredibly important. So I for
one, found it super edifying.
You know that you all called outand highlighted right the
importance of the work we do,not just as writers and
researchers, but as you know,interacting with these 18 to 22
(49:36):
year olds in many cases, or nontraditional students as well,
and that this can be a benefit,like you say, not only to
researchers and scholars, but tothem as well. So I thank you for
including that. So I know we'reabout at time, and I want to
value your time, but I like toend up by asking the question. I
want both you all to chime in onthis one, what am I not asking
(50:00):
about? What is the you know, Iam very aware of my own myopia
in lots of ways. So what is thething that is really important
to you about this project, orabout this field, or about the
work that you've done in animalstudies in its conjunction to
biblical studies, that Ihaven't, that I haven't
highlighted or asked you about,that you think we should, we
(50:20):
should make sure that wemention?
Suzanna Millar (50:23):
I think, I think we've covered a lot in this
conversation. I think most ofthe things that I'd want people
to know about book we've alreadysaid. I just have one kind of
reflection, which I don't quiteknow what to do with, but sort
of often comes back to me. And Ithink I've mentioned a few times
that I've been inspired a lot byfeminist scholarship and other
scholarships that centralized asmarginalized humans. And
(50:45):
oftentimes what that scholarshipdoes is to a feminist
scholarship, tries to get womento do the scholarship and or
scholarship with disadvantagedcommunities, empowers those
communities themselves to speakout and to do the stuff
themselves, which I would loveto say we could do an animal
studies, but it's really hard toknow how to do that. Like, how
(51:06):
on earth do we get a dog or acat or a maggot? I know my
chapter in the book aboutmaggots, like, how on earth do
we, quote, unquote, hear theirvoices? Um, within, within
scholarship. And so I thinkthat's a kind of insoluble issue
that I don't know what to dowith, but I think potentially
warrants further reflectionwithin our field.
Arthur Walker-Jones (51:27):
Yeah, I would agree with that. That's a
unique problem of this field,and so within ecological
hermeneutics, theanthropocentrism has been
questioned as as a category, andI think even more so in animal
(51:48):
studies, it's useful, but ourour perspective on other species
is also always going to be, tosome extent, anthropocentric. So
how we deal with that is isgoing to be ongoing question.
This isn't nothing that you'vemissed Chip, but something that
(52:09):
we didn't say in the book, thatI think is maybe an implication.
It's an implication for theHumanities broadly, but I think
this kind of work, and alsoecological hermeneutics. I mean
both fields I find difficult inthat I have to study science as
I can't even keep up withbiblical studies, and now I'm
having to study other fieldstoo. So although I was trained
(52:34):
in very kyriarchalindividualistic ways, it's made
me aware of the need forresearch to be done in
interdisciplinary teams, which Isee some places, but I think we
we need to develop morecommunal, interdisciplinary
research projects to effectivelydo this kind of work.
Chip Gruen (52:57):
Well, that seems like a good call to action and
maybe a good place to end soArthur Walker-Jones and Suzanna
Millar, thanks again for comingon ReligionWise. This has been
fun.
Suzanna Millar (53:08):
It's been great.
Thank you so much.
Arthur Walker-Jones (53:09):
Thank you so much for having us.
Chip Gruen (53:14):
This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced
by the Institute for Religiousand Cultural Understanding of
Muhlenberg College. ReligionWiseis produced and directed by
Christine Flicker. For moreinformation about additional
programming, or to make aninquiry about a speaking
engagement, please visit ourwebsite at
religionandculture.com There,you'll find our contact
(53:34):
information, links to otherprogramming and have the
opportunity to support the workof the Institute. Please
subscribe to ReligionWise,wherever you get your podcasts,
we look forward to seeing younext time.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com