Article ID: CBB001202104

Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History (2013)

unapi

Pearson, Susan J. (Author)


History and Theory
Volume: 52, no. 4
Issue: 4
Pages: 91-108


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Special Issue: Does History Need Animals?
Language: English

This essay explores a nineteenth-century debate over the linguistic capacity of animals in order to consider the links among language, reason, and history. Taking the American animal-protection movement as a point of departure, I show how protectionists, linguists, anthropologists, and advocates of deaf education were divided about the origins and nature of language. Was language a product of the soul and thus unique to humans, or was it a function of the body, a complex form of the corporeal expressions that humans and animals shared? Was language divine or natural? The answers that different activists and intellectuals gave to such questions shaped their view of the relationship of humans to animals and the inclusion of the latter in the moral and political community. I suggest that such debates are helpful to historians since the possession of language---and its traces in the written word---has traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history from history proper. If we are to include animals in history, we must rethink the relationship of the discipline to language.

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Article Shaw, David Gary (2013) A Way with Animals. History and Theory (pp. 1-12). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001202104/

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Authors & Contributors
Fudge, Erica
Danielle Coriale
Overhoff, Jürgen
Shibani Bose
Antoine Traisnel
Johnson, Keith
Concepts
Human-animal relationships
Animals
Science and culture
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and ethics
Reason
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
17th century
Early modern
20th century
20th century, early
Places
England
Great Britain
France
United States
Europe
India
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