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What It Means to Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present
"Avoiding the impenetrable prose often found in academic books, this deeply scholarly work is lively and challenging in equal measure, and rewarding throughout." --"Boston Globe"
In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been relocating the human-animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.
In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been relocating the human-animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.
480 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2011
About the author
Joanna Bourke
38 books67 followersJoanna Bourke (born 1963 in New Zealand) is an historian and professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 6, 2014
I read this for personal edification, though I can see this being useful in my academic work on disability and critiques of normalcy. What Bourke excels at in archival research and breadth of perspective, she lacks in strong analytical explanation, coherence, and relevance. Sometimes the examples seemed so extreme and obscure that they were included more for charm than as actual representative examples of social discourses on constructing the human. I also found her tone a bit annoyingly glib and judgmental.
However, overall this is a really interesting look at how categories such as animal, woman, disabled, and racial other have been essential to constructing a dominant Western notion of the "human." Bourke points out, though, that these boundaries are constantly shifting, and there has been no good, objective way of defining the human. Bourke also deals with the problems of prejudice/anti-prejudice discourse, as both tend to dehumanize their opponents, while claiming their own humanity. Another issue Bourke takes up is the somewhat problematic but perhaps unavoidable appeal to "human rights" as a means to social justice. Like Bourke, I agree that rights seem the best approach we have, so long as we aren't being essentialist.
The conclusion on "Negative Zoelogy" is pretty intriguing, arguing for a contingent, adaptable approach to examining humanity and life itself. This seems to go along with my interest in disability, which looks at it as an unstable, contingent, but necessary category. I'd like to see more exploration of this concept in further work.
However, overall this is a really interesting look at how categories such as animal, woman, disabled, and racial other have been essential to constructing a dominant Western notion of the "human." Bourke points out, though, that these boundaries are constantly shifting, and there has been no good, objective way of defining the human. Bourke also deals with the problems of prejudice/anti-prejudice discourse, as both tend to dehumanize their opponents, while claiming their own humanity. Another issue Bourke takes up is the somewhat problematic but perhaps unavoidable appeal to "human rights" as a means to social justice. Like Bourke, I agree that rights seem the best approach we have, so long as we aren't being essentialist.
The conclusion on "Negative Zoelogy" is pretty intriguing, arguing for a contingent, adaptable approach to examining humanity and life itself. This seems to go along with my interest in disability, which looks at it as an unstable, contingent, but necessary category. I'd like to see more exploration of this concept in further work.
December 9, 2012
If human rights are at the center of the political discourse, then we need to define, what beings they apply to, which is to say, what is a human being. It is indisputable that a wealthy educated Christian male of European descent is a human being, although during the French and the Russian Revolution such people were sometimes made second-class human beings, supposedly in punishment for having supported a social order that dehumanized the rest of humanity. To a much lesser degree this is also true in the era of political correctness, when American schoolchildren are more likely to be told about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman as examples of humanity worthy of emulation than about Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. Now, how far from this ideal can one get and still be considered a human being? The surprising thing is that there is no single good answer; since 1791 there have been many different answers to the question; Bourke chooses this year as her starting point because it was the year of the Haitian Revolution, which was intimately connected to this question.
Are women human? Women did not get voting rights equal to those of men until 1928 in Great Britain, and until 1944 in France. Bourke quotes an 1872 letter by "An Earnest Englishwoman" that argues in jest that, as women are not considered men in the electoral laws, they should at least be considered animals in the laws punishing cruelty to animals. Are black Africans and their descendants human? It was a common point in 19th century thought that they are not quite as human as the Europeans and their descendants. In Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island an orangutan "appeared to belong to that species of anthropomorphi in which the facial angle is not visibly inferior to that of the Australians or Hottentots." This school of thought found its culmination in Nazi Germany, which sought to impose upon the world its hierarchical vision of humanity, with Aryan superhumans on top, Slavic subhumans at the bottom, and Jewish vermin-masquerading-as-humans dead. Fortunately, this school of thought was not the only one, and with the Nazi military defeat, it went out of fashion. Bourke grew up in Haiti, a nation that arose in a revolt of slaves, which is to say humans reduced to the level of cattle, and she has many examples of Europeans and Americans considering the Haitians "half-devil and half-child" as opposed to humans.
As soon as the Europeans learned of the apes of tropical Africa and Asia, it was recognized that these are the animals most similar to human beings; when evolutionary biology was developed in the second half of the 19th century, it was recognized that these are also the most closely related animals. Now, humans can speak, and apes cannot (Bourke tells the fascinating story of how this was ascertained). Is language the barrier that separates the human and the non-human realms? The deaf and mute do not have a spoken language; it was not until the 1960s that it was realized that sign language is true language with a proper grammar; before, some authors considered the deaf and mute to be "little better than brute beasts." There have been several attempts to teach sign language to apes; the results were inconclusive. In a Franz Kafka story, a captive chimpanzee "sprang into the community of human beings" by saying "Hello!" The story may have deep metaphorical meaning, but it cannot be literally true.
In the 1801 novel The Dog of Knowledge; or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier, the pseudonymous memoirist is taken to Jamaica, where he meets slaves, and witnesses them whipped and worked to exhaustion. Bob is happy that he was "born a dog, and not a Negro, as these poor creatures are called," and he wonders how creatures that "differ in nothing but in the color of their skin and contour of their face" from the Europeans are treated thus; he concludes that perhaps appearances are deceptive, and the slaves are really "kind of animals, born to subjection, the same as dogs or horses." That slaves were really human was recognized by all, including the proponents of slavery: legally a slave was property, like a donkey, but as soon as a slave was accused of a crime, he was tried as a person. Slavery has been abolished in the name of humanism; yet Bourke claims that the humanist ideal of "an autonomous, willful human subject capable of acting independently in the world" is tied to a particular civilization and culture that may be racist or sexist, and present its own constraints of humanity. I must add that anti-racism and anti-sexism can warp this ideal even more.
It is unfortunate that this work by a British historian does not cite a novel by my favorite British author: in a future totalitarian England, a functionary of the ruling party says that "the proles are not human beings."
Are women human? Women did not get voting rights equal to those of men until 1928 in Great Britain, and until 1944 in France. Bourke quotes an 1872 letter by "An Earnest Englishwoman" that argues in jest that, as women are not considered men in the electoral laws, they should at least be considered animals in the laws punishing cruelty to animals. Are black Africans and their descendants human? It was a common point in 19th century thought that they are not quite as human as the Europeans and their descendants. In Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island an orangutan "appeared to belong to that species of anthropomorphi in which the facial angle is not visibly inferior to that of the Australians or Hottentots." This school of thought found its culmination in Nazi Germany, which sought to impose upon the world its hierarchical vision of humanity, with Aryan superhumans on top, Slavic subhumans at the bottom, and Jewish vermin-masquerading-as-humans dead. Fortunately, this school of thought was not the only one, and with the Nazi military defeat, it went out of fashion. Bourke grew up in Haiti, a nation that arose in a revolt of slaves, which is to say humans reduced to the level of cattle, and she has many examples of Europeans and Americans considering the Haitians "half-devil and half-child" as opposed to humans.
As soon as the Europeans learned of the apes of tropical Africa and Asia, it was recognized that these are the animals most similar to human beings; when evolutionary biology was developed in the second half of the 19th century, it was recognized that these are also the most closely related animals. Now, humans can speak, and apes cannot (Bourke tells the fascinating story of how this was ascertained). Is language the barrier that separates the human and the non-human realms? The deaf and mute do not have a spoken language; it was not until the 1960s that it was realized that sign language is true language with a proper grammar; before, some authors considered the deaf and mute to be "little better than brute beasts." There have been several attempts to teach sign language to apes; the results were inconclusive. In a Franz Kafka story, a captive chimpanzee "sprang into the community of human beings" by saying "Hello!" The story may have deep metaphorical meaning, but it cannot be literally true.
In the 1801 novel The Dog of Knowledge; or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier, the pseudonymous memoirist is taken to Jamaica, where he meets slaves, and witnesses them whipped and worked to exhaustion. Bob is happy that he was "born a dog, and not a Negro, as these poor creatures are called," and he wonders how creatures that "differ in nothing but in the color of their skin and contour of their face" from the Europeans are treated thus; he concludes that perhaps appearances are deceptive, and the slaves are really "kind of animals, born to subjection, the same as dogs or horses." That slaves were really human was recognized by all, including the proponents of slavery: legally a slave was property, like a donkey, but as soon as a slave was accused of a crime, he was tried as a person. Slavery has been abolished in the name of humanism; yet Bourke claims that the humanist ideal of "an autonomous, willful human subject capable of acting independently in the world" is tied to a particular civilization and culture that may be racist or sexist, and present its own constraints of humanity. I must add that anti-racism and anti-sexism can warp this ideal even more.
It is unfortunate that this work by a British historian does not cite a novel by my favorite British author: in a future totalitarian England, a functionary of the ruling party says that "the proles are not human beings."
November 26, 2013
Ultimately, the profound and thought provoking aspects of this book are too few are far between. Having said that, it offers a good basis for anyone interested in the history of human rights and how the concept of 'being human' is fluid and is best defined as so.
August 1, 2017
A daring book, ample in its scope, surveying the evolving meaning of 'human' (and, by extension, 'animal') over the last few centuries. Rich in historical detail, anecdotes and illustrations, the book is usefully structured around several key themes:
- speaking. Is language 'our' defining ability?
- feeling. Is the capacity to feel (particularly, to suffer) that we should focus on instead? (Slave liberation and female emancipation make interesting case studies, as one strategy in this campaign was to 'animalize' slaves & women - i.e., point to their ongoing pain & suffering, not to their ignored reasoning abilities - in an attempt to improve their condition)
- recognizing. Pretty much any contemporary struggle is framed in terms of rights - how did we come to see the recognition of rights as an essential concept? Can we extend it - say, to Great Apes?
- seeing. Phrenology & physiognomy were standard practice in the 19th century, when it was thought that much could be inferred about a person's character by looking at their facial features. Fast forward to the 21st century, when plastic surgery is presented as the solution to making your outward appearance accord, Dorian-Grey-style, with the *real* you on the inside.
- eating. Does love (for our own kind) decide what *deosn't pass through our stomach?
- 'copying & pasting'. As chimeras move from our myths into our laboratories, we can grow human cells inside animals and graft animal organs into humans - does this implode the whole distinction?
The book is enlightening, but my only reservation is to how far you'd want to push the social constructionist angle. Granted, the distinctions between humans and non-humans are more porous than is generally assumed. It need not follow that all such distinctions can be made & remade according to taste. To take one example, when Facebook increased the number of gender options from 2 to several dozen - where does this process stop? Could we have a world of 7 billion genders, each tailored to the individual? Maybe there is something, after all, to species concepts.
- speaking. Is language 'our' defining ability?
- feeling. Is the capacity to feel (particularly, to suffer) that we should focus on instead? (Slave liberation and female emancipation make interesting case studies, as one strategy in this campaign was to 'animalize' slaves & women - i.e., point to their ongoing pain & suffering, not to their ignored reasoning abilities - in an attempt to improve their condition)
- recognizing. Pretty much any contemporary struggle is framed in terms of rights - how did we come to see the recognition of rights as an essential concept? Can we extend it - say, to Great Apes?
- seeing. Phrenology & physiognomy were standard practice in the 19th century, when it was thought that much could be inferred about a person's character by looking at their facial features. Fast forward to the 21st century, when plastic surgery is presented as the solution to making your outward appearance accord, Dorian-Grey-style, with the *real* you on the inside.
- eating. Does love (for our own kind) decide what *deosn't pass through our stomach?
- 'copying & pasting'. As chimeras move from our myths into our laboratories, we can grow human cells inside animals and graft animal organs into humans - does this implode the whole distinction?
The book is enlightening, but my only reservation is to how far you'd want to push the social constructionist angle. Granted, the distinctions between humans and non-humans are more porous than is generally assumed. It need not follow that all such distinctions can be made & remade according to taste. To take one example, when Facebook increased the number of gender options from 2 to several dozen - where does this process stop? Could we have a world of 7 billion genders, each tailored to the individual? Maybe there is something, after all, to species concepts.
March 21, 2016
I'm giving this book four stars mainly because of the questions it asks but not because of how it's written. Bourke repeats herself quite a bit and insists on an overlay of Derrida I think her book could done without. Still, "What It Means To Be Human' is an excellent example of the sorcerer's apprentice type dilemma facing anyone who wants to demarcate the boundaries of 'human', namely that every one of them is subject to definition. Bourke is very good at showing how this boundaries have shifted over time and what at stake in each of the shifts she locates. I finished this book profoundly unsettled - feeling much more connected my 'fellow' animals - than I was when I started. "What It Means To Be Human" does not so much answer the question that is its title as it does encourage us to keep asking, in the hope that the very unanswerability will bring readers face to face with their own vulnerability as well as that of their fellow earth dwellers.
Want to Read
December 22, 2011Brain Pickings Review: http://bitly.com/uJypbo
Quoted from the book:
The humanist insistence on an autonomous, willful human subject capable of acting independently in the world was based on a very particular type of human. Human civilization had been forged in the image of the male, white, well-off, educated human. Humanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe. It disparaged ‘the woman,’ ‘the subaltern’ and ‘the non-European’ even more than ‘the animal.’ As a result, it is hardly surprising that many of these groups rejected the idea of a universal and straightforward essence of ‘the human’, substituting something much more contingent, outward-facing and complex. To rephrase Simone de Beauvoir’s inspired conclusion about women, one is not born, but made, a human.”
Quoted from the book:
The humanist insistence on an autonomous, willful human subject capable of acting independently in the world was based on a very particular type of human. Human civilization had been forged in the image of the male, white, well-off, educated human. Humanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe. It disparaged ‘the woman,’ ‘the subaltern’ and ‘the non-European’ even more than ‘the animal.’ As a result, it is hardly surprising that many of these groups rejected the idea of a universal and straightforward essence of ‘the human’, substituting something much more contingent, outward-facing and complex. To rephrase Simone de Beauvoir’s inspired conclusion about women, one is not born, but made, a human.”
August 22, 2016
Interesting book that introduces the key issues surrounding the identity of being 'human'. It especially illuminates how the varying definitions of 'human' are often tied to complex power relations - between men and women, human and animal, the civilised man and the savage etc. My gripe is that at times the book goes down a seeming ramble as it tries to bring in as many historical/anthropological perspectives as possible, which though interesting, at times detracts from the focus. Would have preferred it if the chapters were more targeted in terms of building and critiquing arguments, which I thought came across very nicely in "Animal Rights And 'Speciesism'".
The writer's conclusion regarding 'negative zoelogy' is interesting and potentially very complex and nuanced - I just wished she spent more time exploring this in relation to all the issues discussed before.
The writer's conclusion regarding 'negative zoelogy' is interesting and potentially very complex and nuanced - I just wished she spent more time exploring this in relation to all the issues discussed before.
September 22, 2013
This is indeed a fascinating, thought-provoking book that requires determination for one to come to grips with it; and more importantly, to pursue the answers to many of the questions Bourke raised. It has many useful materials but lacks a coherent structure to put them all together. I gave it three stars because I (subjectively) am not fond of the sprawling nature of the discussions, and further, I would reserve judgment on some of the matters that Bourke passed judgment on. For example, "Men and women who undertook rejuvenation treatments are, literally, selling their souls and debasing their bodies in exchange for eternal - or at least extended - life." p. 349.
Don't get me wrong, but it's quite an interesting read ..
Don't get me wrong, but it's quite an interesting read ..
April 3, 2012
I'm embarrassed to say that I gave up on this title. It was just too depressing to read of women in the 1800's striving to attain the same rights that were allowed animals. This is especially true in the current political clime. It seems as though some of our legislators are championing a real regression of women's rights.
August 21, 2013
Absolutely riveting, and utterly horrifying. Bourke effortlessly blends philosophical, economic and social theory with real life examples that will often turn your stomach. It doesn't make for an uplifting read, but it's certainly an enlightening one.
July 29, 2012
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph... brought this work to my attention and on its merits the book was added to my kindle.
August 29, 2016
Interesting viewpoints.
October 23, 2016
O mais interessante não é explicar o quão nonsense é a divisão homem/animal, mas mostrar como até a humanidade é conferida apenas a uma parcela de seres.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews