and used according to particular, legitimized
codes.
As the ‘empire comes home’ in the form of
international migration to the west, ‘out-of-
place’ animal practices risk being interpreted as
trangressions of the human–animal divide.
Wolch and her co-workers investigated attitudes
toward animals among women of diverse
racial/ethnic and cultural background living in
central Los Angeles, and particularly explored
racialization based on animal practice (such as
shopping at live animal markets; see Figure 9.3).
For example, African American study partici-
pants segmented the animal world into three cat-
egories: ‘food’, ‘pet’ and ‘wildlife’ (Wolch et al.,
2000). ‘Food’ animals were simply necessary for
survival; people had to distance themselves from
their unfortunate fate. Pets and wild animals, in
contrast, demanded compassion. Participants
argued that people should help wildlife in dis-
tress, just as people should help each other
regardless of colour, hinting at their solidarity
with animals as brethren due to their outsider
status. A willingness to tolerate dog eating
among South East Asian immigrants, however,
reflected their own experience as a marginalized
group in American society, and their sensitivityto racialization based on colour and culture. Dog
eating in the Philippines is tied to both tradition
and economics, its prevalence varying by class
and region (Griffith et al., 2003). Although dog
eating is not common among US Filipinos, asso-
ciations of dog eating with Filipinos appeared to
exacerbate Anglo racial intolerance. Like the
African American women, the Filipinas hesitated
to condemn other groups whose animal practices,
while alien or distasteful, were rooted in their
particular culture, instead adopting a position of
cultural relativism.
Stimulating new considerations of human as
well as animal representations and identities, crit-
ical race and postcolonial theorists highlighted
connections between race and representations of
‘animality’ while feminists and others working
on sexuality and the body emphasized the impor-
tance of animals in body part coding. Stallybrass
and White’s (1986) discussion of Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair, for example, revealed how
non-human and human animal bodies were mutu-
ally inscribed. Similarly, animalswere identified
as the ‘absent referent’ in the racialization and
brutalization of others, borrowing from and con-
tributing to postcolonial theory (Adams, 1990;
Spiegel, 1988). Animal geographers expanded on
these insights, focusing on animals’ role in the
formation of heterogeneous identities –individual
and collective – that people adopt or have
ascribed to them. These identities may be linked
to particular eras, places and nations, and to
racial/ethnic, cultural or gendered identities.
Anderson (1995), for example, developed a
cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that
inscribes various human strategies for domesti-
cating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the
animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide,
South Australia, she charted the mutable discur-
sive frames and practices through which animals
were fashioned and delivered to the South
Australian public by the Royal Zoological
Society of South Australia. Through their con-
structions of nature and animals, zoo practices
consolidated and legitimated Australian colonial
identity, naturalized colonial rule and oppression
of indigenous peoples, and reinforced gendered
and racialized underpinnings of ‘human’ bound-
ary-making practices in relation to ‘non-human’
animals. Ryan (2000) similarly showed how big
game hunting and photography in Africa by
British colonialists reinforced and consolidated
British imperialism, empire and masculinity.
Also connecting animal representations to con-
structions of human masculinity in processes of
place domination, Emel (1995) wrote about
nineteenth – and twentieth – century wolf eradi-
cation efforts in the American West (Figure 9.4).190 CULTURENATURESFigure 9.3 Live animal market in LA’s Chinatown
(photo credit: Marcie Griffith)3029-ch09.qxd 03-10-02 10:48 AM Page 190