Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Tutsis referred to Hutus as “cockroaches.” Jews hiding from Nazis recounted feeling “hunted.” American slaves were routinely named “stock,” as they were sold and purchased. Acts of mass violence have often employed animal imagery to dehumanize victims. While the value of animal life permeates the Judeo-Christian scriptures, there is nonetheless reserved a privileged place for human beings with respect to non-human life. This has resulted in affording animal life a secondary ethical value: animals are to be protected but only inasmuch as human supremacy is maintained. The victims of mass violence have alerted us to how complicit this hierarchy can be in the establishment of the degrading power dynamics of mass violence. This paper is informed by voices of victims. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, poet and activist Aimé Césaire, and the narratives of victims of American slavery and the Holocaust (collected by Beverly Eileen Mitchell) first alert us to the ways animal imagery is used to create a dehumanizing power differential. The seminal work of Carol J. Adams’s, The Sexual Politics of Meat, then reveals the ease with which we elide the value of animal life, while the work of sociologist Leslie Irvine illustrates the ways our self-identities are already entangled in the lives of nonhuman animals. Given that a distorted view of the value of animal life has been too often utilized to facilitate mass violence, this paper concludes by suggesting that a revaluation of animal life can contribute to the prevention of future acts of mass violence.