On the specific existence of animal culture

While the thought of animal culture is readily accepted in the environmental humanities and in posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism, this paper seeks to re-examine this acceptance in view of the ambivalence of that concept’s institutional and intellectual origins. For the critical affirmation of animal culture presents as a curious historical object when viewed from the perspective of the late twentieth-century literary-theoretical interrogation of Enlightenment concepts of culture. Approaching the “animal culture” concept as itself a problem, then, this paper considers the potential limits and possibilities of that concept by assessing it from a decidedly poststructuralist perspective. The discussion begins with a genealogical review of “animal culture” in terms of its status as a discourse steeped in an anthropological intellectual heritage, highlighting the potential for characterisations of animal culture to reactivate anthropocentric values or presuppositions. This problematisation is followed by a speculation on what the critical and poststructuralist interrogation of “culture” might still have to offer to (environmental) humanities reflections on animal culture and ecological life more generally. To this end, the discussion reconceives animal culture as constituted and dispersed within a field of eco-institutional forces, pointing towards an institutionality of ecological life before the effects of anthropogenic environmental transformation.