Taxonomies

This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons , the human anomaly constituted by law as property . Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal . It all began with chattels. Their treatment helps one to understand the limits of cruelty. They are used as examples when humans need most to categorize, to dominate, and to justify slavery, genocide, and incarceration. The proximity between humans and animals is sometimes tenuous. Boundaries are permeable, and taxonomies are necessary to ensure the order of things. However, when the pressure is on to construct—legally and socially—degradation and inferiority, categories and terminologies get muddled. The hierarchies no longer hold.

Categorization · Cruelty · Epistemology · Human rights · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Property (philosophy) · Torture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy