Towards Non-Anthropocentric Histories, Essay Example

To a certain extent historical writing ultimately entails a question of why certain historical events occurred as they did; in this regard, one sees the necessity for a break from the reduction of historiography to merely a collective of prima facie »objective facts« towards the advancement of a discourse that can be considered as a certain form of re-construction. Different histories thus emerge according to how this technique of re-construction is performed and enacted. Placed within this methodological context, Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 immediately struck me as a piece of history that strives to emphasize a non-anthropocentric perspective upon past events, such that the author moves away from the equation of history with individual figures and their thoughts and actions towards an underlying interaction of human and non-human actors that engender events. Fenn intimates this overall strategy at the outset of her treatise: “By the time the pestilence was over, it had reshaped human destinies across the continent.”[1] I feel that Fenn’s diction here is especially compelling: the evocation of the term destiny suggests a notion of inevitability corresponding to a classical conception of fate. Yet Fenn immediately subverts this inevitability in two manners: firstly, she suggests that destines can be re-shaped and thus critiques the notion of historically inexorable teleology’s; secondly, human destinies are re-shaped by non-human forces. Fenn’s text thereby posits a certain de-centering of the human position within the very context of human histories.

From a greater theoretical perspective, we can therefore understand Fenn’s initial approach as a post-Enlightenment and perhaps (depending on how we define the term) post-modern history: Fenn displaces the notion of an illusory subjectivity that is effectively isolated from the world while remaining at the same time the world’s foundation by carefully making rational decisions that determine the trajectory of historical events. Rather, the author prefers to articulate history from the perspective that includes the radical exteriority to this subjectivity. This takes the form of a non-human actors (i.e., the Variola virus) imposing themselves upon and thus affecting what at first glance are purely human histories.

Although Fenn does not cite him in her work, I think that there is a close conceptual parallel to her work with that of the French thinker Bruno Latour. Insofar as Fenn’s history suggests a non-human approach, this led me to turn to the literature in search of other such non-human re-constructions of the social and the historical, a re-construction exemplified in the work of Latour. In brief, Latour’s approach can be understood as emphasizing precisely the role of non-human actors and the so-called “networks” they form as constitutive of the social and thus the historical. As Latour writes, “modernity is often defined in terms of humanism….it overlooks the simultaneous birth of “nonhumanity” – things, or objects, or beasts.”[2] Latour’s project therefore intends to introduce the nonhuman into the human and show how the latter’s isolated development is illusory. It is apparent that this is Fenn’s method. Her desire is to vacate the human histories of their autonomy; she wants to bring to the surface the overlooked elements of what Latour terms “nonhumanity” in order to understand their profound effect. Fenn’s description of the Variola virus that is the center of her narrative lucidly makes this point. She writes: “Variola’s relationship to humankind is both parasitic and paradoxical. To thrive and multiply, the virus has to have a host. But for the host species – unlucky Homo sapiens – Variola is the most unruly of guests….Variola has no animal vector….It is passed only from one human being to another. As a result, Variola’s story is necessarily a story of connections between people.”[3] Whereas it could be argued that Fenn reduces the virus to the necessity of its human host, I think this overlooks the main point: Variola, while needing the human, forms “connections between people” and thus is a radically social phenomenon. This is not to discount the obvious “biological” aspect of the disease; but Fenn is trying to identify the effect of non-human actors in the formation of the social, much like Latour. Kjetil Fallan writes of Latour that he tries to “dismantle what he sees as an artificial divide between the human and the non-human, the social and the technological.”[4] This can be viewed as Fenn’s exact method: a virus is not only to be treated as a “technological” phenomenon, isolated to the scientific realm of, for example, the laboratory, and thus only subject to the manipulations of a technocratic society as it is precisely such technological advances which allow a virus like Variola to be identified as Variola. Rather this virus itself helps shape this technocratic society, such that Variola is radically social because of its influence on social forms. Hence, in regards to the Native Americans, Fenn will list the problems of the “legacy the virus left”[5] as follows: “Were records of Native American life more complete, they might well show significant cultural voids, the loss of generations of unrecoverable knowledge. They would show other changes as well: households combined, kinship alliances annihilated, religious convictions altered or abandoned.”[6] Various epistemological perspectives – the prized subject of knowledge of modernity – are thereby presented by Fenn as having been negated by what Latour terms “nonhumanity.”

In this regard, Fenn’s approach is particularly welcome precisely because it breaks down, as the aforecited Fallan notes, various false dichotomies that may unconsciously structure our approach to historical writing. I think that Fenn favors a history that emphasizes complexity as opposed to simplicity, as we are encouraged to posit the diverse phenomena that constitute a given historical narrative. LaFreniere describes “anthropocentric historiography” as a narrative “which depicts a dynamic humanity on a static earth.”[7] In Fenn’s text what occurs is the infusion of this same dynamism into the static earth of the anthropocentric historiography, thus creating a complex and non-anthropocentric historiography.

Works Cited

Fallan, Kjetil. »An ANT in our pants? A design historian’s reflections on actor network theory.« In Hackney et al. (eds.) Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference of the Design History Society (UK). (Boca Raton, FA: Universal Publishers, 2009), pp. 46-52.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

LaFreniere, Gilbert F. The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview. Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2008.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

[1] Elizabeth A. Fenn. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 4.

[2] Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 12.

[3] E.A. Fenn. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. pp. 5-6.

[4] Kjetil Fallan. »An ANT in our pants? A design historian’s reflections on actor network theory.« In Hackney et al. (eds.) Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference of the Design History Society (UK). (Boca Raton, FA: Universal Publishers, 2009), p. 49.

[5] E.A. Fenn. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, p. 258.

[6] Ibid., p. 258.

[7] Gilbert F. LaFreniere. The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview. (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2008), p. 53.