Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation

by Steve Baker

From Mickey Mouse to the teddy bear, from the Republican elephant to the use of "jackass" as an all-purpose insult, images of animals play a central role in politics, entertainment, and social interactions. In this penetrating look at how Western culture pictures the beast, Steve Baker examines how such images--sometimes affectionate, sometimes derogatory, always distorting--affect how real animals are perceived and treated.

Baker provides an animated discussion of how animals enter into the iconography of power through wartime depictions of the enemy, political cartoons, and sports symbolism. He examines a phenomenon he calls the "disnification" of animals, meaning a reduction of the animal to the trivial and stupid, and shows how books featuring talking animals underscore human superiority. He also discusses how his findings might inform the strategies of animal rights advocates seeking to call public attention to animal suffering and abuse. Until animals are extricated from the baggage of imposed images, Baker maintains, neither they nor their predicaments can be clearly seen.

For this edition, Baker provides a new introduction, specifically addressing an American audience, that touches on such topics as the Cow Parade, animal imagery in the presidential race, and animatronic animals in recent films.
 
 

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1992

Reviews

[Darya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Цікава розвідка про те, як репрезентації тварин використовуються в (здебільшого популярній) культурі на позначення чогось про людське суспільство.
Прочитала всякі передмови і теоретичне обґрунтування - можливо, згодом візьму паперову копію і прочитаю решту.
Зараз, звісно, вже дещо читається як "продукт свого часу" (початок 1990-х): і в апелювання до постструктуралістської антропології, і в тому, що відтоді environmental humanities уже більш-менш стабільно про такі речі говорять.

[Michelle Taylor]

The argument of Baker’s contemporary culture study is simple but indispensable: we cannot neglect the overabundance of animal images in popular culture, because those images have very real effects on the way we conceive of and treat living animals. He analyzes twentieth-century images from Britain and the US, from WWI recruitment posters to 1990s tabloids, to draw a range of conclusions based on the following insight: any historical meanings an animal image may have are entirely subordinate to the general public’s ideas about the image at the time it is employed. The animal image is often prepackaged and thus swept into the realm of the commonsense, where the real, the representational, and the symbolic are all mixed up. This explains how strongly contradictory attitudes towards animals survive—for example, when a newspaper headline “Sex beast caged” is juxtaposed with a heartwarming story about a dog saving his master, with no hint of irony. Baker closes by focusing on useful strategies for animal rights activists, suggesting that they work within the “Disnification” of popular culture to counteract and change damaging visual representations of animals.
One of the most compelling conclusions Baker draws focuses on the role of animals in political cartoons. He claims that metonymic representations of animals rely on “familiar proximity,” while metaphoric ones rely on “connotations of distance and otherness” (86). Thus: “Where animal imagery is used to make statements about human identity, metonymic representations of selfhood will typically take the theriomorphic form [in which one takes the form of a beast], whereas metaphoric representations of otherness will typically take therianthropic form [in which one has the form of a beast combined with the human form]. In other words we tend to represent ourselves as wholly animal, but our others as only half-animal” (108). Baker suggests that it is Western culture’s acceptance of the classification system in Leviticus that makes half-animal images so disturbing. I suspect that this distinction between theriomorphic and therianthropic could have some bearing on animal similes versus metaphors in literature.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with his book The Postmodern Animal, this precursor text is full of scintillating and original analyses of the representation of animals in art, entertainment, politics, and propaganda. The chapters on "the rhetoric of animality" and the "iconography of power" were fascinating, but the chapter on "unraveling the animal system" was the real eye-opener regarding the representation of animals in western culture.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book that features a chapter on "animals taking revenge on Thatcherism" knows the way to my heart.

[Hayley · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't actually finish. really liked the idea of this book but just couldn't understand it!