Beyond Personhood: New Ways to Imagine Our Solidarity with Animals

Since the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Native Americans first taught it to Irving Hallowell in the mid-20th century, the concept of animals as “persons like us” has fired the imaginations of both animal studies scholars and animal advocates. As philosopher Matthew Calarco has persuasively framed it, thinking of animals as the same as humans can help us get past speciesist views of other animals as somehow “less than” human animals. Yet as Calarco himself acknowledges, personhood has its limits. For example, students often point out to us in class discussion that personhood still has anthropocentric aspects, since it involves comparing other animals’ traits to those of human animals, which (wrongly) suggests that humanity should be the gold standard to which all sentient beings should aspire. How, then, might we (re)conceive of animals in ways that bring us closer to them, rather than the other way around?