The "cult" of Chi Wara among the Bamana people in Mali, produce the Chi Wara crest for seasonal celebrations. Chi Wara, the mythic beast who appeared to the Bamana ancestors to teach them agricultural technologies essential to their economic sustenance, is represented as an antelope, ripping at the flesh of the Anteater it stands upon. The Antelope (Chi Wara) alludes to the sun (nourishment for), the Anteater the soil. Human dominion, divinely decreed of course, over the elements of the wilderness is embodied in the animals.
I could go on and on with other examples of the "humanization" of animals among tribals / pre-industrial societies, whether via myth (as above) or simple, synthetic metaphor. But I think the naiveté of that assertion is practically self-evident.
Patrick -----Original Message----- From: Nathan Newman <nathan.newman at yale.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, March 02, 2000 2:43 PM Subject: RE: animal rights
>
>>On Behalf Of Hinrich Kuhls
>>
>> The reification of human relations and the humanization of things are
>> characteristic of societies dominated by the capitalistic mode of
>> production; the humanization of animals is only appropriate to advanced
>> bourgeois societies.
>
>This statement seems demonstrably wrong. You need only look at stories and
>myths of all sorts of preindustrial societies to see an incredible variety
>of attitudes towards the animal world, with massive amounts of
>anthropomorphizing animals as friends, companions, enemies and even gods.
>In the US, the native american population had an especially strong
>relationship with the animal population, some taking on specific animals as
>spiritual relations or guides. Old European legends and fairy tales have
>all sorts of mixed human and animal stories. Not that this meant that no
>animal could be killed in precapitalist societies, but then there was no
>strict prohibition usually on killing any human either.
>
>If anything, it is the pressures of capitalism that created a strict
>separation between the worlds of man and animal. Population pressures and
>technological pressures made animals (like most of the environment) a pure
>luxury unaffordable and unneeded accept for pure use. It is only more
>advanced capitalist societies that produce enough excess wealth to afford
>engagement with animals in an economy that no longer has day-to-day use for
>such engagement as in precapitalist economies.
>
>This is probably the reason why such richer New Agey types have such
>engagement with preindustrial cultures and so much alienation from
>present-day needs of developing nations and urban cultures.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>
>