Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship

IF 0.3 Q4 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Global Environment Pub Date : 2023-02-01 DOI:10.3197/ge.2023.160102

Sandra Swart

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This essay confronts the lack of vernacular, indigenous or local knowledge in human-animal history and pushes it back into Deep History. It analyses the shifting meanings of the occult baboon and the alien 'other' in South Africa's syncretic and synchronic cosmologies. It asks why it is the baboon - out of all the animals - who came to be a witch's familiar? It asks why the tokoloshe, a supernatural sprite, became baboon-esque? In answering these questions, it uses Freud's notion of 'alien kinship' - the ancient attraction and anxiety induced by baboon as the uncanny, the alien, the changeling, the shape-shifter - or the 'Other within' us. It examines not only the changing role this understanding of the supernatural baboon has played in human societies historically (including a new role created by the tabloids) but the concomitant consequences for baboons themselves - to show that 'animal history' can advance a 'usable past'.

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小灰人?动物与异族亲属关系

这篇文章面对人类动物历史中缺乏本土、土著或地方知识的问题，并将其推回到深历史。它分析了神秘狒狒和外星“他者”在南非的融合和共时宇宙学中的变化意义。它问为什么是狒狒——在所有的动物中——成为女巫的密友?它问为什么tokoloshe，一个超自然的精灵，变得像狒狒一样?在回答这些问题时，它使用了弗洛伊德的“异族亲缘关系”的概念——由狒狒引起的古老的吸引力和焦虑，作为不可思议的、异类的、易变的、变形的——或者是我们“内在的他者”。它不仅考察了这种对超自然狒狒的理解在人类社会历史上所扮演的不断变化的角色(包括小报创造的新角色)，还考察了狒狒本身所伴随的后果——表明“动物历史”可以推进“可用的过去”。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Global Environment ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES-

CiteScore

0.50

自引率

25.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The half-yearly journal Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences acts as a forum and echo chamber for ongoing studies on the environment and world history, with special focus on modern and contemporary topics. Our intent is to gather and stimulate scholarship that, despite a diversity of approaches and themes, shares an environmental perspective on world history in its various facets, including economic development, social relations, production government, and international relations. One of the journal’s main commitments is to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to facilitate a common language and a common perspective in the study of history. This commitment is fulfilled by way of peer-reviewed research articles and also by interviews and other special features. Global Environment strives to transcend the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and to favour the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. It seeks to replace the notion of ‘hierarchy’ with those of ‘relationship’ and ‘exchange’ – between continents, states, regions, cities, central zones and peripheral areas – in studying the construction or destruction of environments and ecosystems.