ENGAGEMENT AND DETACHMENT IN HUMAN–ANIMAL RELATIONS

Relationship, connection, and engagement have emerged as key values in recent studies of human–animal relations. In this article, I call for a reexamination of the productive aspects of detachment. I trace ethnographically the management of everyday relations between biologists and the Kalahari meerkats they study, and I follow the animals’ transformation as subjects of knowledge and engagement when they become the stars of an internationally popular, televised animal soap opera. I argue that treating detachment and engagement as polar opposites is unhelpful both in this ethnographic case and, more broadly, in anthropological discussions of ethics and knowledge making. [human–animal relations, science, media, ethics, engagement, detachment] S ince the early 1990s, a research project founded by Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, of the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, has focused on the behavior of the meerkat, a small social mongoose living in southern Africa. Meerkats live in groups ranging from fewer than ten to as many as 50 individuals and are among a small minority of mammal societies in which one female monopolizes reproduction: In each group, a dominant female suppresses the reproduction of the other females, who are usually her daughters, in ways that range from actually killing their newborn pups to increasing their stress levels by evicting them from the group when they are pregnant (Clutton-Brock et al. 2001b; Young et al. 2006). One dominant male breeds with the dominant female, and the other males, at breeding age, abscond to visit other groups and do their best to breed with females in those groups (Young et al. 2007). Meerkats spend the night in underground burrows and most of the day foraging for food, primarily, but not exclusively, small invertebrates such as scorpions. Members of the group help feed pups who are not yet old enough to forage for themselves but are old enough to accompany the foraging group (Clutton-Brock et al. 2001a). Any pups that are too young to accompany the group are left at the burrow with one of the subordinate animals (Clutton-Brock et al. 2000). While the animals are foraging, one of them frequently stands guard on its hind legs, propped up by its tail, giving small chirping calls at regular intervals if all is well (Clutton-Brock et al. 1999). Meerkats’ particular way of “socializing” with one another makes them a fantastic test case for biologists asking about the how and why of cooperation, a persistent topic of inquiry for students of animal behavior. For over 16 years, researchers at the Kalahari Meerkat Project (henceforth, KMP), based at a research station in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, has continually monitored the behavior, weights, and life histories of somewhere between 200 and 300 individuals. Although a few Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers are present on-site for periods of three to six months at a time, each pursuing his or her own research, the central database, which includes the detailed life history of the meerkat AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 241–258, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01253.x American Ethnologist Volume 37 Number 2 May 2010 population, is updated on a daily basis by a rolling team of volunteers, most of them recent biology or zoology graduates from U.K. universities who have committed to spending a year in this remote location observing meerkat behavior. But the scientists are not the only ones watching. Propelled to media fame in the mid-1980s by an award-winning BBC documentary presented by David Attenborough, meerkats have remained a regular presence in popular European and U.S. representations of wild animals, featuring, for instance, in Walt Disney’s 1994 cartoon The Lion King (Allers and Minkoff 1994) in the person of Timon, the cheeky sidekick of the lion-cub hero. Banking on this popularity, in 2005, the Discovery Channel International started airing a program entitled Meerkat Manor, which adopted the emergent genre of the animal “docu-soap.” Filmed on the grounds of the KMP, Meerkat Manor followed the adventures of the Whiskers, one of the project’s research groups, with a particular focus on the trials and tribulations of the group’s dominant female, Flower. The use of story lines and characters is an acknowledged feature of many animal documentaries (Pierson 2009), but the docu-soap genre pushed this use to a new level. Meerkat Manor retained some of the classic aims of the animal documentary, such as fostering popular interest in natural history, particularly among a younger audience, and imparting factual information about animals. However, the show also drew explicitly, and quite knowingly, on the style and language of the soap-opera genre, singling out heroes and villains, developing characters through time, making use of cliff-hangers both at the ends of episodes and before advertising breaks, and so on. Most striking, perhaps, in this respect was the show’s temporal span: It managed to draw out the story lines of its chosen cast of meerkat characters over four years and 52 half-hour episodes. Initially aired in Britain and later in the United States, Meerkat Manor garnered a huge fan base and became the subject of numerous blogs and web pages. A Friends of the Kalahari Meerkat Project society was set up through which fans could receive detailed information about their favorite meerkat individuals and groups straight from the research project, in exchange for a yearly fee ranging from £25 (for information on one group) to £250 (for information on all groups): The proceeds contributed to the support of KMP researchers. Friends and fans of the show sometimes wrote directly to the KMP researchers with feedback and questions. Much of this correspondence was cordial and enthusiastic, but some of it conveyed problematic reactions. In particular, some fans, distraught at the death of particular meerkat characters, posted angry comments on the web, and some sent e-mails to the researchers, criticizing them for not intervening to save the animals in question. Following one particularly death-laden episode in series 3, one blogger wrote, Meerkat Manor is one of my favorite shows. But it seems to be getting to sad for me to take lately. The Sept 8th show really did me in, I couldn’t sleep the whole night just thinking about those poor little pups,Len & Squiggy. And what an awful horrific/painful end befell upon poor innocent sweet little “Len” and then 5 days latter his poor little brother “Squiggy” was left all alone,frightened,starving, unprotected, and abandoned,another tragic end. . I realise scientists are there to observe and not interfer with nature, but for Gods sake, you have allready given all these animals names and have shown us,they each have their own personality. I think when times are so tough, and there is no food, the babies are in danger, when some are sooo sick (like poor Carlos) why can’t the scientists show some humnan compashion, and help out these poor little animals? After all isn’t that what seperates the humans from the animals is we have compashion . . . Seems like you doctors of science need to take a lesson from poor Mitch, Daisy, Flower and the others . . . . . . [W. Wardell, September 9, 2007, 3:30 p.m.] In response to the fans’ concerns, a page about meerkat welfare was added to the KMP website, on which researchers explained that, “while we do not interfere to prevent natural mortality, we do our best to ensure that our research on the meerkats never affects them adversely.” More generally, KMP volunteers I spoke to often criticized the excessive attachment of the viewers who wrote in or of the fans who visited the project’s field site through the friends of the KMP society. Some of them blamed the program for giving what they felt was a distorted and overly romanticized image of the animals. The volunteers’ sense of the viewers’ excessive attachment will not have been much allayed by the striking public memorialization that developed around the death of Meerkat Manor characters. In an online version of what Jack Santino (2006) and others have termed “spontaneous shrines,” YouTube became loaded with homemade memorial video offerings to the fallen stars of Meerkat Manor, which recounted the deaths and virtues of the meerkat heroes against images taken from the show and backed by music ranging from a cappella renderings of “Amazing Grace” to heart-rending pop ballads. By comparing and contrasting the entanglement of meerkats with researchers and filmmakers, respectively, in this article I ask about the interplay of detachment and engagement at the heart of interspecies relationalities. Engaging with detachment, detaching from engagement In the past decade, there has been a marked post-symbolic turn in anthropological studies of animals. By 1999, it was still arguably the case that, with a few exceptions, animals featured in anthropological accounts primarily because