Donna Haraway is an American scholar of science and feminist thinker whose Companion Species Manifesto (2003) argues that dogs and people have made each other, in their bodies and in their histories, over thousands of years of living together, and that such relationships must be met with respect for the other’s difference, never by treating a dog as a furry child. She widened the idea to all the species humans live entangled with and, later, to “making kin” beyond the human. Therapeutic Shamanism shares her rejection of human supremacy and her sense that relationships with other beings are real, and sees domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this itself very differently.
Who is Donna Haraway? #
A biologist by training who became one of the best-known thinkers about science, nature and gender. Born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado, she studied zoology and philosophy at Colorado College and took her doctorate at Yale. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book Primate Visions (1989) showed how human assumptions about ourselves are reflected in the science of animals, and her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” took the cyborg, a hybrid of organism and machine, as an ironic figure for how far the old boundaries between human, animal and machine had blurred, suggesting that we are less purely human than we think.1 Her later work turned from machines to animals, in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), When Species Meet (2008) and Staying with the Trouble (2016).2
What are companion species? #
Species whose lives have been made together. The heart of the manifesto is dogs and people, partners through the long story of coevolution in which each has shaped the other: dogs changed as they lived alongside humans, and human ways of life changed in association with dogs. Neither came first, ready-made, and then met the other. “There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one.”3 The idea is wider than pets. Rice, bees, tulips and the bacteria in our guts are companion species too, and so, in When Species Meet, are wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms and whales wearing video cameras, as well as designer pets, laboratory animals and therapy dogs: beings “who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion”.4
Much of her thinking came out of the dog sport of agility, which she took up with her dogs Cayenne and Roland. Her name for the relationship is “significant otherness”: real connection in which the other stays truly other. Training, at its best, is a two-way conversation in which each learns to notice who the other is and what they are saying.3
Why does she say a dog is not a furry child? #
Because loving a dog as a child, or as a source of unconditional love, puts the human at the centre. She holds that both of these common beliefs are mistakes and even abusive, to dogs and to humans: “To regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children”, and, she adds, it sets up children to be bitten and dogs to be killed.5 Dogs are not a projection of their owners’ feelings, nor a means to anyone’s ends. They are dogs, in a relationship with humans that is not always nice, and respecting them means paying attention to what a dog actually is, needs and is telling us.5
What does “making kin” mean? #
Widening kinship beyond family and beyond species. In Staying with the Trouble and an essay of 2015 she urges people to make kin with other humans and other beings in a damaged world, and gives the slogan “make kin, not babies!”.6 The slogan has drawn criticism. Some hear neo-imperialism, misogyny and racism in its “not babies” half, as she acknowledged in the essay itself, and Nikolas Mattheis, writing in the journal Childhood, argues that it risks leaving children out of the kinship it hopes to build. Her own answer, in the same essay, is that both halves of the slogan are hard, and that “make kin” is no easier or firmer ground than “not babies”.67
What do critics say about her view of animals? #
Some animal-rights writers think she is too easy on how humans use animals. Zipporah Weisberg, writing in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, argues that the account of animals in Haraway’s When Species Meet provides cover for animal experiments, dog breeding and training, and killing animals for food, and the writer Carol Adams has made a similar case about the manifesto.8 Others read her differently. Kuura Irni, writing in the journal Redescriptions, argues that her target was dogmatism, not veganism or animal rights as such, and Haraway herself later said of her earlier understanding of veganism, “I was really not getting it!”8
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in the target. Haraway writes against human exceptionalism; Therapeutic Shamanism calls it the myth of human supremacy, the indoctrination into believing that life is a hierarchy with humans superior and at the top.9 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Second, in taking relationships with animals seriously. The bonds people form with the animals they share their lives with can be every bit as deep as their bonds with other humans, sometimes more so.10 An individual animal a person knows and works with, a beloved dog, cat or horse, is correctly called a familiar, and familiars can be real companions in shamanic work.11
Third, in refusing a picture of nature as all harmony. Haraway does not present companion species as a picture of harmony: the relationship of dogs and humans, in her account, is not always nice, and companions meet over a shared meal with some indigestion.1213 In the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, too, nature is red in tooth and claw, a place of cooperation in places but also of things eating other things; to an individual tiger a human is still prey.14 See What is kinship, and why do animists extend it beyond humans?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over domestication. Haraway questions the line between wild and domestic and sees the long partnership of dogs and humans as companionship to be lived well.15 Therapeutic Shamanism places domestication at the start of the break from animism. With farming, humans began changing other animals and plants to suit our own ends, until some were far removed from their wild ancestors, and the species domesticated most of all was ourselves.16 Corgis and bulldogs are visibly different from their wild forebears, and humans have been changed too, less visibly.17 Humans are often proud of what domestication achieved, and it has also come at a cost.18 See What does domestication do to us?
So the two differ on where the deepest relationship is found. For Haraway it is in face-to-face life with real animals. In shamanism a familiar is a middle-world being with limitations, as the human is, while the Animal OversoulsOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, where there are no domesticated animals at all, are of a totally different league.1920 Neither looks for a way back to untouched nature. Haraway’s world is one of dogs, laboratories and machines; and in Therapeutic Shamanism a mass return to hunting and gathering is not possible for us either, so shamanism has to be adapted to the times we live in and find a way forward.18
