English Brutes, Eastern Enlightenment

Abstract

What is Enlightenment? The concept of fellow and companion species, of creaturely life, opens up new possibilities for re-asking Kant's question, and for revisiting historical definitions of the Enlightenment. These historical definitions and the genealogies they presuppose in turn raise questions about ethics and emancipation. How have relations between humans and animals been configured with regard to ethics, given gross disparities of power between species? How might alternatives to the Euroamerican ideal of political equality as the necessary ground for any ethical relation be found? A non-Eurocentric genealogy of the Enlightenment derived from European exchanges with the Ottoman empire reveals possible Eastern precedents for European Enlightenment ideas about kindness rather than cruelty in human-animal relations. The particular case of English people and imported Eastern horses during the long eighteenth century richly reveals Ottoman precedents at work. If horsemanship might be understood to mirror political governance and society at large, Ottoman horsemanship and forms of governance and sociality potentially have much to teach us since the ethics they instantiate does not presuppose political equality as a necessary ground.

Relations of Power and Nonhuman Agency: Critical Theory, Clever Hans, and Other Stories of Horses and Humans

“…Despret’s (2004) retelling of the story of Clever Hans and Schuurman and Franklin’s (2015) insights into the world of natural horsemanship demonstrate that knowledge is “distributed.” That is, knowledge comes about through the way in which animals and people are “attuned” to each other: “Both are active and both are transformed by the availability of the other” (Despret 2004:125). Donna Landry (2011) suggests that these micro-level processes have a broader impact. She traces how a sense of mutual responsibility and service persist in horse-human relations despite disparities of power.…”

“…She traces how a sense of mutual responsibility and service persist in horse-human relations despite disparities of power. Turning to the distant past of the Ottoman Empire for her analysis, she suggests that among the Sultan’s equine and human subjects alike, there was a “dignity in service and in serving willingly” (Landry 2011:19). That is, human-nonhuman relations might be simultaneously hierarchical and ethical.…”

Performing Animality

“…Horses from eastern countries had an enhanced reputation and in relation to improvements in their treatment (Landry, 2011). In a nineteenth-century chapter on the 'Wild Horse', LieutenantColonel Charles Hamilton Smith allocates horses various nationalities and he explains that 'troops of wild Equidae at a distance' could be seen moving freely on Russian wildernesses as 'wild stock' (Hamilton Smith, 1846, pp.…”