MAKE UP RESPONSE FOR AGABEN

Agaben is a very dense reading in that the chapters deal with many different issues and animals alike. The main concept Agaben addresses is the cognitive experience we have between man and animal. My question is, has the relationship between man and animal changed or has animal taught something about man verses what scientists haven't already answered?

MAKE UP RESPONSE FOR JOHN BERGER

There are many ways to describe how animals symbolize our society today. Zodiac signs, domesticated animals, symbolism, learning purposes (the zoo), transportation are just a few examples as to how we see animals. But why do we really look at animals in different ways? Are we fascinated by them, as they are by us?

John Berger explains, “What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet, the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them” (Berger 9).

I will agree with Berger in this sense that animals can teach us many knew things. As the old cliché, “a dog is a man’s best friend”, suits well. We should look at animals and what they have done for us and in turn have domesticated them to help us as well. Berger also explains that animals lack human language, which in turn is ethnocentric. I could see where Berger would draw this conclusion in that animals can not physically speak to us; they use sound.

My question to Berger is how does communicating and understanding animals become second nature as if we treat them as our own? Does our communication help us as human communicate and understand them better?

FASSIN response.

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for a wonderful class experience.  I learned a lot from all of you.  Merci beaucoup.

For my last post I would like to focus on Didier Fassin’s article “Humanitarianism and the Politics of Life”.  As we discussed in class last Wednesday, Fassin brings up issues that seem to run counter to the common conception of humanitarian aid.  Briefly, I’ll list the “triple problematic of the humanitarian politic of life” discussed by Fassin:  First, it segregates lives that have the convenience of being risked (aid worker) from those that are to be sacrificed (civilian populations in battle zones).  Second, it separates lives within the organizations into lives deserving high protection (expatriates) and those whose lives are treated with limited protection (host country national staff). Third, it separates between “lives that can be narrated in the first person (expatriate) and lives that are recounted only in the third person (those who are being ‘helped)”.  

It is the third point that I want to focus on.  Part of the humanitarian mission is to witness and recount the atrocities of violence and catastrophe.  This practice brings an interesting problem to light as Fassin has explained.  The intervening individual is the one who tells the story to those who will listen.  This always leaves the victim, whose story it is, to remain voiceless. Third person testimonies are what the populations of ‘developed’ nations hear.  Here’s what Fassin has to say about that:  “[R]equirements of defending cause and the logic of their (the aid worker) intervention lead them to what might be termed a humanitarian reduction of the victim.”

This is something I have experienced first hand, and may have been guilty of doing as well (however, my experiences are not as "life or death" as many of the MSF volunteers) In aid organizations there is an occasional smothering pressure for results (number of women and children participating in a training, number of individuals effected by a certain project).  All needs to be documented and submitted to the HQ who in turn send the documentation to Washington, who then decide whether the mission is successful or not, whether there needs to be more or less people involved (affecting the staff – both expats and national), whether budgets need to be cut, etc.  Upper management is constantly encouraging people to do more, yet it often comes across as an emphasis on results on paper, rather than true results.  Those who do well are rewarded, those you have low numbers are reprimanded.  The result is skewed numbers, exaggerated stories and a “humanitarian reduction of the victim”.