Dogs, Hallucinogens, and the Extremes of Critical Animal Studies

As a master’s student who organizes my work around the burgeoning field of critical animal studies (CAS), I find it can be difficult to concisely answer the common question: “What do you research?” Part of this difficulty stems from the inherently inter-disciplinary nature of CAS. I first encountered the field through the fiction of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, and from there I discovered a wide variety of angles from which this “question of the animal” is posed. But despite its seemingly nebulous construction, all works in CAS tend to follow a fundamental principle: to better understand animals, we must drop our assumptions and preconceptions of both animal life and human life.

This step back from human-animal distinctions – which are so heavily inscribed in our thinking – places anthropology and ethnography in a strange relation to CAS. As disciplines explicitly focused on the human as an object of study, anthropological and ethnographic work has a tendency to either ignore or devalue the significance of non-human life. Eduardo Kohn, professor of anthropology at McGill University, aims to challenge this disciplinary tension, and his article “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement” provocatively lays out his project.

From the very beginning, Kohn is keenly aware of the need for anthropology to move past a bounded and restricted view of human life. Humans, especially those indigenous groups often taken as the object of ethnographic study, constantly interact with non-human forms of life. For Kohn, these human-animal relations cannot be properly understood within the limited anthropocentric framework that conventional anthropology offers. But how can we open new ways of thinking about these relations?

This is a question shared by almost everyone who works in CAS. Kohn’s strategy rests in a rethinking of our understanding of semiosis and sign systems. Unlike conventional humanist doctrines, Kohn argues that “semiosis is always embodied in some way or another, and it is always entangled, to a greater or lesser degree, with material processes” (2007: 5). In other words, instead of affording humans alone the power to communicate through representation, Kohn opens up semiotic processes to all life forms. But not all life forms communicate in the same way.

Taking his cue from Piercean semiotics, Kohn distinguishes between iconic, indexical, and symbolic sign processes (2007: 5-6). Symbolic sign processes refer to a uniquely human ability: to represent simple or complex concepts by virtue of an arbitrary signifier (i.e. language). On the contrary, iconic processes physically resemble what they represent, while indexical processes hold a contingent relation to the object. All this is to say that, according to Kohn, all life can be figured as semiotic in both iconic and indexical ways, but only human life is capable of symbolic sign processes. His example is a single-cell organism with cilia (2007: 6). The cilia’s adaptive function is its ability to help the organism move through fluid mediums. Kohn argues that this adaptation becomes a “sign vehicle” insofar as the cilia stands as a material attribute which points to a beneficial function, and in turn this attribute is successfully picked up by subsequent generations (2006: 6).

But even if we accept Kohn’s argument that all life is fundamentally semiotic, we’re still lost as to how it influences human-animal relation. I can hardly be pressed to concern myself with how a paramecium “comunicates;” however, Kohn sets up this model for further application. With his semiotic theory of life in mind, Kohn investigates the relations between the Runa people of the Amazon and the semi-wild dogs they share their lives with.

The remainder of Kohn’s paper deals with a number of fascinating and unique interactions between the Runa and their dogs, and always in a thick ethnographic description that vividly portrays the situations as they occur. I’ll spend the rest of this post discussing what I found to be the most interesting and simultaneously troubling account: how the Runa “give advice” to their dogs.

Before describing this distinctive practice, Kohn details the Runa worldview. For the Runa people, nonhuman animals are selves in the same way humans are. That is, nonhuman animals have perspectives and view the world from a subjective and singular vantage point (2007: 7). Nevertheless, the Runa maintain an ontological hierarchy among beings, such that humans are ontologically superior and can therefore understand the perspectives and vocalizations of nonhuman animals, but not vice versa (2007: 13). This one-way direction is important, since it also maps onto Kohn’s model of semiotic life processes.

An upshot of this ontological hierarchy is that humans can therefore communicate with beings lower on the scale if said beings can be temporarily raised to a position of understanding. This fact can be seen outside of human-animal relations, Kohn points out, when the Runa “ingest hallucinogens, especially ayahuasca” in order to speak to the spirit masters, who are the most ontologically superior beings (2007: 13). Yet within human-animal relations, or more specifically human-dog relations, this practice reoccurs.

Kohn explains that should a dog begin to act out or behave improperly (e.g. bite humans, refuse to hunt game, etc.), the Runa “give advice” to the dog (2007: 9). But since the dog cannot comprehend human language, they must ingest a mixture of substances with hallucinogenic properties called tsita (2007: 9). By administering the tsita, the Runa “make their dogs into shamans so that they can traverse the ontological boundaries that separate them from humans” (2007: 13). It should be noted that this process is forced, as the dog’s snout is tied shut and its limbs hog-tied, the tsita poured down its nostrils (2007: 13). During this process, the Runa repeat instructions related to the specific ways the dog misbehaved, and Kohn notes that the grammatical formations employed are radically simplified into what he calls a “transspecies pidgin” (2007: 14). Once again, Kohn makes the connection between the specifically Runa human-animal relations and the continuity of semiotic processes in all life forms.

This practice of “giving advice” to dogs struck me for countless reasons. Primarily, I was troubled by the way in which this incredibly idiosyncratic human-animal interaction stands in the face of so many core postulates and developments in CAS. For example, the idea that nonhuman animals remain unknowable others directly conflicts with the Runa’s belief in transspecies communication. Moreover, Kohn posits potential ways in which Runa-dog relations reflect a sort of colonial and postcolonial logic felt by the Runa people (2007: 14). This insight opens up a slew of ethical questions, apart from the ethical ambiguity of the Runa practice itself.

At the very least, Kohn’s look at transspecies engagement among the Runa people should force us to take pause and consider the necessity to confront human-animal relations in anthropology. Even further though, the Runa-dog relations Kohn describes should cause us to self-reflect on our own ways of interacting with nonhuman life.

Works Cited

Kohn, Eduardo

2007, “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement”. American Ethnologist 34.1 Univeristy of California Press