Lives in Touch: visual and sensory ethnographic
explorations on living with companion animals in The
Netherlands.
A Masterthesis by Anne Posthuma (s1159275) MSc Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Visual Ethnography) Leiden University Supervisor: Peter Snowdon Submission Date: 16th of August, 2018Acknowledgements
I could not have done this master thesis without the support Lotte and Ophelia; Levi and Baard; and my brother Matthijs and his companion Mara. have shown me parts of their lives and insights, and the non-human persons some cuddles, too. Many thanks also go to Maike de Bont and Jan van Summeren, whose work for ZorgDier I truly admire, because they have been very kind to take me along to meetings and to help me with contacting health care facilities.I also want to thank my supervisor Peter Snowdon for the ever-interesting film and reading suggestions and his intriguing questions that always helped me to think further. Thanks, too, to Metje Postma and Mark Westmoreland and my visual ethnography peers whose feedback has been very helpful and whose company in the classroom I have enjoyed a lot.
Thesis structure
This thesis exists of two parts that complement each other. This text is a reflection on the methodology I used for this research, the interplay between the fieldwork and theory, and it uses references to footage I shot. I will both refer to the film as well as footage that is not part of the film. The film itself is an exploration of everyday relations between the protagonists – human and animal – and the role of touch and other senses in this relation. I want to show things there that are perhaps hard to put into words.
Table of contents
Table of contents 2 Abstract 3 Introduction 4 1. Research settings 7 Levi & Baard 9 Lotte & Ophelia 9 Matthijs & Mara 10 ZorgDier 10 2. Visual Ethnography in multispecies and multisensory worlds 13 Becoming-with in multispecies worlds 14 Visual ethnography and the ‘other’ senses 18 3. A multispecies ethnographic encounter 21 What could attunement look like? 21 Projecting unconditionality 24 Conclusion 26 Sources 27 List of figures 29
Abstract
In this thesis (film and article) I explore four different interspecies relations of human beings, to companion animals. More specifically, to cats and dogs. When humans and animals live together, share space and share common worlds, a kind of attunement happens that can be called a ‘becoming with’. I asked the question whether this contact with companion species provides something different than what is available through human-human interaction, and if so, whether it could have to do with touch. Central to this question is also to explore a kind of attunement as a filmmaker to both human and animal protagonists that happens through my own filmmaking process and the specific kind of ‘becoming with’ that this leads to.
Introduction
“… I have thought more often in my life that I’d like to get a pet but I always dismissed it as: alright you might like that right now, but that’s just the loneliness that you’re feeling at this moment. You shouldn’t give in to that, and it’s not practical at all.” – Lotte, 17 januari 2018 I visited Lotte for the first time on the 17th of January. I told her beforehand that I’d like to interview her, and that I would use only audio to record the interview. So we did. I brought my camera, but it stayed in my bag. Lotte and Ophelia pick me up at the station in Nijmegen Lent, and on our way to their house Lotte gets us some cake at the local bakery while I wait outside with Ophelia. I’m trying to pet her, but she never leaves Lotte out of her sight and doesn’t seem too interested in my attention.Lotte and I met through Facebook when someone tagged her in a post I shared on my personal Facebook. I was looking for people to share their stories about mental health struggles (such as depression and/or anxiety) and having a pet – interested in the ways that having a pet helps them cope with some of these problems. Lotte comes outside and we continue walking, she tells me Ophelia is from Spain, that they have been together for about four months now, and that she has a suspicion “Oph” might’ve been an unsuccessful hunting dog, because the area she’s from in Spain is known for hunting.
After Lotte, Ophelia and I arrive at Lotte’s place, I start an interview in which I ask Lotte to introduce herself. She does and also briefly talks about her struggle with depression, and some hardships in her life that are going on at that specific moment. I also ask if she could tell me what adopting Ophelia and living with her means. We talk about what their days look like and I wonder if she can put into words how they communicate. But it is not through the interview that I learn most about how they relate to each other. Looking back at the footage I realize that the experience of filming, and the choices evident in the footage as I watch it afterwards, add an invaluable deal to this project.
I started my thesis with the question whether domesticated animals, dogs and cats specifically1, provide people a “touch” or embodied closeness that offers other possibilities than interaction between humans does for human wellbeing.2 My own assumption, refracted through 1 It is important to ask why I opted to focus on cats and dogs and did not include wild animals, for example, or any other kinds of animals. The first and most practical reason is to limit the scope of my research and fieldwork. Other than that, dogs and cats are the most common type of animals that we have individual relationships with in Europe, and who live inside our houses. To do research with wild animals would be a completely different type of research with regards to place, kind of encounter and frequence of encounter, to name a few. Other aspects could include mortal danger, possible hunting relationships, and much more I have chosen not to address here. 2 My motivation for this topic has developed since writing a paper for a class in February 2017, where I examined the increasing number of people suffering from depression in the Netherlands and analysed this in the context of a neoliberal market narrative2. I argued that the narrative found in the case study
anthropological texts as well as recognized through own experiences, was the idea of the separation of mind and body, with more value placed on the mind. Sometimes, in me at least, this could lead to a strange sort of dissociation with my body that I would call “being inside my head too much”3. I wondered whether a stronger connection with my body, or at least a better “grounding” in sensoriality of the world, could help with this kind of thing and found a case study in the role of companion animals in people’s lives.
During fieldwork, my focus shifted from therapeutic effects of ‘pets’ on human wellbeing to a hopefully less anthropocentric approach of reciprocal relationships between human and animal in day-to-day life. This shift happened because speaking about companion animals only in terms of their benefits to human beings does not do justice to the complex beings that companion animals are. More importantly perhaps, a sole focus on human interests erases the personal needs that these animals have for their own wellbeing (Serpell et al., 2006). An anthropocentric approach also goes against Haraway’s (2008) idea of ‘response-ability’, which I will discuss in the second chapter.
Since human relations to companion animals are not led by human language, or ‘intellectual’4 interaction, they imply a different relational approach than humans to humans. This forces human beings to pay more attention to other senses to communicate with their companion animals. My assumption is that since animals are assumed to be ‘closer to nature,’ human interactions with animals focus more on the senses associated with the ‘body’ than on the ‘mind’, or perhaps even blur the artificial boundaries of nature-culture and body-mind for a moment (Latimer and Miele, 2013).
A distinction between body/mind has been quite prevalent in the way people in Western societies think about animals and in the kinds of interaction that ‘we’ deem more valuable (Latimer and Miele, 2013). I would argue that this mind/body distinction and related dichotomies are polarizing and harmful for both people and animal wellbeing, since a primary focus on the mind could suggest overlooking the importance of how the senses work together (Pink, 2009a), rather than existing in separate spheres.
For example, of touch on our skin, the skin which Montagu (1986) calls the ‘external nervous system.’ Indeed, then it would seem that the sense of touch on the skin is not at all so far removed from the ‘mind’ or brain, but they are very much connected. Montagu (1986) quotes Bertrand Russel: “…our whole conception of what exists outside us, is based on the sense of 3 I found some of my protagonists uttering similar descriptions of this phenomenon (“too much inside my head”/ ”need to get out of my head”) during fieldwork. 4 Of course, language is not necessarily always ‘intellectual’ and can be used for ‘non-rational’ purposes such as poetry.
touch,” (Bertrand Russell in Montagu, 1986, p. 13) calling attention to the sense of touch as it gives us our sense of reality. For that reason, I am focusing on multisensorial worlds that encounters with companion animals inevitably remind us of.
To do so, I have chosen for a visual ethnographic approach, as I argue that audiovisual methods lend themselves well for exploring human-animal relations. Marks (2000) describes forms of vision and filming that intercultural filmmakers make use of, called ‘haptic visuality’. This kind of visuality can be employed to give a sense of touch to the viewer through audiovisual techniques and specific ways of filming. In my research, I have tried to employ a kind of filming inspired by the concept of haptic visuality. In the third chapter I will explore in more detail later whether I succeeded in doing that, and in what ways I do or do not.
First, I will outline my research settings and in the second chapter I will discuss the theoretical framework on response-ability, attunement and sensory ethnography through visual ethnography, using examples from my own fieldwork in the form of fieldnotes and footage. In the third chapter I dive deeper into my own experiences with and without camera and interpret those the persons (human and non-human) I have encountered in this project.
1. Research settings
My research was multi-sited throughout the Netherlands, in which I can distinguish between four separate ‘projects’: three duos of human and companion animal, whom I visited at their homes, and work with an organisation called ZorgDier. With the latter I visited several health care facilities. De Appel is one of the facilities and the only one I was able to visit more often due to questions of access at other places. De Appel is a very significant part of my fieldwork with ZorgDier5, so I have chosen to describe that setting here. I will describe the setting of each of these stories separately after briefly discussing other important specificities of the research. The research settings for this project are perhaps fragmentary, because they are focused on a very specific situation that might disregard other relevant aspects of the lives these people are living. At first glance these case studies do not seem coherent at all. Nonetheless, I argue that both the individual stories that emerged from this research and my work with ZorgDier and De Appel, are relevant in a broader sense. Irvine (2013, p. 8) structured her research around individual narratives of homeless ‘pet’-owners6, which she argues that “…because they combine particular life circumstances with culturally specific forms and frameworks, personal narratives reveal the social embeddedness of subjectivity” (Irvine, 2013, p. 8). I think that also rings true in the case of this research, even if the life circumstances of the persons I worked with are in ways less ‘extreme’ stories than the ones Irvine encountered. Her research is about individual narratives of homeless people whose companion animals changed or saved their lives. What Irvine (2013) demonstrates is how the personal narratives in her research are not merely individual stories. They touch upon bigger issues and show underlying cultural thought patterns. The stories of the homeless people she encounters show how they deal with broader cultural stigmas of homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health issues. The care they can provide for their companion animals seems to give them a greater sense of self-worth in the face of society stressing their (purported) lack of individual moral virtue (Irvine, 2013).
The case of De Appel, which was part of my collaboration with ZorgDier, provides a different perspective on my otherwise perhaps one-dimensional focus on individuals. The combination of these cases is the result of some developments in the field, since it took a lot of time to access health care institutions with ZorgDier I decided to diversify my approach and
5 ZorgDier is a foundation that works with health care institutions who want to offer Animal Assisted
Activities to their clients/patients. They work on the basis of demand from health care facilities: an institution approaches them, and together with ZorgDier they work out a plan to start animal assisted activities. ZorgDier looks for volunteers with pets in the vicinity of the health care institution and they also provide training for them, as well as for the health care professionals working at the facilities themselves.
include individuals outside of these institutions. Nonetheless, ZorgDier provides an interesting contrast to the idea of self-sufficiency and individual responsibility that seems very present in the stories of Lotte, Levi and Matthijs. It demands to step back for a moment and ask questions about what happens when someone loses the ability of self-reliance and the ability to take care of others, such as a companion animal. What does that loss of great degrees of independency mean in a neoliberal society? This was partly what I wanted to address when I wrote the following in my proposal: Neoliberalism has rooted itself in the Netherlands and brings a highly individualistic idea of mental health as located within the individual, or at least the responsibility of health is placed on the individual. Esposito and Perez (2014) however, argue that “mental illness” is not contained within the individual but rather a product of neoliberal thought processes. I want to focus on positive, different ways of approaching mental health of human beings, by not thinking about the mind and body as separate spheres, but also engaging the idea of interdependency as central to human life and care (de la Bellacasa 2017). For the limited scope of this article, I do not give an analysis of health care systems for mental health, as it turned out not to be possible within the time frame of this research, and not relevant for everyone that I encountered. Yet, I think it is good to take into account that the Netherlands is a Western European society that is quite individualized and next to that places a lot of emphasis on ‘the mind’. I add this to contextualize the motivation behind this research. As I wrote in my proposal, the way we think about our minds and about mental health are culturally determined – certain behaviours or people that diverge from a (neuro-typical) norm that is based on a particular bio-political morality, is to ‘other’ them. In other words, the ideas we have about what is ‘mental health’ and its diagnoses are very individualized.
I have sought to take an approach that rather focuses on the interdependency of relationships of (everyday) care between human and companion animals. Coming from a feminist ethical viewpoint, De la Bellacasa (2017) describes the affective aspect of care that is present in all aspects of our lives, even in its absence. She stresses interdependency and interconnection, and the idea that persons (human or non-human) are inevitably affected by their surroundings as well as affecting their environment: the lives around them and other materialities (de la Bellacasa, 2017).
In anthropology, language and reflexive thought have historically been ascribed more importance as a way of meaningful communication than bodily experience (Herzfeld, 2010). In my own research proposal, I wrote:
Keeping in mind the purported, Cartesian, dichotomy between mind and body, as well as the way we have historically looked at animals, I am interested in the physical immediacy of care practices with companion animals, and what it could tell us (meaning human beings) about the importance of non-verbal ways of communication, closeness and its possible health benefits.
Drawing on the speculative care ethics proposed by De la Bellacasa (2017), in which ethical considerations are necessarily are placed within a material setting rather than a hypothetical situation, I see connections to the concept of response-ability and affective attunement and how they are useful to approach these relations grounded in multisensorial worlds. Before getting into more detail about this, I would like to briefly give descriptions of the four projects that exist within this research. Since my research is multi-sited and fragmentary – fragmentary because I primarily focus on people’s encounters with companion animals, I do not claim to give any holistic view of their lives. Rather than a place, the connecting factor between the sites is something else (Hannerz, 2007). The “translocal” linkages (Hannerz, 2007, p. 362) here, even if it takes place within the same national borders, are the focus on companion animals and (every day) wellbeing.
Levi & Baard
Levi reacted to my message on a public Facebook group for Amsterdam residents. I was looking for people who took pets into their home and I specifically asked for people to whom this was helpful with their anxiety/depression. His replied to my post saying that “if it wasn’t for [his] dog, [he] didn’t know where [he] would be right now. [Baard] saved my life.” In later interviews, Levi told me he has often struggled with depression and anxiety that caused him to have panic attacks. Levi is an art student in Amsterdam in his third of four years, but due to his depression he has had to take a break from his studies several times. He adopted Baard at the end of the year in 2015, and had to take him with him on the train all the way from Groningen to Amsterdam.Lotte & Ophelia
A mutual acquaintance of Lotte and me tagged her in a comment on my message on my personal Facebook. She also knew beforehand specifically what I was looking for7. Before I started filming Lotte, I did an audio-only interview with her to meet. She talked about her depression, and how some of the struggles seemed to come back all the time. At her current place, where she had moved in a couple of months before the interview in January 2018, she says she is building a “stable life” for the first time now, for herself. Before living in Nijmegen Lent, she lived abroad in different places after finishing her studies in Amsterdam. She is an illustrator and has her own 7 In the Facebook post I posted on my Facebook wall in January I had broad categories. I was still orienting myself and thus asked for people whose companion animal helped them with their depression/social anxiety, but also for people in general who would want to talk about the relationship with their companion animals.web shop for pins. She told me she used to ‘run away’ from problems. Now she has her own apartment, and she tells me the decision to adopt Ophelia helps her to resist the urge.
Matthijs & Mara
Matthijs is my twinbrother. He had been talking about adopting a cat for a couple of months, and while I didn’t expect him to adopt one during the time of my fieldwork, it just happened. I decided on the spot that I would film part of his process. My relationship with my brother is quite close, and we often talk about loneliness, cats, ambitions, dreams. His role in my film has become to follow the process of developing a multispecies relationship.To the question how Matthijs fits in this research as a whole, since my focus and motivation started with issues of mental health, this does not seem to fit. Yet I think the most important aspect is that of wellbeing and not of individual diagnoses of mental health issues. I do not want to hide parts of Lotte and Levi’s stories, because they were an important motivation for them to participate in this project. Yet I do not focus on diagnoses of mental health, therapies and other related issues with Levi or Lotte more than they wanted to or told me about. The other individual cases relate to that of Matthijs and Mara in that that they are all relatively young people with their own place to live, who decided that having a companion animal to live with would be enjoyable, perhaps beneficial, and for different reasons. For Levi or Lotte living with a companion animal is not a part of any ‘official’ therapy, but rather a part of everyday life, as it is for Matthijs and many other people.
ZorgDier
With ZorgDier I visited several health care facilities, mostly elderly homes, for animal visits and meetings. The only place I was able to film multiple times within the time schedule of my fieldwork was at De Appel in Tilburg. De Appel is a closed ward for people under 65 who developed a form of dementia, this ranges from brain damage because of an accident to Alzheimer’s. Many of the residents of De Appel took care of companion animals before they were diagnosed with a form of dementia and moved to the health care facility. For the residents of De Appel, contact with companion animals is not an everyday reality. For contact with animals they are now dependent on the ZorgDier visits, and things such as the activity schedule of the health care facility.Figure 1. Levi and Baard at home during interview. Still by author. Figure 2. Lotte and Ophelia at home playing on the couch. Still by author.
Figure 3. Matthijs and Mara at home on the bed. Still by author. Figure 4. De Appel, ZorgDier visit with Chablis. Still by author
2. Visual Ethnography in multispecies and multisensory worlds
Research on the effects of having companion animals around shows that it has positive physiological effects on human beings, for example lowering blood pressure and heart rate (Wells, 2009). Wells also cites research that suggests companion animals improve people’s social and psychological health because they can help improve social interactions, and decrease feelings of loneliness (Wells, 2009, p. 528). In anthropology and in Western societies more general, we have looked at animals as “less” than human because of a purported lack of self-reflexivity. The idea that animals cannot be “conscious beings” has been long refuted by more research into animals. It has become clearer that different animals have different ways to communicate amongst their own species as well as with other species, for example human beings (Haraway, 2003; Meijer, 2017). The dichotomy between mind and body translates to another, broader, dualism of culture (human) and nature (animal), and to an idea of ‘sophisticated’ and ‘primitive’. Within sensory categories it is the sense of vision that has been associated with reason, where other senses are allegedly closer to the body (Herzfeld, 2010; Marks, 2000). Feminist theorists link vision to the distanciation from the body and to the objectification and control of self and others. (Marks, 2000, p. 133) For an anthropologist using (audio)visual media, this tension between vision and objectification is important to think about. It is an important motivation for me to think about the media I use, and how I could use them to make a kind of film that tries to engage more intersubjectively with protagonists during the research, as well as engaging the audiences that might see the audiovisual product (Marks, 2000; Pink, 2009a).
I focus on the sense of touch through filmmaking to critically engage with the idea of “more animalistic” senses, “closer to nature.”8 I also do this for two other reasons. Namely, because I believe this way of filmmaking is more intersubjective than a distanciated approach, and as such it is part of building rapport with the people I am working with. I am placing myself not outside of the field but as a physical part of it (Pink, 2009b). Related to this, I want the viewer to notice my subjectivity when they watch the film and to create a product that tries to engage the viewer’s imagination (MacDougall, 1998; Marks, 2000).
During fieldwork the choices I made were mostly guided by audiovisual research methods and my intention to do sensory ethnography. Since sensory ethnography prioritizes knowledge 8These related dichotomies are part of the creation of an otherness in racist systems (Herzfeld 2010:440), but also in relations between animals and humans.
different from verbal and visual, I argue that audiovisual means lend themselves well to study human-animal relations because these relations are not led by human language (Pink, 2009a). This forces human beings to focus on other modes of communication. By making cinematic choices that should emphasize a sense of touch in my research, I try to make a film that evokes a sensory recognition of living with animals in viewers. For example by depicting certain patterns in living with companion animals that are more or less universal outside of the personal relationship. Such as petting, walking, feeding, cleaning, play, and more activities that involve explicit multisensorial engagements.9 The cinematic choices and the sensory recognition that happens in viewers is, however, not the only relevant aspect of sensory ethnography through visual ethnography. I want to argue that the way of filmmaking that I have tried to employ during my research is a way of doing sensory ethnography. For example, I have chosen to use mostly a handheld camera, and to manually adjust focus while filming. In this way, the camera becomes a medium through which I communicate part of my own sensory experiences during fieldwork (Pink, 2009b).
I explore the sensoriality of both the resulting footage itself and the ethnographic encounter through audiovisual methods (Pink, 2009b). In my own filming I was inspired by The Corridor (Vanagt, 2010), a short seven minute film in which VanAgt shows us a mute encounter between a man in an elderly home and a donkey. VanAgt succeeds in giving a sense of place but not in a typical way; there are no overview shots of the elderly home and its whereabouts. Rather, she gives a sense of place that gives me, as a viewer, a sense of atmosphere – a portrayal of specific sensorial experiences by appealing to the viewers’ imagination. She starts the video with shots of trees and mist and someone reading a poem that introduces the donkey. Followed by a shot of donkeys in a meadow, there is a tracking shot where the camera follows a donkey and a nurse through the orange lit hallway to do their visit with a mute elderly man, who starts ‘petting’ the donkey. She uses quite long takes that immerse the viewer into the situation.
Becoming-with in multispecies worlds
Anne: I want to quickly go back to Oof. I think I interviewed you for the first time in January. Has your relationship changed since then? Lotte: Yes, yes (…) people sometimes ask me, ‘has Oof changed?’ But I think I have changed most in my relation to her.10 9 In the end, most interactions if not all are multisensorial even though Western societies often place a lot of emphasis on the visual (and less so aural) senses (Pink, 2009a). This is, of course, in a research process that employs audiovisual methods something that needs acknowledgement. Therefore I need to address how the visual and aural senses relate to other senses and how they can be employed to emphasize touch.
In the last interview with Lotte I asked her about the insecurities she had told me about in January. She had told me then that puppy training had been hard on her because many things Ophelia was supposed to do according to the training, she didn’t. Throughout the months, Lotte’s perception on what their relationship should be and how Ophelia should respond to her became more relaxed as she shifted her focus from other people’s expectations of how to train a dog, to thinking that perhaps Ophelia just was not that kind of dog, and their relationship was not that kind of relationship. I would like to note, of course, that certain aspects and living with dogs are unacceptable because they can hurt the animal, but I do not think that this is the case for Lotte and Ophelia since from my experience their relationship seems peaceful and loving. Despret (2013) writes about the ways in which ethologists and other academics studying animal worlds can employ their bodies to ‘act as if’ they are part of the animal communities they are studying. These scientists attend closely to animal behaviours and try to find an appropriate response according to these behaviours. Despret calls this way of doing research “a creative mode of attunement” (Despret 2013:71). For Despret, this attunement means employing “…empathy as a scientific tool, and the body as a tool for creative attunement to other bodies”. Nonetheless, she does not mean empathy in the sense that human beings can identify with their companion animals: Empathy, in this case, is not feeling what the other feels, it is rather making the body available for the response of another being. It is to make ourselves and them corresponding. (Despret 2013:70)
There are some examples of this kind of research in the film Dans le regard d’un bête (Loreau, 2011). The film has a scene of a workshop in which someone with a lot of experience with bulls teaches other people how to move like an animal – in this case a bull. Even though this is a very literal translation of what Despret means, the interesting thing is that it learns people about certain behaviors and also physical differences and doing such a workshop could change their perspectives towards their understanding or their thought patterns about animals, indeed empathize. Related to Despret’s creative attunement, Haraway (2008) describes a certain kind of attunement to the species we live with that occurs in encounters with them. She calls this sort of attuning ‘becoming with’.
Rather than defining each individuals’ identities before encounter, ‘becoming with’ relies on the idea that identities are inevitably relational and shaped within any encounter. Within encounters, they can also change and evolve. Becoming with, for Haraway, entails the space in which encounters are shaped by all participants, and who can respond to each other in surprising ways. Actors can be of different species but in a non-oppressive encounter both have “response-ability” and thus the agency to respond (Despret, 2013; Haraway, 2008).
Haraway (2008) stresses that this response-ability can only exist within a “multidirectional relationship,” in which there is no room for human exceptionalism. She uses an example of laboratories:
People and animals in labs are both subjects and objects to each other in ongoing intra- action. If this structure of material-semiotic relating breaks down or is not permitted to be born, then nothing but objectification and oppression remains. (Haraway 2008:71)11
Yet this idea extends beyond the laboratory into all realms of interaction with other species. Anthropologists such as Harvey (2006) have looked societies that have a different approach to living with animals. He addresses this problem through revisiting the concept of animism. He describes this as the idea that “…the world is found to be, and treated as, a community of persons not all of whom are human” (Harvey, 2006, p. 11). I think the ideas of response-ability and affective attunement imply the respect that Harvey describes as a central concern for animism, because these approaches all demand reciprocity. What is more, Haraway (2008) firmly situates response-ability in our material surroundings: in real life situations, relations and communities, and does not think of it as an abstract intention (Haraway, 2008, p. 36). The specifics of a situation dictate what is treating another person with respect; and not every community, or person (human and non-human) may the same idea about what respect entails. Nonetheless, it seems to me that central to the idea of response-ability, too, is a willingness to listen: with our mind, body and senses. Going back to Lotte’s thoughts about her relation to Ophelia: I think this is the process of defining and redefining their relationship all the time. As time goes by, Lotte learns more about the personality of Ophelia, learns to read whether she is happy, whether she needs something, whether she behaves differently from what she normally does. Letting go of ideas about what the dynamics should be is at the same time gaining more knowledge about herself and Ophelia. Of course Lotte is still trying to learn Ophelia things – as she did during the time I was meeting with her: when we first met, Ophelia was hanging out on the couch most of the time, but because sometimes she was incontinent during the night, Lotte wanted to learn her to sleep in her basket. When I visited them later, Ophelia’s go-to place was indeed the basket. But Lotte had accepted that Ophelia might not respond to her like other dogs will to their respective ‘handler’. 11I want to specify that I take it for a fact that we live in multi-species communities (Haraway 2008; Willett 2014) and that communities exist in which humans may live closer to certain animals than to their own peers, and vice versa (Harvey 2006). Human and animals have co-evolved and share common worlds (Meijer 2017; Harvey 2006). The question of response-ability is about how we relate to each other in these common worlds. Particularly in Western ideas about society, human exceptionalism and –centrism has
Harvey proposes respectful communication with other-than-human people “pursued either through the mediation of animists or by learning appropriate etiquette and protocol from them [animals]” (Harvey, 2006, p. 17).
He proposes we ‘ask’ other persons, in this case non-human persons, politely, and suggests we can learn from animists how to do so – there are many cultures that do not center human life, in which humans and other species find ways to communicate and help each other, or at least communicate honestly and with respect, including predatory intentions (Harvey, 2006). Going back to my intentions with this research, I ask the question what touch brings to the discussion about communication with companion animals such as dogs and cats. For many people in Western societies, they are close, within reach. We touch them. My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having ruck with each other. Touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with – all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. (…) caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning. (Haraway, 2008, p. 36)12 The idea that close relations, living close with other species, and specifically touch – whether this is direct touch or living close to one another – makes persons (human and non-human) in a way responsible for each other and for their shared world-making (Haraway, 2008).13 De la Bellacasa (2017) looking at care that entails this accountability in the moment: there is no ‘prefixed’ moral good or bad, since caring is situated in practice and context. Willett (2014) makes a case for a multispecies ethics in which “affect attunement and misattunement, perhaps unlike impartial sympathy or mirroring empathy, (…) expands ethics beyond liberal sentiment to the biosocial materiality in those pockets of life where we humans are thrown together with other species” (Willett 2014:96). This means that, rather than thinking in moral abstraction, affect attunement can help us think in concrete terms about what ‘world making’ with companion animals means – and it can help us to think about how to ask questions to our companion animals. There are some parallels that Haraway, Harvey and Willett all include in their thinking about living with other-than-human persons; these seem to be about reciprocity and (pro-longed) 12 Emphasis in bold by author of this article. 13 I would like to get deeper into what kinds of ‘(in) touch’ exist in the 21st Century, in which for many people, big parts of the world are “accessible” at least through internet and social media. Needless to say it is another discussion to talk about “accountability” and “responsibility” for this kind of possibility to “touch upon” other lives in distant parts of the world. For this article I will stay focused on the more direct meaning of
proximity. Willett calls reciprocity the “norm of norms”; Harvey (2006) talks about a similar thing such as a willingness to listen; and Haraway, in the same spirit as Harvey, defines it as being open to another’s ways of responding without prematurely defining the limits of the interaction, by for example buying into nature/culture dichotomies and related binary thinking that results in processes of exclusion, in which certain ways of communication or being are inevitably deemed more valuable than others (Latimer and Miele, 2013).
Visual ethnography and the ‘other’ senses
Images are better at witnessing bodily practice than text (Bear et al., 2017; MacDougall, 1991). As an ethnographer who engages in multispecies worlds, audiovisual methods help me to understand relations outside of textual representations. Bear et al. (2017) test different (visual) methods – still photography and digital video – and mention a couple of advantages that digital video adds to research in the field. Photos and video both testify to the physicality of the cows and their surroundings, in more detail than field notes could. Video adds another layer of time and movement to image. These dimensions can help to foreground practices of other-than-human species, because they are less dependent on human interpretations than text (Bear et al., 2017, p. 229). In my research proposal, I also briefly touched upon this: MacDougall (1991) writes about how “audiovisual research is an opportunity to “…enable us somehow to confront the intersecting of the worlds [films] describe.” (MacDougall 1991:2) Films, as opposed to verbal forms of communication, are more continuous with the physical and sensory world of the subjects that it shows, as “films construct their arguments physically out of their primary data” (MacDougall, 1998, p. 68). This is an interesting thought to work with in human/animal relations, because ways of communication between humans and animals are not primarily verbal, at least they do not share the human language. Therefore I argue that an anthropology focusing on human-animal relations needs to make use of the excesses of (sensory) information that present themselves in film. (MacDougall 1998, pp. 68)
The idea of ‘becoming with’, is not separable from my role as researcher and filmmaker, in fact it is a very important part of my methodology. In my filming I use the camera as if trying to bring vision closer to my body. The goal is to remain attached to the research while and to be aware of different actors are affecting each other during fieldwork. Since “tactility cannot be a distant sense” (Marks p.132), this approach is a conscious choice to avoid a subject/object divide (Latimer and Miele, 2013, p. 21) and remain a participant in the situation, like my human and non-human protagonists.
Most of my cinematic choices during fieldwork were informed by the idea of haptic visuality and sensory ethnography. Haptic visuality, as opposed to optical visuality, is described
makes invite the viewer experience films in an embodied way, engaging not only vision and auditory senses, but for example also tactile ones. Thus it is a way to represent the other senses through audiovisual means (Marks, 2000, p. 2). Most importantly, Besides this, I also made some other choices that take this further for example by focusing manually. So not only does the camera move when I move, but the focus also moves with my focus.
…the camera is also essential to the ethnographer’s forms of engagement in that environment, ways of experiencing and mode of participation. Moreover, it moves with, rather than independently from, the ethnographer as she or he moves. (Pink, 2009b) List of recurring cinematic choices during fieldwork: • Style of filming: hand-held and often slim depth of field. • Use of medium close-ups and close-ups of interaction, staying close to my protagonists when filming. • Minimum of static overview shots.
I used a handheld camera whenever possible is to emphasize my subjectivity, since my movements will be visible in the film. I used manual adjusting of the camera to accentuate the focus. The slim depth of field ensures that this focusing is very present in the footage. Otherwise my presence as a filmmaker and participant is also clear in camera-movements, and sometimes verbal interactions.
The minimum amount of static overview shots is a conscious choice to immerse the viewer in the situations with animals. Part of the reason was also because I as a filmmaker myself was immersed in filming from a close perspective, with a maximum zoom of 70mm, I used my body to change perspectives. Hence, I decided on the spot how I was going to move the camera and what would be important to film). The animal is never far away or completely gone when I film human protagonists, or vice versa because I was filming at home, during walks, or during ZorgDier visits at De Appel.
Figure 5. Excerpt from a clip the author shot at De Appel. An example of a close-up, slim depth of field, handheld camera as I have used more often. In this specific shot I was very consciously focusing on the petting, the hand of one of the residents and the paws of the cat reacting to that.
3. A multispecies ethnographic encounter
Bear et al. (2017) conclude that digital video was the most revealing of cows’ subjectivities in their research on human-animal and technology relations on a milk farm. This was because the element of time and movement made it possible to capture the cows in their activity, inactivity and exploration (Bear et al., 2017, p. 251). During my time in the field I have used my camera to capture Ophelia, Baard and Mara in a similar manner as I would Lotte, Levi and Matthijs. Where much of my interaction with the latter three is language based, including interviews and more general chatting, the interaction with companion animals happens more through unidirectional language (human to animal), touch, and other kinds of body language. An important part of filming within the three home settings was to figure out how I related to them, how they related to each other and to me, and what the presence of my camera meant. In the last chapter, I have given primary attention to the camera. In this chapter I would like to look at my experiences in the field more in general and interpret those of my respondents.What could attunement look like?
One of the red threads throughout my research has been deciding when to get my camera, and when to be present without camera. This was partly due to inhibitions about the comfort of my protagonists, but also about the appropriateness of filming certain things rather than others – since I have told my protagonists the aim of my research I felt it was sometimes unclear to them why I was filming them at seemingly random moments of everyday life, and not only their pets. This is an interesting notion to me; in general, it seems easier to point my camera at companion animals rather than human beings, I guess partly because they cannot argue against me in human language. But this also has some parallels to the idea I found during my research that the love “we” receive from pets is “unconditional”. Is it? And what about filming animals? I started out wanting to explore therapeutic effects of animals on human beings. This is important because both Lotte and Levi replied to me because they found themselves benefiting from having an animal in their lives, which helped them cope with certain mental health issues. This specificity, in turn, made me increasingly aware of film choices, because I wanted to be sensitive to the situations of my protagonists. In a sense, this was my way of trying to apply the idea of attunement and response-ability into the research, but at first it highly relied on my interpretations of what my respondents would think comfortable. To counter this I asked Levi, Lotte and Matthijs what they wanted to get from participating. Levi answered this question by saying that “[He] wants to show that a dog is more than just an item I own.” And he proceeds bydrawing from an experience in which someone threatened to take Baard away from him. He tried to mention this to the police and they told him to “report it to the police if Baard went missing when he got home.” It made him angry, he explains, because “Baard is so much more than just an object, or something that you own, because I feel whole when I am with Baard and otherwise I feel like a part of me is missing.”
But if that is Levi’s interpretation of what he gets out of this project, what would be Baard’s? I remember at some point during that same visit, I was filming close-up shots with Baard but he reacted to the camera and dead-cat on my microphone by and leaning against me. To keep myself from falling over I was forced to quit filming and I started petting him. What I took from this in hindsight, is that even though I cannot interpret how Baard experienced being filmed, this is a way in which I am able to respond to him in the moment of doing research and filming, even if I have no clue about any animal’s ‘motivation’ or ‘intent’, nor a clue about the presence or lack thereof. Figure 6. The author and Baard. Picture by Levi. Even though this might have been a good moment for both Baard and me here, this is not to say that any time I respond to a situation in research, or in life, it is a hit. Sometimes trying to respond leads to misattunement. During my second visit at De Appel we visited a resident in one of the two living rooms on opposite sides of the courtyard. The session had been chaotic, because we
and visitors kept passing by, joining or leaving. One of the residents had left halfway through because he did not feel so well. When Maike, Jan, Chablis and me came to the living room to see if Chablis could cheer him up a bit, he was laying down on the brown leather couch. Maike asked if he wanted to sit up so he could pet Chablis, but he did not want to.
Jan told me to film and not be shy; in the end they had given me permission to film everything at De Appel. I was hesitant because it felt like an intimate moment, why would I want to film his sadness when he wants to be left alone, and does not know? If Chablis could not make him sit up, did he not just want to lay on the couch? I have some footage, but it reflects how I keep a distance. Another resident, M. sits in a red chair next to the couch, holding a teddy bear with a red t-shirt on. To keep a distance is not always inappropriate, and that is also part of response-ability and attunement: to learn when somebody needs space, or when they want contact. Despret (2013) rightly points out that bodies become articulated in the process of interacting and asking questions (Despret, 2013, p. 70). Rather than assuming a certain response from someone, to act with empathy in scientific pursuits is also “the process by which one delegate one’s body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies” (Despret, 2013, p. 70). Figure 7. Unedited footage of a situation of misattunement at De Appel. The living room was noisy, since it was around four o’clock, there were some visitors and kids in the living room – and us. We left the living room as quickly as we realized that it was too much. Another resident walked us back through the hallway holding a leash that Chablis had on him. Maike walked on the other side of the dog with another leash in her hand.
Some situations between Matthijs and Mara also seemed to be about a conflict of what Matthijs wanted Mara to do, and what she did. In the film, for example, we can see a scene where Matthijs tries to seduce Mara from coming from hiding under the bed to going outside. It would be her first time outside, and even though she seems to be curious and walks up to the open door several times, it takes her a while to try stepping outside. He says “she is not really like the average cat, she does not respond to treats.”
Projecting unconditionality
In a society where things that deviate from an accepted norm, and in which things outside that norm are polarized, inclusion/exclusion and thus acceptance are very conditional; also of loneliness/mental health issues, and these can result in certain stigmas (Irvine, 2013). In a broader sense, the dichotomy of nature/culture and mind/body and related binaries result in processes of exclusion that have seemingly fixed boundaries around what is ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ (Latimer and Miele, 2013, p. 19). The first time I met Levi and Baard, the three of us went for a walk. In this instance, it was also very obvious, looking back at the footage, that I have way more footage of Baard than of Levi, and that pointing the camera at Baard and not at Levi too much seemed to make both Levi and me more comfortable. During my fieldwork I the idea of ‘unconditional love’ many times. As opposed to people, both Levi and Lotte and many other people whom I had conversations with during my fieldwork and afterwards, said that they could understand the therapeutic effects of companion animals, especially dogs, on people. Not only because you would meet other people on walks, but also because they are a reliable source of love, and they do not judge. This is as opposed to people, who cannot always be there or have a certain “political agenda”, as both Lotte and Levi mentioned a couple of times. From this, I interpreted a fear or expectation of unreliability towards other human beings. The ‘political agenda’ seems to refer to other people’s intentions, their interests, and the idea that these need not be in line with their actions. This compartmentalization of intention and action has some similarities to a mind/body divide that is not perceived to be there in animals, who are more ‘primitive’ and thus also perceived as ‘honest’ and even ‘innocent’: As Levi said, they might do something bad, but not out of bad intentions: “Baard may take the rotten fish out of the garbage can and make the whole apartment smell bad, but he would not do that to punish me.”While writing this article I thought a lot about the idea of unconditional love that we receive from our companion animals, until I had a conversation with someone I met at a barbeque
how to give love unconditionally. I asked her to elaborate to which she replied: “yes, I would not know what they feel, or think about me, but I gave them my care and love regardless.” Now this idea of the innocence of animals is a questionable presumption, given that if animals are mistreated or left uncared for, they may be dependent but and can be debunked by research that shows how animals have whole intentional systems of communication. Rather, it is more interesting to look at what it tells us about people and what they feel they lack, or desire.
Conclusion
In the introduction and first chapter I have motivated my research and explained why it turned out to be a fragmentary and multisited research. In the second chapter I have discussed the concepts of response-ability and attunement, where I draw mainly from Haraway (Haraway, 2008). I think my effort for a sensory ethnography through visual ethnography has its many flaws. In many aspects, I have still been language or human-centered both in the film and in this written text. Thus further research would look into the problems that I have encountered within this project. I have also found that my time spent with ZorgDier and De Appel has not been sufficient to get used to the setting or build rapport with staff, even though one of them has been very kind. This sort of access to health care facilities remains a difficult thing and the time frame of this research was not enough. I have also found that I find it particularly hard to write about animals’ experiences in this written text and not turn to anthropomorphisations, an aspect of relating to animals that I have not have the room to discuss here. Therefore, I am happy the audiovisual component is there in which I made an attempt to film the companion animals in a way they can ‘speak for themselves’, since the audiovisual is more continuous with the physical world it represents (MacDougall, 1998).
Ashley Montagu (1986) writes that lab rats who have been touched more during their lab lives are more relaxed, trustful rats. Rats that only have been minimally handles responded more anxiously and suspicious. I would be interested in further anthropological research into narratives in which mind/body dichotomies are embedded. Admittedly, to see what can be learned from more holistic perspectives, in which not only human beings are included in ethical considerations, but animals too (Latimer and Miele, 2013). A visual and multisensory ethnographic approach, in which affect and forms of response-ability play a big role, would still seem a promising to think about how this could happen in the best way possible.
Sources
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