Nina Zhuoran Wang November 18, 2018
Sika Deer in Miyajima, Japan. Illustration by Author.
Desire for Control: Frictions in Human-Animal Landscapes “Animals have a past, a story, a biography… Each is a unique somebody, not a disposable something. Think of the many implications: animals have mothers and fathers, often siblings, friendships, a childhood, youth, maturity.” - Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Humans have always modified the natural environment for our survival, comfort, convenience, and overall benefit. From the works of Plato to Kant, Western philosophy has largely justified human exceptionalism with rationality as the defining difference. This is self-serving bias is deeply ingrained into our way of life and way of thinking in the pervasive eurocentric domination of ‘subhuman’ species and nature as a resource. These human acts of control on the fauna landscape (including culling, exiling, importing, segregating, domesticating, preserving, containing, restraining, modifying, and more) has historically resulted in unforeseen and often detrimental results. The normative understanding of non-human species sort animals into mutually exclusive categories, whether they are perceived as natural or cultural, wild or domesticated, useful or destructive. These rigid generalizations make it difficult for us to understand beings which exist between the gaps of these
constructed binaries. The abstraction dismisses the varied narratives that exist between species, social groups, and individual animals, erase the important distinctions of individuality and identity, and ignore the interconnectivity between all living things. This thesis aims to challenge these preconceived and deep-rooted ideas by bring to light contextual nuances, multiple subjectivities, and individual identities, through the examination of granular, microscale interactions between human and non-human inhabitants. The thesis aims to communicate these findings using graphic stories and narrative writing as storytelling devices to evoke emotional connections - empathy, curiosity, imagination - and a deeper understanding of the subject matter in the reader. In doing this, we can begin to decolonize the way in which we negotiate with nature and non-human beings, and offer insights as to how we can design or occupy our shared environment to be more habitable and empathetic to all.