Requiem for a chicken

When I moved into my new living situation a couple months ago I was taking a calculated risk that I could prevent either of my two dogs from killing the three free ranging chickens on the premise. For two months that peace held, and sadly last week someone--I strongly suspect one of my dogs, but there is room for reasonable doubt--killed Fraulein Schnitzel, one of the last two surviving chickens (another one disappeared a week before) of the original half dozen or so that other dogs/coyotes/etc had winnowed down. While it was not unheard of for a dog to kill one of the chickens on the property, it was still particularly sad to see Schnitzel go as she was a remarkable chicken. She had what I can only describe as a crown growing up from her head, and she was uncommonly fond of interacting with humans. She was also very loud so her absence is noticeable.

I don't bring this up as a kind of "he was a good dog" speech. Since it was my dog that probably did the deed, and Schnitzel was the favorite chicken of our property owner, I figured burying her was the least I could. This was much harder than I had expected. The soil is completely dry. In the first place I dug there was a 2x6 buried a foot down, a nice surprise. In the second hole there was a root about two inches in diameter. It was hot as hell to boot: we're not far from the wildfires in the Santa Cruz mountains making national news. When I was done I was drenched in sweat, my back hurt, and I had two blisters filling with blood and a spot on my thumb where the skin was just floating. Such are the infirmities of the scholar. But I did feel accomplished, and somewhat reconciled to the death of Schnitzel.

Now in a way, there is no need for this complicated economy of reconciliation to the dead, "mourning" as we call it. Nothing can change the facticity of death, nor did I share a very rich emotional world with Schnitzel relative to that I have with some humans, dogs, and cats. Schnitzel's owner eats other chickens so its not like this was the transgression of categorical imperative. (She was, for the record, upset but understanding). I didn't do anything bad here (my dog had snuck out unbeknownst to me) and there was no expectation of penance or punishment. Death is a kind of non-event , but its peculiarity as such seems to make even more of an event. But it doesn't seem to be a kind of event that humans have any monopoly over, either as mourned or mourners. I see a warped vision concerning the anthropology of mourning, where a ritual that exists among humans is studied as such, and in the process taken to pertain especially to humans: that because knowledge of mourning contributes to anthropology, there is an actual anthropos being excavated in the process. (Incidentally, Heidegger makes this same point with regard to scientific research building up its unacknowledged worldview in "The Age of the World Picture." I hope I didn't offend any Heideggerians with my casual characterization of death as anti-event.)

Rather, mourning seems to open up all of those boundaries that construct the nonanimal human. One acts or feels as if one has wronged the dead, or as per Freud imagines that one has caused his or her death, knowing that one is likely not at fault in any socially rigorous sense--and even if one is, the slate has been cleared. Mourning puts the affective dimension of ethics in flux, while foregrounding this element at the discount of the rational form of ethics. Hence we read from religious books, or stories, or poems--"Do not go gentle into that good night"--rather than the second Critique. Thus mourning also makes one "mad," temporarily outside of social mores. One might hurt oneself or do something crazy under the excusatory power of grief.

While this can be seen as the token of mourning's exceptionality, its role in erecting 20th c anthropology has been anything but marginal. I would turn anthropological wisdom on its head: the ontological and ethical openness therein is the ground floor, or even the basement, on which a climbing and ultimately teetering "humanity" rests. If notions of the human, of our destiny as a species, are in question, what makes sense isn't an increase in buttressing that makes for a more spectacular disaster down the road but a (re)turn to what structural anthropology could have shown had it conceived of itself as comparative ethology instead.