scholarly journals Everything but the Squeal: The Politics of Porcinity in the Livre des Propriétés des Choses

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 260
Author(s):  
Sven Gins
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Human History ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Ecological Consequences ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
Biological Relation

Mediaeval encyclopaedias described nonhuman animals in terms of their corporeality and cosmic significance by combining zoological and theological knowledge. Such descriptions were therefore prescriptions of normative parameters for how animals were supposed to function within Christian society, rather than objective observations. As mediaeval conceptualisations of species were highly malleable, particular animals that shared no biological relation could be considered kin, and animals who behaved against their prescribed nature could become a different animal altogether. This paper investigates how several species were implicated in the mediaeval invention of what it meant to be (like) a pig. My counter-hegemonic reading of the Livre des propriétés des choses, a fifteenth-century French encyclopaedia, draws attention to how late mediaeval Christian scripts of porcinity simultaneously defined the nonhumanity of pigs and of ‘other’ humans. These render the idea of the pig inseparable from what it meant to be human. I contend that the Livre des propriétés des choses employs discourses of porcinity to self-define and -stabilise particular notions of human identity by debasing and othering human and nonhuman animals with seemingly porcine traits. Additionally, I underline how such fabrications of humanity are often mired in practices that devaluate and harm real animals, including other humans. Mediaeval studies need to further address the crucial roles of animal suffering in human history. This way, historians can add valuable insights to present debates about anthropocentrism and its devastating socio-ecological consequences.

Political conservatism and the exploitation of nonhuman animals: An application of system justification theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 858-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Hoffarth ◽  
Flávio Azevedo ◽  
John T. Jost
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Social Dominance Orientation ◽  
System Justification ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
System Justification Theory ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Welfare Attitudes

Many people in Western societies tolerate the mistreatment of nonhuman animals, despite obvious ethical concerns about the injustice of animal suffering and exploitation. In three studies, we applied system justification theory to examine the ideological basis of human–animal relations. In Studies 1a and 1b, we showed in both a large convenience sample ( N = 2,119) and a nationally representative sample in the US ( N = 1,500) that economic system justification uniquely explained the relationship between political conservatism and animal welfare attitudes even after adjusting for social dominance orientation. In Study 2, we replicated and extended these findings using more elaborate measures of animal welfare attitudes in the context of an MTurk sample of U.S. respondents ( N = 395). Specifically, we found that conservatism was associated with less support for animal welfare and greater endorsement of speciesism (the belief that humans are morally superior to nonhuman animals) and that individual differences in economic system justification mediated these associations. We discuss several ways in which system justification theory may inform interventions designed to promote support for animal welfare in society at large.

Identity and Eating: A Christian Reading of Leviticus

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Ellen F. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Symbol System ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Ritual Sacrifice ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
God's Call

Israelites lived intimately with their livestock, as members of a single household, and this had an effect on their understanding of human identity—as Leviticus expresses it, of God’s call to Israel to be holy. Leviticus treats eating and ritual sacrifice as practices of embodied holiness, elements of an enacted symbol system designed to enable Israelites to live with integrity before God and in relation to nonhuman animals. The understanding expressed through that system is genuinely agrarian: humans find their wellbeing and their identity in relation to the wellbeing of the land and its nonhuman inhabitants. Through the Eucharist, Christians identify with Christ the Lamb. Understood in light of Leviticus, that identification challenges us to see the connection between sacramental eating and our relation to other animals.

Origin of Adult Animal Rights Lifestyle in Childhood Responsiveness to Animal Suffering

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Pallotta
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Adult Animal ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Trait Empathy

AbstractThis qualitative study examines the childhood experiences of adult animal rights activists regarding their feelings about, and interactions with, nonhuman animals. Central to children's experiences with animals is the act of eating them, a ritual both normalized and encouraged by the dominant culture and agents of socialization. Yet, despite the massive power of socialization, sometimes children resist the dominant norms of consumption regarding animals. In addition to engaging in acts of resistance, some children, as suggested in the biographical narratives of adult vegan animal activists, also possess a predisposition to respond to the perceived suffering of animals. This predisposition is a variant of the trait empathy but is specifically animal-oriented. In open-ended interviews with 30 vegan animal activists about their paths into the movement, this study examined these childhood experiences and the predisposition that may help set the stage for later adoption of a vegan, animal-rights lifestyle.

Better Muslim or Jew? The Controversy Around Conversion across Minorities in Fifteenth-Century Castile

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Echevarría
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Living Together ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University ◽  
Christian Society

Abstract This article presents the Responsio in quaestione de muliere sarracena transeunte ad statum et ritum iudaicum (1451) by Alonso Fernández de Madrigal, “El Tostado” (1410–55), as a rich source for the study of conversion across minority groups. A trial conducted before the archbishop of Toledo concerning a Muslim woman turned Jew by her lover in Talavera de la Reina (Spain) caused a scandal in Christian society. As one of the most outstanding legal scholars at the University of Salamanca, Madrigal established the right of the archbishop of Toledo to judge an issue involving the two minorities and decided in favor of the woman returning to her faith of origin, instead of imposing the death penalty. While conversion superseded issues of illicit sexual relations, gender acted as a mitigating circumstance. This article will also consider how the three communities contributed to the survival of “cohabitation,” defined by Madrigal as social peace, and the preservation of the status of the different religions living together in Castile.

Trade Politics and Native Polities in Iroquoia and Asante

1983 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit W. Wesler
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Human History ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
Trade Politics ◽  
Cultural Baggage

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.

Animal Suffering

1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-471
Author(s):  
Donald Vandeveer
Keyword(s):  
Premature Death ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Proper Treatment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Normal Human ◽  
Tom Regan

The problem of ascertaining whether there is a justification for the imposition of suffering and premature death on nonhuman animals is important in itself. Examination of the problem also promises to force philosophers to rethink widespread assumptions about what is proper treatment of less than normal human beings, the basis for attributing rights to humans, the value of life, the “intrinsic worth of all human beings,” and certain egalitarian principles. In what follows my primary concern will concern the justification of imposing suffering on animals. In particular I shall try to sort out and examine some arguments set forward by Tom Regan in a recent essay.

“[A]s if some animal were dying in a slow but exquisite anguish”

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Guinea Pigs ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Cutting Out ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Impact

Throughout her writing, Woolf includes brief descriptions of the killing, torture and trauma of individual animals: Peggy’s experimentation, presumably on guinea pigs, in The Years; Bob Brinsley pulling the wings off of a fly in “The Introduction”; Macalister’s boy cutting out a piece of a live fish and throwing it back into the water in To the Lighthouse; a kidnapped giant cockatoo shrieking in terror in Flush, and a dog’s flashbacks on witnessing this scene; and Giles stomping on a snake choking on a toad stuck in its mouth in Between the Acts. In these scenes, Woolf highlights animal suffering. By addressing human-animal encounters in the research lab, “pests” in the home, the fishes we eat, the pets we keep and the snakes we meet in a walk, Woolf, as Dubino shows, makes visible the impact of our human presence in the nonhuman animal world. Within these brief glimpses she reminds us of the toll that humanity, but especially patriarchy, as it is inflected by science, capitalism and war, takes on its fellow nonhuman creatures. This essay explores how comprehensively and feelingly Woolf portrays the ways that nonhuman animals suffer and how humans both inflict and perceive that suffering.

scholarly journals Deer crossing. Moose crossing. Old people crossing. Children crossing: Reading Islamophobia through a vegan lens in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Old People ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Postcolonial Identity ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The Way

This article uses close textual analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows in order to reevaluate contemporary theorizations of Islamophobia in relation to global speciesism. By addressing the lacuna in current work engaging with Islamophobia of an understanding of speciesism as a form of discriminatory oppression engrained within the hierarchical divisions of categories of human identity, the article seeks to establish a radically new vegan mode of reading with which to approach literary texts. Exploring the concept of a vegan lens as a mode of reading that seeks to expose the power of language and metaphor in maintaining the absent referent of nonhuman animals, and to challenge the way we understand the construction of human and nonhuman animal identity in relation to Islamophobia, it suggests the variety of ways in which speciesism has been foundational to the assertion of an “us” versus “them” dichotomy. Shamsie’s novel is thus read in order to complicate and multiply the human/nonhuman animal divide apparent within current discussions of postcolonial identity.

The Pattern of Discrimination

1996 ◽  
pp. 166-194
Author(s):  
Ariel Toaff
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
General Relations ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Legislative Measures ◽  
Christian Society

This chapter discusses Jewish–Christian relations in late medieval Italy. The daily business and general relations between Jews and the non-itinerant clergy in Umbrian communes in the late Middle Ages were close and constant. However, from the fifteenth century onwards, in the communes of Umbria as elsewhere in Italy, there was a proliferation of legislative measures obliging Jews to wear something that would distinguish them from Christians. The imposition of the so-called ‘badge for Jews’ was justified by the hope that it would discourage sexual relations between infidels and Christians. The chapter then looks at the discrimination against the Jews during the triduum of the Christian Holy Week, particularly the holy sassaiola, the fight with stones. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the fate of the Jews became one with that of the gypsies. Ghettoization and segregation on the one hand, and expulsion on the other, were simply two sides of the same coin with which Christian society, now closed and homogeneous, hoped to deal with minority groups.

Coluccio Salutati and the Conception of the Poeta Theologus in the Fourteenth Century

1977 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 538-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald G. Witt
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Ancient Society ◽  
Ars Dictaminis ◽  
Christian Society

The Italian humanists of the fourteenth century did more than reintegrate the pursuit of eloquence with the concern for ethics, two interests united in the discipline of rhetoric since the time of Cicero but separated in practice by thirteenth-century specialists of ars dictaminis in Italy. Rather their achievement lay in nothing less than Christianizing the European medieval rhetorical tradition. They accomplished this by expressing in terms of those central fields of rhetoric, ethics, and history an appreciation of the distinction between the culture of the ancient world based on human reason and Christian society founded on revealed truth. While not denying the ultimate influence of God upon human history, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati (at least in his later life) tended to emphasize the natural character of ancient society and thus to secularize its history and achievements.

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