Alexander Andrason & Haile Matutu: Reflections on (our research on) human-to-animal communication (in Africa): Anthropocentrism, Posthumanism, and White Crisis

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Alexandar Andrason (Centre for African Studies, UCT) and Haile Matutu (Department of Psychology, UCT)

Paper ►

andrason_matutu_ataya_2024.pdf

Bio:Haile Matutu is a queer researcher based in the Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town. He holds a MA in Psychological Research (University of Cape Town). His interest in the psychology of marginalized subjects, and people who occupy liminal spaces in society, is his attempt at overcoming his own alienation with the world. It also emerges from a desire to understand himself and how those about whom he writes can be understood from their vantage points – being African. He looks to Decolonial Feminism as an approach of humanizing himself and those he does research with. Haile’s current doctoral research looks at how intimate partner violence between men in queer relationships affects their construction(s) of post-violence masculinities. Haile is a co-editor of a Special Issue on ‘Unsettling Knowledge Production on Gendered & Sexual Violence’ for the Journal of Social and Health Sciences. He aspires to be a feminist and to live in the moment.

Alexander Andrason is a homo-anarchist based in the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He holds a PhD in Semitic Languages from the University Complutense in Madrid (Spain), a PhD in African Languages from Stellenbosch University (South Africa), and a PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Iceland. The scope of his research includes linguistics, cognitive science, complexity theory, anthropology and anthrozoology, pedagogy, and philosophy. He speaks some thirty living languages and has an extensive knowledge of various ancient or classical languages. He has published more than 170 articles, edited several special journal issues, and authored a number of grammars and language books. He is currently directing a cluster of research projects dedicated to human-to-animal communication and “peripheral” linguistic phenomena in languages spoken across the African continent.

Topic: The present article is dedicated to (research on) one aspect of human-to-animal communication, namely, the category of conative animal calls (CACs) or: lexicalized constructions bestowed with phonic substance that are addressed to non-human animal species, entertain a directive function and, apart from functioning as words, can be used as self-standing non-elliptical utterances. The authors review the history of CAC scholarship and contextualize it within the Zeitgeists, philosophies, and intellectual currents of the relevant epochs. The authors argue that the historical marginalization of CACs in linguistics is related to the anthropocentrism of the 20th century while the recent growth of CAC studies reflects the posthumanism that has flourished in the 21st century. Despite the benefits offered by the current posthumanist context visible in the explosion of research on CACs – as well as the increased plasticity of the concept of language and the expansion of the linguistic field by several phenomena formerly marginalized or excluded from it (to all of which CAC studies have substantially contributed) – the authors problematize this shift in posthumanism-infused CAC linguistics. That is, when evaluated from an African perspective and through a decolonial lens, the posthumanism underlying the surge in scholarly interest in CACs seems to be yet another manifestation of Whiteness and a reaction to ‘White crisis’.
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