This thesis explores relationships between humans and nonhumans in the Bishnoi community. The Bishnoi are a small Vaishnavite community most densely located in Rajasthan. They are well known in North-West India for defending and protecting the environment; sometimes even sacrificing their own lives to save trees or wild animals. This thesis is informed by the author’s short-term ethnographic study in the winter of 2013. The author combines symbolic and interpretive anthropology with multispecies ethnography in order to explore issues of relatedness, exchange and embodied experience between humans and nonhumans in the Bishnoi community. This research elaborates on central themes that emerged from the fieldwork, including themes of embeddedness, duty, dharma, sacrifice, nonviolence, purity, impurity, and contemporary challenges. This research attempts to treat nonhumans as agents and participants in Bishnoi life, active in their physical and perceptual engagement with the world, and details the centrality of the nonhuman in the constitution of Bishnoi communities and identities.

Based on Donna Haraway's concept of dogs as companion species, this study aims to critically examine the phenomenon of companion species as it manifests on social media by exploring the notion of humans being-with and becoming with dogs as their nonhuman others. Working through Haraway’s companion species and the nonhuman turn, I consider the relation between Haraway’s (2008) becoming with and German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1927) idea of being (Dasein) and being-with (Mitsein) others. By reading Haraway with Heidegger, I argue that nonhumanism is not a rupture from the human condition, but rather an expansion of what it means to be human with others in contemporary society. I show that although nonhumanism typically rejects Heidegger’s perceived anthropocentric approach to animals, Haraway’s nonhumanist becoming with shares and shows similarity to Heidegger’s being-with-others. Throughout my exploration of the phenomena of companion species, I maintain the position that in the midst of the nonhuman turn, we remain all too human by being-with nonhuman others, specifically in terms of human-dog companionship. In contemporary society the pivotal relationship of companion species notably manifests on social media when humans capture and share their relations with their dogs on various platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. In an added layer to the study, I argue that online images of the human-dog relation reflect and mediate the nature of being-with and becoming with nonhuman others. Through a digital and theoretical exploration of online companion species, I show how these images reflect the significance of human qualities within nonhuman relations, as well as what it means to be human with our nonhuman others in the Digital Age. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / NRF Grant-Holder-Linked Bursary 2016-2018 / Visual Arts / PhD / Unrestricted

This dissertation argues that the unstable category of the parasite was used to debate the limits of humanism during the modernist period (approximately 1890 to 1945). I show how the most marginalized individuals and organisms are deemed “parasitic” and positioned at the core of social issues, such as tropical disease, poverty, and racism. Authors from Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen to John Steinbeck and George Orwell reveal how parasitism occupies a liminal space between categories of sickness/health, human/animal, and production/exploitation. This project contributes to developing debates in modernist studies about the relationship between nature and culture, and it builds on animal studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate that aesthetics shapes our evaluation of various forms of life.

Recently, a number of scholars have sought to reveal the extent to which the concept of religion and the discipline of religious studies depend upon a distinction between humans and other animals for their conceptual and disciplinary integrity. This dissertation is an attempt to deepen this insight by (re)turning to one of the central figures in the history of thinking about religion, G.W.F. Hegel, whose Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion represent one of the first forays into the academic study of religion. By employing the non-human animal as a limit-case, this project attempts to probe Hegel’s concept of religion for a place where it might be possible to think “religion” anew. This “place” can be found in Hegel’s concept of habit or Gewohnheit, since habit unsettles the distinction between nature and spirit, leaving open a way to rethink “religion” as being rooted in the animal or quasi-natural. Chapter 1 considers Alexandre Kojève’s worry that, at the proverbial “end of history,” the human being will become “reanimalized.” We argue that the (im)possibility of such a reanimalization lies in Hegel’s concept of habit or Gewohnheit, that “mechanism,” which aids the natural or feeling-soul in its “transition” to spirit or, more specifically, consciousness. In chapter 2, we consider the relationship between nature and spirit further, exploring the relationship between thought and feeling as thematized in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Hegel argues (in contrast to the likes of Schleiermacher) that religion cannot have its essence in feeling, because feeling is a form of thought. In chapter 3, we take a closer look at how habit aids in the “transition” or passing-over from nature to spirit, highlighting habit as skill. Habit is a means for the purification of the natural drives and for replacing these drives with those of another, spiritual nature. However, we will find that the transition from nature to spirit cannot be accomplished through habit alone; it depends upon an encounter with the infinite or death, wherein the subject realizes her own in/finitude. In chapter 4, we consider how spirit expresses itself through the human body and, most importantly, through language and (the language of) sacrifice. While the death of the animal is the becoming of spirit, spirit depends upon the death of the animal even after it makes its first appearance in language since speech or language is dependent upon the animal voice. In the final chapter, we discover that religion too is predicated on the death or sacrifice of the animal. Moreover, it is through religion that human beings raise themselves above the animals and learn how to recognize themselves as essentially spiritual beings. Religion brings about this realization, this conversion from nature to spirit, through the cultus – a form of religious practice akin to a habit as skill. In the cultus, the human subject undergoes a conversion and becomes aware of herself as a spiritual rather than a natural being. When performed continuously, this cultus becomes the basis of the ethical as well as the philosophical life.

This interdisciplinary dissertation, The Rhetoric of Wolves, attempts to answer a simple, yet broad question: What do we talk about when we talk about wolves? While even the “we” here is contentious, as there are many perspectives and positions through which the wolf is figured, there are also many kinds of wolves, but no “real” wolf. That is, this dissertation takes seriously the contention that has recently arisen in the environmental humanities and animal studies through the late work of Jacques Derrida and others that figurations of “the animal” matter, not only for multi-species relations and coexistence, but for how the subject and polity are constructed and normalized. As these discourses put “the animal” into question, that is, how the animal functions as a discursive resource in socio-political issues, so too does this dissertation question how “the wolf” functions discursively in contemporary socio-political issues in North America. To address these questions, this dissertation utilizes a Foucaultian-inspired genealogical analysis of the discourse around “the wolf” understand how rhetoric about wolves coalesces into what I call “rhetorical assemblages” that vie to become regimes of truth that are used to attempt to settle the identity of the wolf and human-“animal” relations through the productive capacity of various power/knowledges that are historically and materially grounded. To do so, this dissertation examines and analyzes the rhetoric of a series of case studies in North America where figurations of wolves produce “the wolf” variously as man-hunting machines, outlaws that disrupt the natural order, illegal immigrants threatening family and tradition, and always already potential terrorists who must be productively managed through a biopolitics that attempts to make good the expectations of the dominant neoliberal frame of contemporary social and political life. / Graduate / 2023-08-15

This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies.

<p>This thesis examines how the late work of Jacques Derrida challenges the efficacy of the concept of biopolitics to describe the relationship between life and politics. The central question that occupies this thesis is how life becomes part of the political, how it exits the putative spontaneity of nature and enters the calculation of sovereignty. In order to posit this question, my work is organized according to two horizons. The first horizon centers on the ways in which Derrida configures the relationship between life and politics. The second horizon is that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center or what is now known as September 11 or 9/11 became an event around which Derrida bends this critique of life in politics.</p> <p>My first chapter looks to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity as a way to articulate the problematic conflation of life and politics by the term “biopolitics.” While Derrida does not explicitly state his complication of this term, I argue that “autoimmunity” positions life as an impossibly unstable concept, one that cannot and should not be confined to a single understanding. My second chapter turns to the first volume of Derrida’s final seminars The Beast and The Sovereign. This chapter continues many of the themes pursued in the first chapter, but changes the focus from an autoimmune critique of democracy toward a more generalized critique of human life as political and non-human life as apolitical. Ultimately I pursue the idea that Derrida sought to rethink a configuration of the political that apprehends life in excess of politics. Derrida imagines a politics that escapes being pulled into the political and contoured into so many configurations of death and subjugation.</p> / Master of English

This dissertation approaches literary animals in Asian diasporic novels through the concept of drawing close. I am interested in how literary animals can communicate an endeavour to draw animals close, and how literary representations of this closeness imagine normative human-animal relationships otherwise. I argue that even the most subtle literary animal can be read as a practice and expression of drawing animals close, and this closeness reveals itself most directly through each chapter in relation to belonging, family, and inheritance. This project centers around the question: what can stories offer animals? I argue that the fields of literary animal studies, postcolonial studies, and Asian diasporic studies need to come together in order to attend not only to the multiple ways that animals inhabit Asian diasporic novels, but also to the particular relationships between postcolonial subjects and animals. I chose novels that navigate relationships to animals often informed by Hindu and Buddhist epistemologies as an intervention in the predominantly Western-focused field of animal studies that has prioritized Western religious traditions, philosophies, and literature. Each chapter of this dissertation examines the diverse ways that authors listen to and represent literary animals, at times acting as a reflection of the desire and efforts to fortify the human-animal boundary, and at other times significantly challenging human exceptionalism by advocating for compassion and interdependence between humans and animals. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project looks at animals in Asian North American novels. Whether they are symbolic, mythical, historical, or everyday companions, I argue that paying close attention to animals in stories that are otherwise about humans reveals how they shape our ideas about belonging, family, and inheritance. I focus specifically on three novels: Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Each novel represents animals in complex ways that are informed by various ways of knowing the world, such as religious (Hindu and Buddhist), scientific, or cultural knowledges. One central question that directs this dissertation is: what can literary animals teach us when we learn to pay attention to them?

This dissertation approaches both being and knowledge as functionally no different than storytelling, with stories themselves given life by the various theoretical and narrative frameworks and strategies through which they are shaped and made credible. Storytelling is the foundational methodology of this work, and the work itself takes imagination as central to complicating and disrupting the normative terms (i.e., the stories) of both being and knowledge. Its particular agenda is in making space for imagining futures without both war and the figure of the human, especially the human as Man, as a way through the interminable conflict characteristic of the contemporary historical moment. Situated in the field of human-animal studies, the analysis takes up military working dogs, which I argue are made to sustain the disimagination processes inherent to militarization. The innate dehumanization of war requires narratives that recover the human, and dogs, as companion species and creatures of the home, are especially well positioned for this task. Drawing on Black feminist thought, and anti-colonial insights from Indigenous thinkers, this work also shows how such dogs are used strategically within assemblages of whiteness to reify certain forms of sovereignty at the expense of both racialized people and dogs. Finally, I argue that imagining futures without conflict and war requires asking seemingly unimaginable questions, such as why sacrificing dogs in combat seems an unassailable truth given the alternatives. By asking such questions, I seek to engage a kind of radical imagination unconstrained by the limits of Man as the locus of ethics, especially during times of conflict, and to bring about an appreciation of dogs, whether in combat or otherwise, as beings for whom our responsibility to, and ethical relation with, runs far deeper than most humans willingly acknowledge. / Dissertation / Candidate in Philosophy / This project looks at weaponized and military working dogs within the context of war and conflict to examine the stories we tell about them, and what these stories do. I ask, how do these stories work and who are they for? To answer these questions, I traverse an expansive archive that includes, among other things, popular media representations, military memoir, mainstream journalism, and documentary film. I am especially interested in the ways stories about dogs inform how we understand war, militarization, and race, and how they impact the operation of power and sovereignty. I argue that dogs have been used to teach us who is and isn’t human, but that our obligation and responsibility to the gift that dogs bring is to undo the oppressive story of Man, which institutes untold amounts of suffering and oppression across species, and to tell new stories in its place.

This thesis puts forward a theory for a new basis of the rights and dignities of animals. The first chapter explains how the neurobiological output / input model can be applied to animal behavior, and suggests that animals—from fruit flies to chimpanzees—and humans are most similar in their desire to experiment with the world around them. The remaining chapters explore the practical implications of considering animals through the output / input model, using literature, the author’s personal experience, biological observations, and historical anecdotes. These chapters seek to prove that animals have much more to offer us than milk and meat. / Master of Arts / This is a draft of a book that lays down a new basis for the rights and dignities of animals. Rather than emphasizing the intelligence of various species, their communication abilities, or capacity to feel pain, the author emphasizes the impulse to experiment, which new research suggests may be a universal characteristic of the animal kingdom. The second half of the book is a series of essays that attempts to show how this new model might change human relations with various animals.