“Come Watch This Spider”: Animals, Mennonites, and Indices of Modernity

Abstract

Abstract: Historians have increasingly written the animal into the narratives of social history. Broad studies document how humans managed animals, related to them, and were affected by them. Many of these studies critique the separation of humans from animals during the rise of an urban, commercialized society. Collectively, however, these works also present inter-species relations as an index of modernization – the rise of the classically “liberal” society with its focus on individualism, technology, and unfettered capitalism. An investigation into the way Mennonites in Canada related to the animal kingdom can illuminate this social development by focusing narrowly and interpreting broadly. As an identifiable ethno-religious community, with a strong literary tradition and a historic, religiously informed, predisposition to rural life, a study of Canadian Mennonites reveals the evolving nature of inter-species relationships. This change is evident in an interrogation of their texts that pay special attention to such encounters. In particular, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural diaries reflect a traditional agrarian concern and respect for animals. Then, twentieth- and early twenty-first-century memoirs speak of individual ascendancy and an alienation from animals. Most recently, novels and works of poetry give voice to a nascent culture of resistance to animal subjugation. By happenstance, this series of texts reflects the sequence of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern societies, and thus it serves to illuminate those particular societies and the inter-species relationships commensurate with each. By writing the animal into the history of one ethno-religious community, a fuller understanding of how modernization was experienced at the local level is achieved, and in the process both this community and the wider society are interpreted. To study animal-human relations is also to study social history more generally.