Profile

 

Published in ISAZ (International Society for Anthrozoology) Newsletter, Nov. 2003, p. 8-9.

 

I first became interested in animals around the end of the 1980’s, not terribly long after I had obtained my Ph.D. in German and intellectual history. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even the study of literature. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.

 

Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Around 1995, I founded Nature in

Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. It was initially a rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among attendees but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call “the real world.”

 

From fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997), a study of animal bride tales from around the world. This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in theThird Reich (2000), and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002). My most recent book is a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003).

 

When I embarked on the study of animals in myth and literature, even graduate students in the field did not have to mention a few dozen books just to show that they had read them. In barely more than a couple of decades, the literature on human-animal relations has grown enormously in both quantity and sophistication. NILAS, I am proud to say, has become a well established organization, which has sponsored two highly successful conferences together with ISAZ.

 

But as the study of animals, what I like to call “totemic literature,” becomes more of a standard feature of academic programs, I fear that something may be lost. It is now just a little too easy to discourse about the “social construction” and the “transgression” of “boundaries” between animals and human beings. Even as I admire the subtlety of such analysis, I sometimes find myself thinking, “So what?”

 

Having been there close to the beginning, part of my role is now to preserve some the sensuous immediacy that filled the study of animals in literature when that was still a novelty. That poetry is not simply a luxury in our intellectual pursuits. With such developments as cloning, genetic engineering, and the massive destruction of natural habitats, we face crises so unprecedented that traditional philosophies, from utilitarianism to deep ecology, can offer us precious little guidance. The possibilities are so overwhelming, that we hardly even know what questions to ask. But neither, I am sure, did the fugitive who once encountered a mermaid in the middle of the woods.

 

Boria Sax