Paper notes: The Weirdest People in the World

Reposting here two notes I wrote elsewhere. I was responding to a thread of comments on Tumblr about a seminal psychology paper from a few years ago. The first few posts in the thread claimed that the paper explained how anthropomorphic fantasies about animals stem from a lack of contact with animals during childhood and from general detachment from nature.

That would a ridiculous and easily disproved claim, but unsurprisingly it turned out that's not what the paper was saying. The original poster had drawn hasty conclusions from an article which in turn has summed up the paper while skipping important details. Nevertheless the matter helped me focus a few thoughts about anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in culture, therefore I'll repost both my notes here so they won't get lost forever in the depths of Tumblr.

[First note, written after reading the original Tumblr post and skimming through the article]

I grew up in the country, always owned pets, always loved to hike in the woods and see wild or exotic animals at any opportunity, always disliked the city environment. And that’s exactly why I always anthropomorphized animals in my imagination. I don’t perceive them as unknowable aliens not I ever felt any need to pretend humans are fundamentally different from animals.

I haven’t yet read the research paper in question (I’ll be sure to review it on my blog ASAP), but from the conclusion it smells like typical facile psychology which treats correlation as causation and has looked for data to prove a preconceived sensational-sounding conclusion. This point in particular strikes me as dishonest:

These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many.

All it takes is a cursory look at the news, the humanities and social controversies to see that most people think humans aren’t animals at all and would rather resort to supersition, appeal to authority, denialism or outright violence than accept such an idea and live with it. So no, most children do not “begin to understand that humans are one animal among many”… if only they did! What they do is begin to learn and accept anthropocentrism. They are taught that humans are special creatures only vaguely related to animals and that “human” and “animal” are two distinct realities which aren’t supposed to intermix even in fantasy, because if they do the foundations of humanities will crumble or devils will fly out of your nose or something.

Furries are for the most part people who see no reassurance and no appeal in anthropocentrism. Of course we furries have conserved (or rediscovered in adult age) the children’s tendency to mix human qualities with the qualities of other animals, but our motives and the reason why anthropocentrism does nothing for us are wildly different and a simplistic inference like that made by the paper isn’t going to explain anything.

Besides nobody ever seems to explain what the problem with anthropomorphism is exactly. Nature scientists must consider it a fallacy and actively avoid it in the context of their work, but that’s a separate matter which has nothing to with psychology.

[Second note, written after reading the actual paper which was actually very good research]

Ok, after a closer look to the article and paper… it seems that the guy who made the original posts jumped to conclusions and should have checked what the paper actually says about anthropomorphization, because the article didn’t sum it up very well. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the paper (page 13-14):

Cognitive scientists using children drawn from U.S. urban centers, often surrounding universities, have constructed a developmental theory in which folkbiological reasoning emerges from folkpsychological reasoning. Before age 7 urban children reason about biological phenomena by analogy to, and by extension from, humans. Between ages 7 and 10 urban children undergo a conceptual shift to the adult pattern of viewing humans as one animal among many. These conclusions are underpinned by three robust findings from urban children: (1) inferential projections of properties from humans are stronger than projections from other living kinds, (2) inferences are asymmetric, with inferences from human properties to mammals emerging as stronger than inference from mammals to humans, and (3) children’s inferences 13 violate their own similarity judgments by, for example, providing stronger inference from humans to bugs than from bugs to bees (Carey 1985;1995).

However, when the folkbiological reasoning of rural Native American communities in Wisconsin and Yukatek Maya was investigated (Ross et al. 2003, Waxman & Medin 2007), none of these three empirical patterns emerged. Among the Yukatek Maya, the human category appears to be incorporated into folkbiological induction relatively late. The results indicate that some background knowledge of the relevant species is crucial for the application and induction across a hierarchical taxonomy (Atran et al. 2001). In rural environments both exposure to, and interest in, the natural world is commonplace, unavoidable, and an inevitable part of the enculturation process. This suggests that the anthropocentric patterns seen in U.S. urban children result from insufficient cultural input and a lack of exposure to the natural world. The only real animal that most urban children know much about is Homo sapiens, so it is not surprising that this species dominates their inferential patterns. Since such urban environments are highly “unnatural” from the perspective of human evolutionary history, any conclusions drawn from subjects reared in such informationally depauperate environments must remain rather tentative. Indeed, studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying “normal” physical growth in malnourished children.

What it posits is that urban children tend to think of real animals in terms of what they know about humans, developing an anthropocentric perspective since they know very little about other species. Nothing surprising here: anthropocentrism is indeed a massive encroached problem of Western culture. But concluding that it fosters anthropomorphic fantasies on the basis of the paper’s comparison is quite the stretch, especially considering the prominent role of anthropomorphism in Yucatec Mayan folklore and in the ancient Mayan mythology it’s rooted into.

In fact pretty much all ancient mythologies featured anthropomorphism more than present day cultures and religions do. This fact keeps suggesting me that anthropomorphic imagination is a core component of human imagination.

I’d argue that lack of contact with animals forces that spontaneous function of our imagination to use what it can as building material. If the only animals an urban kid knows are plushies and cartoons then he will use them as a starting point for the unavoidable anthropomorphic fantasies. The same thought process which in ancient times would have led to faith in Coyote the Trickster, Quetzacoatl or Anubis now leads to finding solace in different anthropomorphic fantasies based on cartoons and the like. I’d also argue that such fantasies are unavoidable, to the point that all anthropocentric cultures have to actively force children to abandon them as part of “growing up”.

Going back to the paper, I still hold that most Western adults do not grow to view “humans as one animal among many” as the paper states, and they classify humans as animals because they were taught so in basic science classes rather than because of a deeper acceptance of the fact. But that’s a minor complaint; other than that the paper looks like very good research on the topic of fallacies and undisputed assumptions in social sciences, but it doesn’t help explaining the origins of furry culture in the slightest.

Zeuxis' centauress

An excerpt from Tummers, J.C. (2009):

There was already disagreement on the matter back in antiquity. On the one hand, craftsmanship was considered very important – witness an anecdote about the ancient painter Zeuxis, to which both the art theorists Franciscus Junius and Samuel van Hoogstraten refer. According to the ancient writer Lucian, Zeuxis had painted a picture of a female centaur suckling two baby centaurs, which he thought would be greatly praised for its craftsmanship such as the connection between the human skin of the upper part of the centaurs’ bodies and their furry lower bodies and legs. However, when Zeuxis displayed the work to a general audience:

'All of them praised most … the unusual aspect of the subject, and the novelty of its ‘message’, which was unknown to earlier artists. Thus when Zeuxis realized that the curiosity of the painting rather than his technique was capturing their attention and was putting the refinement of the work to one side, he said to his pupil: ‘Micion, cover it up and take it back home. These people are praising the raw mud of our art, but as for the lighting, how well it looks and how carefully done, they have nothing to say. The novelty of the subject surpasses the discipline of the execution’.

Zeuxis apparently did not agree with the preferences of his audience, and both Junius and Samuel van Hoogstraten use his comment about the audience focusing on the ‘mud of the art’ (droesem van de kunst) to stress the importance of knowing what aspects to praise in a painting.

I really really wish that particular picture had survived to this day, but alas it's lost like most ancient Greek-Roman paintings.

The anecdote is interesting though, whether real or fictional. Anthropomorphic beings feature often in Greek-Roman mythology and there are several instances of nonhuman creatures fostering and nursing heroes and even gods: in some version of the Greek cosmogony myth Zeus himself had been nursed for a period by the goat Amalthea. So the idea had to be quite familiar to the ancient Greek public and the nursing of Zeus had certainly been a recurring subject of art. Why were they so surprised by the subject of Zeuxis' artwork then?

The fact is the centauress was not nursing a human or a god, but her own children. This was quite the conceptual leap from the "mainstream" myth which played upon the contrasting natures of the foster mother and the infant and was ultimately focused on the human(like) nature of the latter. But it was also a conceptual leap from the typical epic depictions of mythical creatures. Those centaurs were engaged in a very mundane activity which didn't have any obvious reference to mythology.

I can imagine how puzzled the audience had to be, and it is not surprising at all that the skillful execution was overshadowed by discussion of the subject matter. Why did he choose that over the top subject? What was the point, the meaning of it? Cryptic symbolism or a mere gimmick? Did it have any artistic value at all?

Those are pretty much the same questions that furry art faces today when exposed to outsiders, and in fact a painting like that could very well be furry art created nowadays. The appeal is obvious to us furries. The intimacy and daily life of almost-human creatures is what furry is all about.

It sounds like Zeuxis' goals with that painting were exactly the same of many realist furry artists, down to the desire of being appreciated for skillful handling of anatomical difficulties... and the audience didn't understand his goals and focused on all the wrong things, just like it often happens with furry art.

The subject of nursing centaurs still appeared here and there in Western art, but it certainly wasn't as remarkable as it had been in a culture which had centaurs as part of its religious canon - or as it would be much later in the eyes of furry fans.

Artist notes: Blotch

"Blotch" is the pseudonym used by anthro artists Kenket (Tess Garman) and BlackTeagan (Teagan Gavet) during their very fruitful collaboration period which ran from 2006 to 2014. As a general rule BlackTeagan was responsible for the linework and Kenket for the coloring which was usually watercolors. Kenket has since become an extremely skilled painter while BlackTeagan is focusing on comics and ink drawing.

For simplicity I will refer to Blotch as a male since that's the gender of the fictional character they estabilished as the author of the pictures, a male anthro leopard.

Even though the two artists already had some visibility on their own, Blotch appeared on the furry fandom scene out of nowhere and quickly rose to become one of the most popular furry artists of the late 2000s and early 2010s, if not the most popular. This led to quite a lot of controversy as he was the first highly skilled artist to feature anatomically correct genitals on characters - and quite prominently so.

Big Bad Wolf, 2008

If this had been only a distasteful gimmick it would have died out quickly though. Porn sells, but not consistently and certainly not for the price tags which have been consistently associated with Blotch's art. In spite of silly internet myths there is only so much that impulse buying can do.

Blotch's art has been dismissed as mere porn by some anthro fans unwilling to admit that erotic artwork could be a credit to the genre, but it has other qualities which make it stand out as iconic anthro art, well worth of being presented as one of the most important achievements in our little genre.

Speaking of Love, 2010

Blotch's erotic art in particular could come across as kitschy because of its open sentimentality, but I would argue that that is a superficial impression and that the novelty of what it tries to express about same-sex relationships experienced by young people is more important than such academic criticism.

Does sex in art need to feel gritty, smug, overwhelmingly physical and/or openly political all the time? One would think so looking at the works of recognized masters of erotic art. I'll be using male gay artists as an example here just because Blotch's subjcts are mostly male-on-male love scenes, but the situation is pretty much the same for all flavors of erotic art. There are notable exceptions like Tom Bianchi or Charles Demuth, but in most cases, from Tom of Finland to Gengoroh Tagame, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Harry Bush, power relationships are the most common underlying theme. Dominance, submission and hardcore physical sensations seem to dominate, and so does (in Western artists at least) a visual language which acknowledges and openly encourages political readings.

On the other end of the erotic gay art spectrum yaoi art leans towards more romantic tones, but power relationships are still a very prominent theme. There's apparently no escape from same-sex relationships being associated with power struggles, even if only in the imagination, whether the art in question is aimed to a male, female, gay or straight audience.

And yet Blotch's art has seduced the furry audience by focusing on something else entirely: playfulness and day to day affection.

5 More Minutes, 2008

In spite of their idealized settings the best works of Blotch are gay slice-of-life art, and not of the absurdly contrived kind brought forward by some other furry artists. It is slice-of-life in that it attempts to capure ordinary moments of affection. Any couple of lovers with an open mind and an appreciation for animals and nature can't help but smile in front of the simple and yet hard to express truths found in those images.

Don't Stop, 2014

One has to look at Far East art from centuries ago such as Ukiyo-e or Indian sacred art in order to consistently find similar light-hearted portrayals of male-on-male sexuality.

Surge, 2011

This, I believe, is why Blotch's pictures have reached iconic status in furry art even though most of them don't depict specific characters (as is usually the case in the commission dominated market of furry art). They clearly answered a need for representation that a huge number of furries shared. Sentimentality is not a flaw if it's brought out where it had been unjustly excluded and underestimated before.

And again, genuinely positive depictions of sex in art are so rare that they certainly cannot be considered a stale subject.

Minimum Security Prison, 2011

In dog we thrust, 2007

Penis party, 2013

Even Blotch's more whimsical pieces are full of the same playfulness and positivity which are the hallmark of good erotic anthro art. Whatever the subject an observer always gets the feeling that the characters are having a great time no matter their exact relationship to each other (or lack thereof), and that sincere feelings are never entirely absent from the sexual act.

Will this kind of art ever be recognized as the achievement it is outside of the anthro art niche? It's hard to tell, because even inside its niche there are people who would never take erotic art at more than face value. But I really hope it will, because what anthro artists like Blotch have done really is new and interesting in the landscape of Western art.

Cool performances

Three videos showing the great potential of anthropomorphic costumes.

I’m especially enthralled by this one with the faun, both the costume/makeup and the acting are great with just the right degree of uncanniness. It gave me chills just looking at the video… seeing the performance in real life has to be quite an experience. As simple as it may be, this is real performance art.

Embedding disabled - follow the link to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkvXcRle8Oc

Quadruped costumes are very difficult to design and wear properly if they are to imitate the actual walking motions of the animal. The crafter(s) and performer did a great job here.

Fursuits are on the brink of becoming mainstream fashionable items now and are considered more and more the defining element of the furry fandom, but can the furry fandom achieve anything close to this level of performance? Something which can be fun and moving for a general audience instead of the mere inside joke it is in most cases? Not everybody has to be a professional performer of course, but I feel there is something amiss with the way fursuits are used in the fandom.