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Accepted Paper:
Between protector and predator, the ethical status of the dog among the Dörwöd Mongols
Bernard Charlier
(Cambridge University)
Paper short abstract:
Can the concept of hospitality be extended to animals? In Western Mongolia the dog is never entirely domesticated. Its wolf like nature imprisons it in that space in-between where the porosity of the opposites constitutes it: protection-predation, humanity-animality, good/bad fortune.
Paper long abstract:
According to Kant, all that is human, every man has a right to hospitality (1795). So, every stranger is human. But the non-human, the animal, for example, is excluded. No dog at home, then? And, what if the stranger is rejected in the non-human? Kant's universal, human hospitality questions political, ethnical and ethical difficulties of actual hospitality. I would like to consider hospitality through the analysis of the ethical status of the dog in Western Mongolia. How can its spatial and alimentary proximity to men and wolves meet the notion of "hostipitality"? The dog is never entirely domesticated. Its wolf like nature imprisons it in that space in-between where the porosity of the opposites constitutes him: protection- predation, humanity-animality, interiority-exteriority, domesticated-wild, good/bad fortune. Might the dog's relegation to the outer space, (though, next to the yurt), reveal the herder's incapacity to conceive the stranger-intruder the same way as himself? Or, rather, what side of the dog does the herder refuse to see in himself?