Companion Species

Astrid Møller-Olsen

Related terms: symbiogenesis, companion plants, posthuman feminism, postanimal studies, critical plant studies

We are not alone. “[N]either humans, nor any other organism, can be regarded as individuals by anatomical criteria” as biologists Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber so neatly and categorically phrase it (2012, 327). Every living body is deeply entangled with other living bodies on an existential level. We are teeming with and surrounded by companion species that feed us, clothe us and keep us and the planet healthy, and have also been an integrated part of our evolution, history and continued survival. In her Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway 2013), feminist scholar Donna Haraway explores “the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who arc bonded in significant otherness” (16). Still, she simultaneously argues that interspecies entanglements are much more fundamental and “must include such organic beings as rice, bees, tulips and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is – and vice versa” (15). It is also a critical tool for queering the humanities for, as Haraway writes in her foreword to Queering the Non/Human, “queer re-worlding depends on reorienting the human and its posts to the never-finished meal of companion species, complete with all the acidic consequences for all the diners” (Haraway 2008, xxvi). Due to the interdisciplinary potential of this “never-finished meal,” new ways of thinking through ‘companion species’ continue to emerge within and beyond the humanities.

Unlike terms such as ‘companion animals’ or ‘companion plants’ that are used in everyday language with a focus on other species’ usefulness for humans, ‘companion species’ is a critical concept centred on mutualism. Where ‘companion animal’ refers to non-human animals that perform essential services to human animals such as guide dogs, ‘companion plants’ denote the millennia-old agricultural practice of growing different species of plants (such as the three sisters, sweet corn, bean and gourd) together so they benefit from the environmental adaptations of their neighbours and yield a better harvest. ‘Companion species’ on the other hand, is defined by mutual dependency not only in sustaining life but as a major evolutionary mechanism. This fundamental aspect is developed from Lynn Margulis’ concept of symbiogenesis – the process of cross-species evolution, a prime example of which is how some prokaryotic organisms began to act as hosts for others and through this new symbiosis evolved into the first eukaryotic bacteria (Hughes-Warrington and Martin 2021, 162). Together with Dorion Sagan, she argued that such processes occurred many times in evolutionary history – so much so that “symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on Earth” and even today, human bodies “contain a veritable history of life on Earth” (Margulis and Sagan 1997, 32-33).

The call to rethink research from a more-than-human perspective has resonated across subjects and practises to crystalise in the interdisciplinary subfield of environmental humanities. The insects that pollinate our crops, the harvested plants themselves, and the gut bacteria that help us digest them are all ‘companions’ in the fundamental sense that we cannot live without them. Though some of these species could live (and might even thrive) without us, they in turn depend on other companions in a network of closely entwined inter-organic relationships that challenge the notion of individuality or the single-species collective as the main matrix for humanistic analysis.

Recasting anthropology and history as a continuing process of co-evolution and mutual domestication between humans and their companion species, Anna Tsing concludes that “[c]ereals domesticated humans. The love affair between people and cereals is one of the great romances of human history” (Tsing 2012, 145). As a research concept, ‘companion species’ includes a healthy dose of reciprocity that turns our habitual anthropocentrism on its head and forces us to reevaluate the basic tenets of humanistic research from a point of gravity outside humanity. Similar to the way the heliocentric model of the solar system replaced the geocentric forcing physicists to acknowledge that Earth is just one planet among many that circle a common star, so humanistic scholars must redraw their disciplinary maps in ways that situate humanity as just one species among many that share a home planet and embrace the fact that “[h]uman nature is an interspecies relationship” (Tsing 2012, 144).

The multifocal perspective afforded by the concept of ‘companion species’ can also provide extended theoretical insights and methodological restructuring to the arts. In the humanities, the framework of companion species has recently been employed by scholars in religious studies, European studies and medieval studies, to explore “the constructed nature of distinctions between human beings and other species” in their respective source materials (van Dijk 2024, 3). In literary scholarship, it has been coupled with postanimal studies to read for literary examples of what might happen when “the precondition that who is eating whom no longer determines who may or may not become a member of the collective” (Bauer 2024, 335). The concept has also been criticized for maintaining human sovereignty and glossing over the violence inherent in many cross-species relationships, not least those between humans and other animals (Wadiwel 2015). Combined with the emergent discipline of critical plant studies, it has been used as a framework for comparativism to shed light on the messy entanglement and unequal status of the texts and languages under comparison as well as the role of disciplinary and subjective biases in the selection process. Anglocentrism in research shares a blind spot with anthropocentrism when the English language functions as a ‘transparent’ tool of analysis, a standard against which the literary languages under scrutiny are subtly measured, just as other species are held to a human standard. Companion species readings do not solve such issues, but they do draw our attention to them so that “[a]nthropocentrism is not eliminated but recast in a context where it represents just one perspective among many, translated into one human language among many” (Møller-Olsen 2024, 141).

Companionship is never frictionless, but it is fundamental as “[b]eings do not preexist their relatings” (Haraway 2013, 6). Thinking relationally challenges the idea of a ‘standard’ species, gender or language – it becomes that little grain of sand that annoys and precludes simple answers by constantly reminding the researcher of the power relations inherent in the tools of analysis. The concept of ‘companion species’ complicates, queers, and enriches humanistic research by insisting we put multilingual, multidisciplinary, and multispecies perspectives at the core.

References

Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber. 2012. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87 (4): 325–41.

Haraway, Donna J. 2013. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2008. “Foreword: Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding.” In Queering the Non/human, edited by N. Giffney & M. Hird. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Bauer, Liza B. 2024. Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1997. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. University of California Press.

Møller-Olsen, Astrid. 2024. “Companion Plant Reading: Translating Vegetal Voices.” Plant Perspectives 1: 120-144.

Tsing, Anna. 2012. "Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species." Environmental Humanities 1: 141-54.

van Dijk, Mathilde. 2024. “Introduction.” In Companion Species: Saints, Animals and Ordinary Humans in the Middle Ages, edited by van Dijk. London: Routledge.

Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2015. The War against Animals. Leiden: Brill.

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies

Companion Species

References