Change From Without: Uncertainty and becoming vulnerable to the more-than-human

Paul Keil 

This paper will explore notions of the self and how the self is subject to change within interspecies relations. Specifically, I will present examples of people who live and work closely with animals for the purpose of augmenting their capacity to affect and be affected by the world, whether it is expanding their bodily or social potential.  

But, instead of focusing solely on self-alteration as intentional changes, or an actively imagined and constituted project of modifying one’s power, this paper will also draw attention to the ways in which the self is revealed as unintentional, inapprehensible, and vulnerable through people’s relationship with animals. Drawing on research of interspecies entanglements across different species and different cultures, specifically working dogs in Australia, and working elephants in Northeast India, I will present how the self can be “leaky” and, in part, elusive, and how this informs and determines self-change within the interspecies relationship. 

I begin with working dogs in Australia, and where handlers were conscious of how their emotions and intentions would be read by and in turn affect how the dog behaves. Here the self, I argue, is not bound by the boundary of the skin but is reflected or revealed to the hunter through their nonhuman partner’s own responses. Often these were self-aspects unacknowledged or unattended to at the time. The threat of the self unknowingly and uncontrollably leaking into and disrupting the dynamics of the interspecies partnership, demands that the human handler practices new modes of self-awareness as well gestural and emotional discipline, occasionally framed in gendered ways. Although, in some cases these affective entanglements can be temporarily embraced to create the conditions for the dissolution of hierarchy and species difference.   

That animals demonstrate an awareness of aspects of the human self, sometimes hidden even to the person themselves, is a common notion also in India, where elephants can be god-like beings with remarkable insight into a person’s “heart”. The second part of this paper focuses on one elephant owner’s crisis of identity after surviving a violent attack by an elephant. And how one of his elephants somehow recognised this doubt, which the owner had not fully acknowledged himself, and helped him to resolve this issue. Selves in India are exposed to elephants in way that they are vulnerable to unexpected intervention. 

More-than-human research have sought to ontologically reconfigure what we call the “human.” Our empirical selves – bodies, activities, and societies - are constituted through relations with more-than-human others. The above ethnographic accounts lend themselves to a broader multispecies project that seeks to provoke an ethical shift from a narcissistic projection of the self onto the world, to a dialogical self – one that is vulnerable to and open to being shaped by intentions and perspectives unfamiliar and sometimes incomprehensible to our own.