Abstract
The study of religion, asserts Aaron Gross, is in need of a theorization of “the animal” (7). While this may seem like a rather insignificant task, Gross shows that animals have always been at the centre of the modern and contemporary study of religion—albeit as an “absent presence,” typically invoked only to be forgotten. This is accomplished through an excellent analysis of how animals figure in the theories of religion by Ernst Cassirer, Émile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, and Jonathan Z. Smith. Despite their many differences, each of these theorists contends that the study of religion is the study of the human. That is, they all adhere to the premise that animals do not have “religion” (however it is variously constructed or conceived) while humans do. In order to reinforce this animal/human binary the animal becomes a marker for the lack of classificatory thought and (complex) social interaction, lack of symbolic function, or lack of mythmaking. Gross points out, however, that this binary deconstructs itself by failing to protect the very ideology it sets out to achieve—namely, “the grand idea of the inviolability of homo sapiens” (81). Thus, “the religious life of human communities who have been historically seen to be close to animals, such as children (who are viewed as in a transitional state between the human animal body and the fully human adult) and indigenous peoples (who are understood to live in or close to an ‘animal’ state), becomes distorted when animals are ‘absented’ from the imagination of religion” (95). In other words, this binary obfuscates not only animals but also humans.
The book is framed by discussion of the high-profile scandal in 2004 surrounding leaked videos documenting the cruel treatment of animals in the kosher slaughterhouse at Postville, Iowa. These videos contain disturbing images of workers systemically cutting and partially removing the esophagi and tracheas of cattle in the butchering process; often, however, it is clear that the animals had not yet lost consciousness before this was done—several of the cattle can be seen walking around with their trachea and other parts hanging out of them. Gross pays particular attention to the response to these tapes in the American Jewish community, as Haredi and Orthodox voices largely (though not universally) sought to defend these practices (or at least deny that such practices were that widespread or cruel) while the Conservative and Reform voices, for the most part, questioned and condemned them. These responses are significant not only for what they reveal about Jewish self-understanding and ethics but also because of what they reveal about American culture, and the entire ideology of what it means to be “human,” particularly with regard to the study of religion (3).
Indeed, for Gross the question of the animal and religion is also a question “about the foundation of the human sciences, even the foundation of thought itself” (8). The theorists with whom Gross dialogues in order to support this claim are Tim Ingold and (especially) Jacques Derrida. The anthropological scholarship of Ingold looks at hunter-gatherer societies as a way to rethink the binaries of Western thought. In these societies, there is no strict human/animal binary, and thus hunting is viewed as an “interspecies social phenomenon” (112). Derrida’s concern, on the other hand, remains strictly focused on exposing the way that the animal/human binary insinuates itself into contemporary ideology. Even the word “animal,” Derrida asserts, makes us forget that there is no such thing as “the animal.” Thus, the gap between the animal and the human begins with a disavowal—an endless endeavour to forget animals or at least ensure their marginal status. And this leads naturally into the current “war” (the word is intentionally and provocatively chosen by Derrida) that humans are waging on animals: the industrial, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence “in which the idea that animals are machines is the disavowed premise” (136). The space in which this violence is permitted has a “religious” precedent by which it still operates—the logic of sacrifice, the privileging of one life over another. (This logic is based on what Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism, a neologism that highlights the connection between the privileging of human over animal with that of man over woman.) This sacrificial structure even, or especially, marks the way we eat, for to eat animals is to sacrifice them to our needs and wants.
Thus, the work of Derrida and Ingold, according to Gross, helps explain the slaughtering of animals at the plant in Postville, for such incidents, and the responses to them, emanate from a larger mythical and religious structure that is rarely explored (either in the media or also in academia). Gross accordingly writes, “eating meat today, eating it selectively, and even refusing to eat it are all what scholars of religion might call mythological activities, religious activities” (198). Hence the theoretical stakes and practical implications (as the subtitle suggests) of the question of the animal and religion, and why this book is the timely and engrossing read that it is.