Written Component 3
Modern society has always regarded morality and controlling one’s own desire as a way to divide the primitive animal instinct. There is a binary opposition between nature and civilization. However, no matter using the history or biology perspective, the contemporary despised animal nature has never left us. According to the Darwinian evolution, even if we learn to use tools and have the wisdom to create civilization, we are still primate mammals. The humans who out of the jungle thought society is an important mechanism to eliminate their naturalness, which caused the unique and noble. In fact, the concept of “nature” is artificially shaped. The shadow of ape ancestors exists in all aspects of our habits. This article will focus on the animalistic similarities people are sharing is through eating behavior.
According to the anthropological book by Desmond Morris, no matter how noble things are, there are basic behavior patterns established in the early ape period (Morris, 1969). Even if the culture has brought us a variety of dining habits, it has an inseparable relationship with the ape at the beginning of the evolution when disassembled the eating behavior. It’s a natural selection over hundred years of heredity which becomes our biological feature. For instance, first, carnivores will eat a lot in a long interval. Most of us have special formal mealtime and only a few cases show eating more than four to five times a day. This is different from the herbivores who eat freely and eat whatever they find and eat in a whole day; Second, the food heating shows the simulate to “temperature of freshly killed prey”. The food seasoning shows the rich taste system as primates have; Third, the preference for sweets engrave in humans gene is since naturally available ripen foods are sweeter (Morris, 1969).
On the other hand, appetite is the instinct of survival. It’s like a newborn baby will have a desire to eat before he knows the world. The consumers in the food chain eat the lower prey following the law of nature. Nevertheless, human society gradually considered eating as a more primitive and basic body demand. Whether in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the body is at the lost level. Or in Foer’s book links eating behavior with shame, he believes that the process of eating animals’ bodies also bears a part of our self wants to reject nature(Foer, 2009). The issue of what to eat and how to eat become linked with morality. Gandhi, a well-known vegetarian, said “the most violent weapon on earth is the table fork.”(Tuttle, 2005). Appetite has become an original sin, and the dining table becomes a butchery place. Physical pursuits are inferior to spiritual pursuits, while Carnivorous is barbaric, violent, and animalistic behavior. In the chain supermarkets of modern society, bloody animal limbs are missing, and bodies are processed, exquisite, and artificially packaged into products. On the contrary, those repressions and exclusion of animality form the basis of anthropocentrism. According to Agamben’s books, he claims post-historical people begin to treat animal nature from concealment to governance and finally become pure abandonment (Agamben, 2004). When humans are not biologically defined species, they exist only through the cessation of animality. Therefore, it’s the animal body of human being which can not get rid of is a remnant of civilization？
The distinction between man and animals produce their self-identity. It bases on the exclusion of primitive, chaotic, and irrational elements of nature. At the same time, it also brings the concepts of “animals are inferior to human beings” and a sense of self-superiority. And I hope that by exposing the original sameness of our eating behavior, we can achieve a universal identity and essence, and produce a kind of value that everyone is the same. When the body regards as an artistic language, it emphasizes nature and eliminates culture (Ravetz, 2005). Use vision to capture the eating body movement, and extract the animality code in the action. When arranged and juxtaposed those fragments by montage method, the differences between individuals are finally eliminated and then creating a unified political value.
Morris, D. (1969) ‘Feeding’, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal. London:Jonathan Cape Ltd, pp. 164-173.
Foer, J. (2009) ‘Shame’, Eating Animals. New York: Hachette Book Group, pp. 20-41. Available at: https://b-ok.cc/book/842089/58d19c (Accessed: 12 May 2021).
Tuttle, W. (2005) The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony. New York: Lantern Books, p 22.
Agamben, G. (2004) ‘Animalization’, in Hamacher, W. (ed.) The Open: Man and Animal. California: Stanford University Press, pp. 5-8., pp. 73-78.
Ravetz, A. (2005) ‘News from Home: Reflections on Fine Art and Anthropology’, in Grimshaw, A. and Ravetz, A. (ed.) Visualizing Anthropology. UK: Intellect Books. pp. 69-80.
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Visual Experiment
How to paying attention to the essence of the body and ignoring the external cultural representation? ：
Bring “disintegration“. Breaks the speculation that the audience normally filling the gap in the traditional montage frames that using the usual logic. The general structure dispelled can turn to focus on more essential connotations. Use randomness as a tool to characterize “disintegration”, use a lot of unusual ways to eat.
This coincides with the viewpoint of the visual anthropologist Grimshaw. She claims a way to free from language-based interpretation mode and use the visual dimension to disintegration phenomenon. It can beyond the limitations of inherent human logic and brings the “intelligence of sight”. Because images have codes that are difficult to interpret and can only be communicated with the senses.
So then I tried to zoom in on the part of the body that is eating to see if I could collage the code involved in the action of eating.