ABSTRACT
The topic of children and animals sits at the confluence of recent feminist and anticolonial debates, as well as informed by so-called new materialist and posthuman approaches (the status of which are evaluated in Part III). One feature shared by these approaches is that they challenge or even undo the Eurocentric, logocentric binary between humans and animals, even as they highlight the ambiguous position occupied by the child in this. This chapter revisits the legal accountabilities and discretions accorded animals in European courts (that were touched on in Chapter 2) to frame considerations of child–animal relations in terms of how animals have cohabited with humans and incited relations that parallel if not prefigure those with children. Of course, it matters which kind of animal is being considered, as well as which kind of child (with racialised, classed and gendered projections noted as travelling in both directions). Discussion focuses on recent reformulations in the form of the monkey-related imagery associated with children but also the consumer appetite for monkey dolls, which thereby traverses the in/animate binary in part through the affect with which such artefacts are invested. This brings to the fore emotional ambiguities and ambivalences incited by and in relation to both children and their various kinds of proxies – whether animals or dolls. The analysis is informed by Marilyn Strathern’s discussion – rooted in what may seem a rather parochial debate within English anthropology but expanding beyond this. The analytical strategy she identifies in this process topicalises how relations with pets (better designated companion animals) may have prefigured those with children in early England, which are said to structure a peculiarly English, and a peculiarly early version of, individualism underlying the development of racial capitalism.
