Why Look at Animals  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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"Why Look at Animals?" is a chapter in About Looking (1980) by John Berger.

The text is cited by numerous scholars in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, a group that seeks broadly to consider human-animal relations and the cultural construction of terms such as "human", "animal" and so on. Collectively they took Berger's question to mean that scholars are surrounded by animals but often do not actually see them, and that there are good theoretical and ethical reasons to study animals in the humanities. The chapter was later reproduced in a Penguin Great Ideas selection of essays of the same name.

Excerpt

“At first sight, Grandville’s animals [in Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux], dressed up and performing as men and women, appear to belong to the old tradition, whereby a person is portrayed as an animal so as to reveal more clearly an aspect of his or her character. The device was like putting on a mask, but its function was to unmask. The animal represents the apogee of the character trait in question; the lion, absolute courage; the hare, lechery. The animal once lived near the origin of the quality. It was through the animal that the quality first became recognizable. And so the animal lends it his name.

But as one goes on looking at Grandville's engravings, one becomes aware that the shock which they convey derives, in fact, from the opposite movement to that which one first assumed. These animals are not being "borrowed" to explain people, nothing is being unmasked; on the contrary. These animals have become prisoners of a human/social situation into which they have been press-ganged. The vulture as landlord is more dreadfully rapacious than he is as a bird. The crocodiles at dinner are greedier at the table than they are in the river. Here animals are not being used as reminders of origin, or as moral metaphors, they are being used en masse to “people” situations.” (John Berger About Looking 18-19)