Genomics Forum blogging team at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2012
Blog by Christine Knight
Blog by Christine Knight
Joanna
Bourke and Roger Osborne’s Book Festival session explored the authors’ complementary
histories of the human condition: Bourke’s history of how the boundaries of
‘human-ness’ have been defined since the eighteenth century (What it Means to be Human), and
Osborne’s longer-term history of democracy (Of
the People, By the People) – political history and Political history, respectively.
Professor
Bourke opened proceedings with the tale of finding a letter during her
archival research, written in 1872 by ‘An Earnest Englishwoman’ and entitled
‘Are women animals?’. As its author pointed out, women’s legal worth at the
time was less than that of animals. In two court cases, men had received
sentences of only a few months’ hard labour for murdering or severely
assaulting a woman. Yet a man convicted of assault and theft against another
man received a seven-year sentence and forty lashes. The letter argued that
there was something wrong with a society that could produce such verdicts. Forget
suffrage, the letter’s author suggested. Could women be deemed animals in law
at the very least, to provide some guarantee of protection?
What it Means to be
Human traces the history of who has been considered human historically, en
route encountering issues such as animal rights and indeed human rights. In her
talk, Bourke identified various bases on which human-ness has been judged over
the last 300 years, including speech and language; sentience; the face; and
eating practices. She also discussed (most interestingly for the Genomics Forum)
recent scientific challenges to defining the human – for instance, xenotransplantation
(the transplantation of organs across species boundaries). As Bourke pointed
out, it is ‘not a given who is human and who is animal’ – both are
socio-historically constructed.
There was a distinct feminist overtone to proceedings: chair
Ruth Wishart opened the session saying that being human historically has
largely been defined by the phrase ‘I have a penis, therefore I am’. One
wouldn’t have to be a particularly radical feminist to agree, but I still felt
a little sorry for Roger
Osborne following this introduction! Osborne pointed out that our ‘age of
democracy’ is a historical anomaly – historically, democracies are both rare
and short-lived. More importantly I think, and aligning neatly with Bourke’s
social constructivist approach, Osborne noted that our democracies reflect
human qualities, both positive and negative – from greed to love.
Questions covered human rights, imperialism, and gene
therapy (not all at once!), and also returned to animal-human hybrids. Bourke asked
rhetorically whether it would be cannibalism for a person to eat an animal
organ regenerated using human stem cells. The more important question, I think,
is not whether this would be cannibalism but whether it would be right or wrong
– bringing us back to issues of animal rights as well as human ones. But that’s
another book festival session – Rethinking
Food this Wednesday 22 August, with the Genomics Network’s Dr
Neil Stephens.
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