Complexity, ‘Nature’ and Social Domination: Towards a Sociology of Species Relations

Abstract

Whilst environmental sociology has been emergent over the past twenty years, our discipline has distinct difficulties grasping non-human life-worlds as properly the subject matter of sociological enquiries. Sociologists continue to write, for example, of the ‘family’ or household as if all household dwellers were human, frustrating those few of us who have undertaken empirical work on interactions between humans and the non-human animals who are so often to be found in the ‘home’. I have been interested in a variety of non-human creatures whose lives are co-constituted with our own, particularly domesticated animals who live with us, labour for us and are eaten by us. Yet in disciplinary terms, the lives of non-human species and scapes are still overwhelmingly absent or enter the scene of the social as a backdrop, a prop, a fantasy, or a rhetorical device. Yet as Donna Haraway (2008) suggests, we constantly meet other species and have histories of entangled (and often ugly) relations with them. We need, in my view, a sociology that understands these relations with non-human ‘natures’ as social and allows for critical perspectives on the power relations of species difference. These social relations with species are also cross-cut, emergent with relations of social difference that have become sociologically recognised, around ethnicity, sexuality, gender, locality, and so on.