The Animal Turn in Religious Studies (Review Essay)

REVIE W ARTICL E RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE ANIMAL TURN Aaron S.Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. 304. Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. 192. Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 360. Katherine WillsPerlo, Kinship and Killing: The Animal in World Religions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. Catharine Randall, The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2014. Pp. 192. Paul Waldau and KimberleyPatton, eds. A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 720. INTRODUCTION At least until recently, nonhuman animals have received little attention in religious studies scholarship. Once we begin to pay attention, however, we cannot help but notice the presence of animals in religious stories, rituals, and art in virtually every tradition, time, and place. From the other direction, it becomes evident that religion © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2016/5602-00XX$10.00 510.proof.3d 1 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 q1 2 Review Article strongly shapes popular understandings of animals’ characters, value, and proper roles. Taking the intersection of animals and religion seriously puts religious studies into conversation with the burgeoning field of animal studies. This conversation is growing, as evidenced by the number of books and articles that have been published on the topic in recent years. In this review essay, I look at several recent books on animals and religion, with a twofold aim: to evaluate the works under discussion and, even more, to identify some of the issues and perspectives that are defining the nascent scholarly conversation about animals and religion. The books addressed here include three general surveys or introductions to the role of animals in world religions: Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton’s edited volume, A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, and single-author studies by Katherine Wills Perlo and Lisa Kemmerer. I also discuss three more specialized books: Laura Hobgood-Oster’s investigation of animals in Western Christianity, Catharine Randall’s examination of “creatureliness” in early modern French religious thought, and Aaron S. Gross’s exploration of the theoretical and moral issues raised by kosher slaughter. This selection is far from exhaustive; recent books not included here have addressed animals in Islam, in Japanese religions, and in Christian theology, among others. However, these six books suggest the diversity of perspectives and topics brought together under the rubric “animals and religion.” At the same time, they reveal important recurring themes in the emerging scholarly conversation about animals and religion in animal studies more broadly. These include the abiding tension between the animals’ symbolic importance and their actual lives, the place of moral and political commitments within animal studies, and the challenges of comparison and pluralism. THE BOOKS By far the most expansive book on animals and religion is A Communion of Subjects, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton. The book spans over 650 pages, including sections on animals in Abrahamic, Indian, and early Chinese traditions and also on contemporary scientific, moral, and legal issues. Specific chapters address a wide range of issues, including medieval Christian bestiaries, horse mythology in India, raven auguries, and the legal issues surrounding animal sacrifice in Santería. Coverage is broad but sometimes erratic and, even within sections, the chapters are sometimes less comprehensive, or more specialized, than is ideal for teaching purposes. The book also lacks an organizing principle, other than the notion that animals are important for many human endeavors, including religion, science, and more. Still, A Communion of Subjects provides a general sense of the field, and the quality of the writing and scholarship is generally high. With its attention to a diversity of issues and traditions, A Communion of Subjects offers at present the best overview of animals and religion. Its length, however, will incline many readers to pick and choose among the chapters, limiting its practical value both as a teaching tool and as an introduction for scholars who wish to familiarize themselves with this new field. Single-author overviews possess both advantages and disadvantages over edited volumes, on this as on other topics. Without the challenge of collecting works by var- 510.proof.3d 2 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 3 History of Religions ious authors, monographs can be more comprehensive and systematic. On the other hand, the limitations of a single author’s expertise or theoretical stance are not balanced by the work of others. This is true of the available single-author works on animals in religion, sometimes intensified by the strong moral commitments of authors who are also animal advocacy insiders. This insider perspective is most intrusive, perhaps ironically, in the book that aims to be the most comprehensive in its coverage: Lisa Kemmerer’s Animals and World Religions. A strong advocacy stance also shapes Katherine Wills Perlo’s Kinship and Killing: The Animal in World Religions, the other single-author survey of animals and world religions. Both books are organized by religious tradition with Kemmerer offering slightly more breadth than Perlo, who limits her coverage to Abrahamic traditions and Buddhism. Both authors discuss a wide range of stories, moral teachings, symbols, and other elements within these religions, all with a primary aim of identifying those that support animal rights aims. Although its title is the broadest, in many ways Kemmerer’s book takes the narrowest approach. She limits her book in at least three major ways. First, she explicitly “focuses on religious teachings that are relevant to animal advocacy” (7). Second, she further restricts her argument by defining animal advocacy as synonymous with—perhaps even limited to—a rejection of meat eating (10). Third, Kemmerer excludes practices from her analysis, focusing exclusively on religious teachings and doctrines. Although she admits that a substantial gap divides religious teachings and the actual behavior of people within every religious tradition, she chooses not to discuss practices (religious or otherwise) in order to focus on ideals that support an animal rights position. The result of these restrictions is that Animals and World Religions feels partial and unsatisfying, despite the wealth of detail offered in regard to each religion under discussion. Katherine Wills Perlo shares Kemmerer’s commitment to an animal rights (and not simply an animal welfare) position and is explicit about this throughout her book. However, she offers a more balanced approach to the religions under discussion, concentrating not on the “pro-animal” teachings in each tradition but, rather, on the tension between affection for animals and exploitation of them. This tension demands a human response, which religion helps provide (1). These responses, further, fall into three main categories: aggression (or justification), defense, and evasion. By organizing her argument around religious responses to this fundamental contradiction, Perlo gives her book a sharper intellectual focus and makes it a more satisfying work of scholarship than Kemmerer’s book. Ultimately, both volumes are more helpful as arguments about the strengths and failings of various religions in regard to animal welfare than as broad and balanced introductions to the varied roles and understandings of animals in different traditions. Like Kemmerer and Perlo, Aaron Gross is driven by moral as well as intellectual concerns. However, his book places these ethical concerns within a more sophisticated theoretical context than either of the other two books, and the result is a more balanced analysis of the ways that taking animals seriously affects both scholarship and moral reflection. The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications begins with the controversy resulting from the release of a video, taken by an activist from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), that documented 510.proof.3d 3 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 4 Review Article grotesque cruelty at a kosher slaughterhouse run by the company AgriProcessors. Paralleling Perlo’s focus on the tension between kinship and killing, Gross argues that kosher certification and other efforts to regulate consumption patterns address deep moral ambivalence about the treatment of animals. As an effort to resolve this tension, Gross notes the emergence of the “humane subject,” which combines claims of human ascendency over animals with precepts of kindness to them. The slaughterhouse controversy and kosher certification provide a concrete case to ground Gross’s thoughtful and sophisticated exploration of animals in religious studies theory. Whereas The Question of the Animal and Religion focuses on a single tradition, its theoretical discussion is relevant to the broadest questions and conversations regarding animals in religion and in religious studies. The last two books I discuss are more narrowly focused, though they address many of the same issues that are raised in the books already mentioned. In Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, Laura Hobgood-Oster explores diverse representations of animals in (mainly) Western Christianity, including biblical, ritual, iconographic, and theological expressions in early and medieval Christianity, as well as contemporary movements for animal advocacy that are grounded in religious ethical concerns. Her book is not a systematic, chronological overview of the tradition but rather a rich exploration of several key moments and issues, combined with an explicit commitment to a distinctive theoretical stance within religious studies. Although she does not pretend to offer an overview of animals in religion, Hobgood-Oster, like Gross, examines questions that reverberate far beyond the particular case she discusses: “How is an animal symbol and subject, alive and involved, a vehicle of the divine and a faithful example to all witnesses? When do and did other-than-human animals enter and leave the stage of Christianity and what does that mean?” (4). She is particularly interested in the specificity of animal actors in stories and practices, a theme that is highlighted in her attention to both historical and contemporary issues. Her chapters on animals in medieval hagiography and, especially, on dogs in Christian story and art illuminate the diverse, complex, and compelling ways in which nonhuman creatures occupy a religious stage. Catharine Randall’s book The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality is the most specific and detail-oriented of the six books discussed here. Diving deeply into a time and place encompassed within the broad contours of Western Christianity that Hobgood-Oster discusses, Randall offers a careful reading of several seventeenth-century French spiritual texts, both Protestant and Catholic. Her aim, she explains, is “to elucidate in an interdisciplinary way the early modern perspective on animals and the ways in which animals are applied to affirm, alter, or oppose authority, whether social, cultural, literary, or, especially, theological” (8). The texts she studies all make extensive and intensive use of animals as symbols, moral teachers, and spiritual muses, though in very different ways, some much more positive about animals’ value than others. She notes in particular the divergences between Protestant and Catholic ways of seeing animals and finds that overall the Catholic model, with its emphasis on an incarnational spirituality, offers stronger grounds for valuing nonhuman animals and bridging the divide between humans and animals (83). 510.proof.3d 4 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 5 History of Religions Having outlined the books reviewed here and some of the major issues they address, I now turn to a comparative discussion. My goal is not to examine each book exhaustively but rather to identify major points of agreement and disagreement, and the books’ strengths and weaknesses, suitability for teaching, and general contributions they might make to scholarship in both religious studies and animal studies. I organize this discussion around several important themes, including nonhuman agency, each of which figures in at least several, if not all, of the books reviewed here. ANIMALS AS SUBJECTS AND SYMBOLS The title of Waldau and Patton’s edited volume comes from eco-theologian Thomas Berry’s assertion that “the world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (13). This phrase suggests a basic distinction in popular and also scholarly ways of thinking about animals, as active, sentient, and sociable agents, on the one hand, or as tools serving human ends, on the other. Berry’s either/or formulation is oversimple, however, since in reality nonhuman animals experience both ways of being in the world: they are the subjects of their own intrinsically valuable and interesting (at least to themselves) lives, and they are also used, with varying degrees of callousness or cruelty, as instruments for pursuing the interests of others. (The same is true for many humans, of course, and several authors suggest a meaningful relationship between treatment of objectified animals and objectified humans.) This tension between distinct, albeit not mutually exclusive, meanings permeates not only real world relationships between humans and nonhumans but also the scholarly literature in animal studies, including most of the books reviewed here. Randall explains the basic division as it plays out in the early modern French spiritual texts she reads. In these texts, she finds two basic approaches to reading animals: as means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of existence or as subjects in their own right with their own minds (2). In relation to contemporary Judaism and also religious studies theory, Gross offers related, though more complex, delineation between real animals, symbolic animals, and “the animal” as an abstract category opposed to the human (10). The defining borders between these categories often blur, as people sometimes think they are discussing real animals, for example, when in fact symbolic creatures or abstract ideas are really at stake. Both animal studies generally and studies of animals and religion specifically are more interested, most of the time, in the ways that animals reflect human perceptions, values, and concerns than in the behavior, interests, or experiences of real-life animals. Animals are considered because they are important for human societies and cultures, serving human ends or reflecting human thoughts and feelings. This approach may be hard to avoid, since we can know other animals only in relation to ourselves and through our species-laden lens. However, as Paul Waldau points out in A Communion of Subjects, the emphasis on animals’ meaning for us often leads to inaccurate portrayals, in religious stories and other aspects of human culture (42). Some of these inaccuracies, such as the notion that nonhuman animals lack complex emotions or social relationships, are used to justify endless cruelties. 510.proof.3d 5 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 6 Review Article Even writers who explicitly oppose animal abuse often treat animals primarily as objects of human interpretations and actions. Although Perlo desires a world in which animals are active subjects of their own lives, for example, she fails to engage research on the ways that real animals exercise agency. Instead, she examines the ways that different religions support either respectful treatment or exploitation of animals. She rightfully acknowledges that most religions harbor ambivalent attitudes, including both expressions of kinship and affection, on the one hand, and justifications of harm and killing, on the other (1), and she sheds critical light on the varying ways different traditions have sought to address this tension. In this regard she is more nuanced than Kemmerer, and Kinship and Killing is a more balanced and rigorous argument. However, Perlo, like Kemmerer, remains interested primarily in animals as objects—of human cruelty, human pity, or human obligations. Laura Hobgood-Oster’s study of animals in Christian tradition also addresses the dual approach to animals. Most of the time, she writes, Christian texts—and their readers—have viewed animals as purely symbolic. This reading, she argues, “serves to reinforce human superiority and dominance” (15). A closer reading of religious stories and practices might open possibilities of a more active role. She begins her book with a description of a festival for San Zopito, the patron saint of the Italian town of Loreto Aprutino. A major player is a large white ox, “Il Bui de San Zopito,” who “marks every aspect of San Zopito’s commemoration and brings living animals to the heart of Christian ritual and story” (1). Without claiming that the bull is a Christian, HobgoodOster does raise the possibility of seeing him as more than simply a prop. The interesting question, she asserts, is “what is going on with the ox, who is arguably the central actor in this festival?” More precisely, she asks, “How is an animal symbol and subject, alive and involved, a vehicle of the divine and a faithful example to all witnesses?” (4). Hobgood-Oster raises these far-reaching questions in relation to specific events and stories. Catharine Randall takes an even narrower focus on a particular period and place within Christianity and, like Hobgood-Oster, traces an ongoing tension between views of animals as means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of existence, or as subjects in their own right (27). Randall’s work underlines a point that is important in regard to all the books discussed here, and indeed to animal studies in general. The fact that animals are important to a culture or an individual does not mean that they are seen positively or that their lives are valued equally. In many religious stories, for example, animals are highly significant and at the same time portrayed in very negative ways, as demonic, threatening, or polluting. They may, further, be portrayed positively, as innocent or even divine, and still treated badly. This underlines the importance of distinguishing animal advocacy as an activist pursuit, animal ethics as systematic reflection on the moral status of animals, and animal studies as critical attention to the representations and interpretations of animals in human cultural expressions. The intellectual and moral concerns of these different undertakings often overlap, but they are not identical, and (for example) some of the scholars who examine symbolic uses of animals in art or literature are not especially interested in the moral or political implications thereof, just as some animal advocates are not especially concerned with the theoretical dimensions of human attitudes toward other 510.proof.3d 6 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 7 History of Religions creatures. This distinction is sometimes blurry, especially in religion, where moral and affective concerns are so often interwoven with ideological and intellectual ones. Ultimately, work at the intersection of animal studies and religious studies tells us much more about humans than about the other species with whom we are so preoccupied. This is true of the work of scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives and on a range of topics. Even those who focus on the moral status and suffering of real animals, such as Perlo and Kemmerer, are more interested in the tensions between different moral positions within and among human representations than in the tensions between those representations and animals’ own experiences. This emphasis may stem in part from the difficulty of gaining access to accurate understandings of nonhuman subjectivity, but there is a large and growing literature in ethology (animal behavior) that provides a wealth of rigorous and wide-ranging sources. Unfortunately, few of the people working in animal studies, in religion or other humanistic and social scientific fields, engage this work. Such engagement would make it possible to analyze what human cultures have thought and done with regard to animals in relation to the animals’ subjective experiences, capacities, and interests. For example, knowing about the generally cooperative and family-oriented social lives of wolves would provide a comparative perspective for thinking about religious, literary, and historical demonizations of canis lupus. One thing that the emerging scholarly literature on animals and religion underlines, then, is the extreme difficulty of treating animals as subjects of their own lives. Even when the subject at hand is animal suffering, they appear as passive objects of human actions much more than active agents. Ironically, when nonhuman agency is the subject, the situation becomes even more difficult. It is easy to nod to animal subjectivity but much harder to engage animals as actual subjects, as living beings over whom we exercise continuous and usually malignant power. This very power is an obstacle to critical thinking, as Gross points out (199). It makes it harder to think directly about animals as anything other than the objects of our hunger or our pity, or in Perlo’s terms, as anything other than our victims or our kin. It is understandable that the primary preoccupation of animal studies scholars is the significance of nonhuman species for human beings. This significance is so ubiquitous and so multifarious that it offers more than enough grist for scholarly reflections. However, the roles that animals play in our lives are not their only roles, and probably they are not, certainly for wild animals and for many domesticated ones as well, the most important parts of their lives. Thinking about aspects of animals’ lives that are separate from human society has been, to date, the realm solely of ethologists and some behavioral psychologists, whose work is treated as separate from the field of animal studies. Many ethicists concerned with our obligations toward other species read and discuss research about animal capacities and behavior, but the same cannot be said of the work on animals by scholars in other humanistic and social scientific fields. It is as though what animals really do and what they are really like has no place in the conversation about their roles in our cultures and societies. Perhaps the next stage in animal studies will involve bridging this gap. Religious studies scholars might make a major contribution to this step if we can think about animals as social actors, individual innovators, and even religious subjects. Religion is an ideal field for this kind of 510.proof.3d 7 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 8 Review Article work, bridging behavior and cultural studies—we are already, as religious studies scholars, always crossing boundaries, bringing different methods and resources together to try to grasp, if not definitively pin down, our large and fluid subject. The study of religion and animals would be enriched—and also muddied and complicated—if scholars took seriously the possibility of nonhuman agency as documented in countless works in animal behavior. Some of these even hint at the possibility of nonhuman religious expressions, a suggestion perhaps first made by Jane Goodall, although it rarely appears as even a possibility in contemporary studies of animals and religion. The exception is Hobgood-Oster’s short discussion of animals as religious subjects in human rituals and, less directly, Gross’s attention to the importance of animal agency in indigenous cultures discussed by Tim Ingold. None of the authors really discuss links among human religion and nonhuman social and communicative behavior, for example, or other entry points into the possibility that religion was not born with the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species. This possibility is reinforced, albeit indirectly, by the growing literature on the evolutionary origins of religion, another field that might be brought into the conversation on animals and religion. This research has already been important for some discussions of animal morality, especially in the work of scholars such as Frans de Waal, Marc Bekoff, and Marc Hauser. (Essays by the latter two are included in the section on “Animals as Subjects: Ethical Implications for Science” in A Communion of Subjects—one of the sections of the book in which religion has no place.) Studies of animal behavior suggest a much messier approach to animal subjectivity, because they reveal that animals’ desires and intentions often depart from those of humans, a reality rarely addressed in the literature on animals in religion. This is especially true of the religious issue in regard to which animals’ “agency” is invoked most often— ritual sacrifice. ANIMAL SACRIFICE Exploring the ways that animals are presented in religious stories, scholarly studies, and popular culture thus tells us something important about the ambivalence with which humans generally view nonhuman creatures. More precisely, religion offers an excellent way in which to explore the paradoxes of human interactions with animals. This paradox is captured especially well in ritual sacrifice, a major theme in several of these books. Examining sacrifice highlights the difficulty of understanding and presenting animals as subjects. Sacrifice underlines, in particular, the ways that the denial of animal subjectivity and intrinsic value seeps in even when people (such as many writers included here) seek to escape it. For example, in his chapter “Sacrifice in Ancient Israel,” in A Communion of Subjects, Jonathan Klawans asserts that “we will do well to think of animals as subjects, and not as objects” (66–67). However, Klawans’s essay turns out to be an effort to show that sacrificial killing is somehow an interactive process in which the nonhuman victims participate willingly and benefit as much as the human participants. This counterintuitive reading rests on his assertion that the meaning of sacrifice “derives not primarily from what the animals offered Israel, but rather from what Israel provided to its domesticated animals, which 510.proof.3d 8 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 9 History of Religions parallels the care that they wished their God to provide for them” (74). The larger pastoral context of ancient Israelite culture, in other words, somehow creates a context in which animals actively choose sacrifice, presumably out of gratitude to God or their human caretakers. “If placing oneself in the position of another constitutes the essence of empathy, then ancient Israel had empathy to spare for their own domesticated animals, even when—or perhaps, especially when—they carefully guided them to the altar to sacrifice them to their own divine shepherd” (75). Kimberley Patton’s essay in A Communion of Subjects, titled “Animal Sacrifice: Metaphysics of the Sublimated Victim,” presents a similar interpretation of sacrifice as characterized by human caring and animal subjectivity. She criticizes animal rights philosopher Tom Regan for suggesting that animals are objects in sacrifice (392) and asserts instead that “animals are seen as active subjects from start to finish in the sacrificial process, glorified mediators between realms, whose cooperation is essential to the efficacy of the ritual, whose forgiveness is often sought from kinship groups to avert vengeance” (393). Of course, being “seen as” an active subject is hardly the same as having real agency, power over one’s situation. This conflation of interpretation and reality is common in the literature in animal studies generally, as authors interested in animal well-being struggle to make sense of cultural practices in which animals are important but also disposable. It is worth exploring Patton’s argument in detail because it reflects this tension so well. She insists that sacrifice calls for “the animal’s cooperation in every step of proceedings,” or the sacrifice will not succeed. “The animal is virtually never divested of agency or free will. Instead, it is understood to assent to its own demise; this ‘voluntary’ self-offering by the animal is nonnegotiable” (396). It is hard to know what to make of this claim—how can animals be said to “cooperate” with their own killings when these deaths require that the animals be captured, tied, and physically driven or carried to the place of sacrifice? Assertions that the animals “offer themselves” can be seen as efforts to resolve uneasiness about killing, as both Perlo and Gross note. From this perspective, it is understandable that the religious actors involved claim that animals acquiesce in their own ritual killing. However, it is harder to comprehend why otherwise critically attuned scholars, including Patton, Klawans, and many others, repeat this insider justification. Perlo offers a pointed critique of “subjectivist” readings of animal sacrifice, including the chapters by Patton and Klawans in A Communion of Subjects. She sees Patton’s essay as an example of the defensive response to the tension between affection and exploitation. Defensive strategies seek to justify exploitation—in this case sacrifice—as having benefits to animals. Patton, like Klawans, asserts that sacrifice actually benefits the animals who are killed, by giving them a special status, elevated among other animals with agency and the prospect of resurrection. Perlo comments that “one might note that all these benefits, or mitigations, of sacrifice are features of human moral conflict and imagery, not of the animal’s experience” (9). What is interesting in the discussions of animal sacrifice is that claims that the animals’ willingness to die to serve human interests are coupled with—and in fact made possible by—assertions that the animals are themselves active agents, with their own desires, wills, and subjective experiences. Most scholars working in animal studies reject the Cartesian claim that nonhuman creatures are mere automatons and insist 510.proof.3d 9 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 q2 10 Review Article that they are feeling, thinking, sociable beings who have interests and whose interests matter. However, at the same time most scholars are unwilling to critique, much less condemn, institutions that regularly exploit nonhuman animals. Thus we get discussions of “happy meat” from scholars of sustainable agriculture, among other paradoxes. Here Gross’s category of the “humane subject” is helpful as a way to understand the dual desire to exploit animals while also asserting one’s status as a kind and devout person. Similar arguments—asserting human kindness while assuming human dominance—also emerge in scholarly interpretations of hunting, especially in Native American cultures. Ubiquitous in such accounts are claims that prey animals “offer” themselves to the hunters. Hunters in turn must express gratitude to the animals whose death makes their survival possible. This “bargain” is, of course, entirely in favor of the human party, but the desire to present it as somehow beneficial to, or at least accepted by, the nonhuman victim seems widespread in different cultures. Again, religious studies scholars repeat religious insider claims about what is happening in ritual practice, rather than assessing these claims critically. This uncritical approach is, tellingly, almost never repeated (at least in contemporary scholarship) when human beings are the objects of religious violence, as in Aztec human sacrifice, Hindu sati, or Catholic inquisitorial practices. Another way to think about hunting is not as an offering but as an interaction that makes sense only in the larger context of a complex relationship between humans and other species. Although scholars readily acknowledge that native hunters have great biological, ethological knowledge, Gross writes, “the idea of actual relations with animals that might be substantially (rather than metaphorically) equivalent with human social relations is ruled out without question.” In other words, the idea that animals participate actively, intentionally, and even willfully in social relationships (with humans or members of any species) never enters the conversation—except when necessary to support claims that animals acquiesce in their own ritual deaths. Thus scholars commonly write, as Ingold notes, that indigenous people interpret facts about particular animals “as if ” they had social relationships, among themselves and with the hunters (106). The problem, Ingold argues, and Gross agrees, is the “as if.” Removing this clause makes it possible to develop “an ontology that does not restrict personhood exclusively to human beings and its important corollary: some animals too can be loci of religious action and meaning (can be religious ‘subjects’ in the sense of not being mere objects or unwitting participants, but agents within the phenomena of religion)” (115). Such agents may rarely act in ways that advance human interests or fulfill human preconceptions. A deeper understanding of personhood and thus of nonhuman agency would transform common interpretations of religious rituals, myths, and doctrines—and do so, perhaps, far more profoundly than a simple assessment of “pro” or “anti” animal messages. ANIMAL ETHICS, ADVOCACY, AND SCHOLARSHIP The moral status of nonhuman animals is among the most important topics in the scholarly literature on animals. Philosophers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer, 510.proof.3d 10 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 11 History of Religions writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, were pioneers in thinking rigorously about human attitudes toward and treatment of other animals. Ethical arguments from within religious traditions, such as those in the work of Christian theologian Andrew Linzey, address many of the same issues as these secular thinkers. Even in writings that are not explicitly focused on ethics, our duties toward nonhuman animals are often a major subtext. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of the work of most of the authors discussed here. Perlo and Kemmerer, in particular, write from an animal rights position, committed to a world in which animals are not used by humans in any exploitative way. This commitment drives their readings of different religions, which, especially for Kemmerer, are oriented toward finding theological and moral support for animal rights rather than exploring the nuances of different traditions. While HobgoodOster, Gross, and many of the contributors to A Communion of Subjects clearly sympathize with animal advocacy, their interest in religion goes beyond its potential contribution to animal rights arguments. Food plays an especially prominent role both in the religious significance of animals and in animal ethics and advocacy. Not surprisingly, food is a major theme in several of the books, most explicitly in The Question of the Animal and Religion, which begins with and circles back to kosher rules about diet and slaughter. However, Gross’s arguments move well beyond simple condemnations of meat eating, and he uses kashruth as a springboard to talk about the complexities of human relations to animals well beyond the food industry. Food, and meat eating in particular, also appears in numerous chapters in A Communion of Subjects, which includes a section (titled “Are Animals ‘for’ Humans?”) on factory farming. Meat is also a major preoccupation for Kemmerer, who explicitly equates animal advocacy with vegetarianism or veganism: many people, she writes, believe that religions “do not align with the agenda of animal activists, that religions do not require adherents to rethink their meaty diet. But in reality, religious traditions offer a wealth of moral teachings and spiritual ideals that surpass animal welfare to align with animal rights and animal liberation, that reach beyond a vegetarian diet and require adherents to adopt a vegan diet” (10). Perlo also places diet at the heart of her moral agenda, because meat eating is the best example of human exploitation of other animals. However, she also discusses other uses of animals, not only in research and entertainment but also as companions. She would prefer an end to pet keeping, envisioning instead “a nonspeciesist world” in which “people would live in environments where dogs, cats, or other anthrophiles could go as they pleased to and from a human habitation” (227). Mainstream animal advocacy groups do not reject pet keeping in general but rather focus on abusive practices, which are seen as aberrations in generally positive human relations with companion animals. Some advocates, however, reject all human uses of animals, even those that do not appear intrinsically exploitative or harmful. The most prominent advocates of this stance is PETA, which plays a surprisingly significant role in the work of several of the scholars discussed here. Both Perlo and Kemmerer identify, to varying degrees, with PETA’s approach, and Gross’s book begins with PETA’s video exposing the cruelties at AgriProcessors. Kemmerer’s commitment is made explicit by her decision to close most chapters with stories about religious activists, almost al- 510.proof.3d 11 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 q3 12 Review Article ways from PETA. These anecdotes are intended, no doubt, to show that every tradition is compatible with animal advocacy and that animal rights may even capture core religious teachings. Kemmerer’s desire to show the compatibility of animal rights and religion led her to exclude contradictory evidence, to cherry-pick her examples, and to present minority streams (such as Sufism) as the mainstream. She even cites PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk as an authority, writing that “Indian philosophy of reincarnation is well represented in the words of Ingrid Newkirk . . . ‘a dog is a pig is a rat is a boy’” (62). Kemmerer’s stance is extreme, but she reflects a larger dilemma in committed scholarship: is it possible to combine strong moral and political commitments with rigorous scholarship? More specifically, can studies of animals and religion be grounded in concern about animal welfare and also offer balanced and broadly supported arguments about the religions under discussion? Fortunately, the work of Gross, Hobgood-Oster, Randall, and many of the contributors to A Communion of Subjects demonstrate that this is indeed possible. COMPARISON AND JUDGMENT Related to the problem of advocacy-driven scholarship is the challenge of evaluating the moral position and contributions of different traditions in a comparative context. Comparison is at the heart of religious studies, and at its best, our discipline demonstrates the value of subjecting diverse traditions, practices, and ideas to a common analysis. Three of the books reviewed here—A Communion of Subjects and Kemmerer’s and Perlo’s books—deal with multiple traditions and with diverse streams within each tradition, but they do not always make the comparisons explicit. All three often treat different religions side by side, or one after the other, rather than put them into conversation with each other. Of the three, Kinship and Killing involves the most thorough comparisons, because it carries the theme of tension between affection and cruelty across the various traditions discussed. Gross, Hobgood-Oster, and Randall do not compare different religious traditions, but their books do contribute to comparative analyses in several ways. They address common roles of and ideas about animals—for example, as spirit guides, moral teachers, or sacrificial objects—that highlight important features of “religion” generally. They also pinpoint, perhaps even more important, shared ways of dealing with nonhuman animals and with ambivalent feelings about human use of them, as captured in Gross’s concept of the humane subject and Perlo’s analysis of strategies of aggression, evasion, and defense. Such concepts enable comparisons within and between traditions much more helpfully than the question of whether religions support animal rights in a general way. The authors almost completely shy away from making judgments about which religion has the most humane or compassionate view of animals. The exception is Perlo’s comment that Buddhism, while still “centrist,” is “the most animal-supportive” of the religions she discusses (115). For the most part, however, scholars of animals and religion suggest that every tradition has resources for supporting kindness toward animals. This theme runs throughout Animals and World Religions and also 510.proof.3d 12 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 q4 13 History of Religions in most of the chapters in A Communion of Subjects. In his contribution to the editor volume, theologian Jay McDaniel writes that “Christianity can be, or at least should be, good news for the earth and its creatures. This is not because Christianity is the best religion or because all people should convert to it. Each religion has its gifts and liabilities” (134). The same point is echoed in regard to most of the other traditions discussed. A good example is Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s claim that “merciful treatment of all living beings has from time immemorial been a core value of Jewish views of the proper relationship between humans and earth’s nonhuman beings” (89). This rosy view echoes work on religion and ecology, which often asserts that each religion under discussion has deep principles supporting environmental protection. Very rarely do scholars judge one religion as more or less green, feminist, or the like, usually asserting instead that all contain the potential to contribute to the moral agenda at stake. The scholarly task is seen not as comparing religions to each other but rather as identifying the positive potential in each. This reconstructive task is necessary and important, but scholarship on animals and religion should not stop here. Can it really be true that all religions condemn exploitation of nonhuman animals? Does the Quran really promote vegetarianism, and do animals have legal standing in Judaism, as Kemmerer suggests (183, 255)? If this support for animal rights is as widespread in every religious tradition as some scholars suggest, then we ought to take up, explicitly and critically, the very wide gap between these core principles and actual practices. Not one of the scholars writing here, however, confronts this gap. And certainly none suggests that the reality of widespread cruelty reflects a deep and unavoidable anthropocentrism at the heart of one or more religious traditions. Peter Singer sounds perhaps the only irreligious note in A Communion of Subjects. In an interview with Waldau, Singer reflected that many prominent animal advocates (including himself ) have been atheists or agnostics and adds that “the organizations that have done most for animals have also been independent of religion. There are exceptions, but you couldn’t say that communities of faith have been especially prominent in the modern animal movement” (618). You could not—unless you restrict yourself in the way that Kemmerer does, deliberately excluding both practices and ideas that run counter to an animal rights agenda. That sort of cherry-picking does not contribute to rigorous intellectual debate about either animal ethics or religion. It also seems unlikely to persuade skeptics, inside or outside religion, to take animals seriously. Aside from Singer and a few other skeptics, most writing about animals and religion dismisses the gap between ideas and practices, either by ignoring it entirely or by deliberately excluding the issue from their analysis. Thus Kemmerer explains that her book “is about what religions teach, not about how religious people live. In truth, there appears to be embarrassingly little correlation between the two” (10). This lack of correlation is precisely something scholars ought to address, rather than endlessly repeating that “true” Christianity (or Islam, Judaism, etc.) has nothing to do with the terrible things done by its followers. We might learn a great deal if we followed Michel Foucault’s approach to the relationship between Stalinist practice and Marxist philosophy. He insisted that Marxists need to confront the abuses done in their name, rather than pretending that real-world practices have nothing to do with the “true” version of their philosophy. In response to Stalinism (if not necessarily to Foucault), 510.proof.3d 13 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 q5 q6 14 Review Article many socialists did confront the gap between Marx’s theory and the failings of “really existing” socialism. This engagement is far from complete, but it has still opened possibilities for rigorous scholarship and constructive debates among people committed to socialist philosophy and practice. It was important for socialists themselves, and not only their enemies, to ask how a theory so committed to justice, freedom, and solidarity could be implicated—if only in name—in terrible oppression and violence. Similarly, scholars committed to animal welfare and religious pluralism should not leave it to others (e.g., to atheists like Singer) to ask how religions that profess compassion and respect for all creatures have participated in institutions and practices that cause tremendous animal suffering. CONCLUSION The books reviewed here all contribute to scholarly knowledge of the significance of animals in human religious experience. Taken as a group, they raise many of the themes that are important and provide, through comparison and repetition, a sense of what issues are beginning to define the field. At the same time, most suffer from weaknesses that are frustrating, though perhaps inevitable, in the formative stages of a new area of scholarship. In particular, teachers and students seeking a comprehensive, coherent, and academically rigorous introduction to the field will not find it among these books. The best overview remains A Communion of Subjects, although it is too long and too uneven to be an ideal teaching tool. The books by Kemmerer and Perlo, whose titles promise broad overviews, turn out to be evaluations of different religions’ potential contributions to animal welfare. While this is certainly crucial, it is not the only significant or interesting question that should arise in books on “animals in world religions.” The single-mindedness of these books, especially Kemmerer’s, will put off even readers sympathetic to animal advocacy—or at least, they put me off. Although Gross and Hobgood-Oster share strong moral commitments to animal welfare, their books are more satisfying intellectually in many ways, as is Randall’s even more narrowly focused study. Perhaps precisely because they are grounded in a specific field of study, these books all do a better job of reflecting on the thorny intellectual, moral, and political questions that emerge when we consider the place of animals in both religions and religious studies. Despite the shortcomings, all these books contribute to the emerging scholarly conversation about animals and religion. By highlighting the multiple and diverse ways they appear in all aspects of religion, these studies help us think differently about not only animals but also religion. ANNA PETERSON University of Florida 510.proof.3d 14 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50 QUERIES TO THE AUTHOR Q1. AU: Please note that all the book titles, spelling of authors’ names, and publication information have been verified through an Internet search. Q2. AU: Preferred spelling in Webster’s 11th edition. Q3. AU: I’ve substituted the preferred spelling in Webster’s 11th edition. Q4. AU: Note the addition of “stance” to “Kemmerer is extreme.” If this is not acceptable, please rephrase as needed. Q5. AU: By “editor volume” do you mean “edited volume” (i.e., A Communion of Subjects)? If not, please clarify. Q6. AU: Is Cohn-Sherbok’s quotation also taken from A Communion of Subjects? If not, please provide the source. 510.proof.3d 15 Achorn International 08/22/16 20:50