To properly understand what ability means we need to look beyond the human, too.
In this blog post, Dr Andy Flack reflects on his recent open access article in History and Theory – co-authored with fellow Bristol lecturer Dr Alice Would – exploring the history of ability ‘through an animal lens.’
How did you get into thinking about this area?
This article emerged out of my recent AHRC Leadership Fellowship, which brought together environmental history, disability studies and sensory studies for the first time. We looked at animals that live in the dark, and the naturalists (mainly British and north American) that looked for them, and asked how supposedly ‘strange’ and ‘abnormal’ senses were understood between around 1800 and the present day. During our research, this began to raise the question of what naturalists meant when they thought animals were either well-equipped or not to live in their dark worlds. And more than that, we noticed that naturalists and environmentalists had lots to say about environmental change and its impact on the way animals were able to continue living in their worlds. In effect, it seemed that animals were being ‘disabled’ by human changes. As we thought more about this, we realised that to understand that character of this ‘disability’, we had to better understand what people in the past thought it meant to be ‘able’ in the world.
Tell me more about ability beyond the human context?
By looking at a range of dark-dwellers, from bats and hedgehogs to star-nosed moles and deep sea fish and cave-dwellers, we found that the historical idea of ‘ability’ changed over time. Mirroring a medical understanding of the human body, for much of the period naturalists identified ability in the sensory structures of animal bodies, such as the tactile nose of the star-nosed mole, the neurology of the barn owl and the echolocating organs of the bat. Across the period, there emerged an understanding that ability resided in the ways in which specialized bodies interacted with the wider environment, and that environment change could – sometimes fatally – disrupt that ‘harmony’. Early in the twentieth century, it was sometimes seen as the fault of the animal itself in its failure to adapt to modernity. Later, however, there was a sense that for an animal to remain ‘able’, it was the responsibility of people to adapt the environments that we have made so that species can live well together. This has profound implications, because ability today is less often understood as something that resides within some kind of ‘specialised’ body, and more as something that is produced when environments are effectively adapted to the diverse needs of all.
What’s next?
We hope that our article will inspire historians to return to many of the ‘big ideas’ that structure how we think – and have thought – about the world but which often go ‘under the radar of our perception’. We also hope that historians look for the roots of ‘ability’ beyond our context, to test and nuance our findings. Looking well beyond human contexts could offer exciting and urgent ways to do this because we live in a world that is changing fast, and where the adaptation of all beings is going to be imperative. Indeed, we hope that we have shown that to understand either ability or disability, we need to understand both.