8. TO TOUCH LIGHTLY IN PASSING

In order to listen to a cow like Piet and their herd, a decentring of humans in (socio)linguistic research is needed. Such a decentring presents theoretical and methodological challenges to understandings, conceptualisations and theorising of the animal Other. The main challenge becomes that of rethinking intraspecies and interspecies interactions as embodied, multimodal and sensory phenomena whose bodily mediation draws on material objects and environments (Cornips, 2024). Instead of academic writing, poetry ideally gives the opportunity to hide and/or approach something that is unsayable or untouchable in images. For example, the tension between a bull cow and a human baby hiding in a cow lick or a baby sock, is not present in biology or related academic fields but does exist ‘in the poetry’ of or between ‘things’. That unsayable is then not necessarily in the written text but may (hopefully) subsequently arise in the minds of readers. That is another thing than capturing emotions or expressing them in academic language reserved in linguistics. Because tangible or measurable reality is bounded but our imagination is not, we need poetry to allow the world to shine through in us more completely. 

Therefore, this project is a collaboration between Leonie Cornips (linguist and ethnographer), Merlijn Huntjens (poet) and Nina Willems (theatre/performance art). Nina and Merlijn have collaborated since 2015 in their art collective PANDA (see https://www.pandacollectief.nl/over-panda/). In 2024, we started developing the artistic research project called ‘KOE’ (cow), in collaboration with cow Piet and their herd, with whom Leonie has been working in the past few years. In 2023 we conducted preliminary field research with Leonie taking fieldwork photos, of which this small publication is the result. 

Why did we choose to engage in this collaboration? The artistic methods, poetry in particular, allow humans to reflect and write about bodily and audible sharing activity with cows, hence synchronising together which is described by Argent (2012: 119) as part of ‘kinetic, haptic, and proxemic communication modes to create meanings’ and by de Waal (2012: 123) as ‘identification’ with the other, a process of ‘bodily mapping the self onto the other (or the other onto the self)’ which forms ‘a precondition for imitation and empathy’. By using ethnography and artistic methods the authors became increasingly sensitive to and affected by Piet’s expressive actions and movements from within our relationship through time (Servais 2018: 5) because we learned very soon to acknowledge Piet’s personhood emerging out of what we both did and do (and didn’t) in our relation (Servais, 2018: 6). Crucially, we learned almost from the beginning to consider and experience Piet not as a ‘passive object waiting to be acted upon by a desiring human subject’ (van den Hengel, 2021: 45) but that both Piet and we are ‘part of an independent web of existence where the material, social, political and spiritual dynamics of living and loving meet in co-shaping motion and being’ (Van den Hengel, 2021: 40). The strong point is that our relation is dynamic: Piet and we are being transformed by the other, articulated by what Piet makes us/our bodies do and perceive – or not – and what we make Piet/their body do and perceive – or not (Despret, 2004). 

The more we collaborated the less our different roles (poet, linguist, ethnographer, performance artist, mother) became applicable; we became artistic researchers who, using all our qualities, discovered and described the world of cow Piet and their herd. Nina and Merlijn engaged in field research using Leonie’s methods, Leonie started documenting through poetry, supported by Merlijn.

Nina also took her son Olivier with her as part of the field research, as a form of ‘performance in everyday life’ (Schechner, 2006). Olivier (now fifteen months old) is fully discovering the rules of behaviour and language in the human world. What happens when we confront him with the behavioural rules and language of Piet and their herd? How does his performance affect that of Piet and the herd, and ours as human researchers? An example: in their first encounter, during the preliminary research phase, Piet bowed their head to Olivier and approached him at a slower pace than the other humans. Finally, Piet started licking Olivier’s sock. When Piet stood directly opposite Olivier, the child started to cry, and stopped when his mother placed her body between his and Piet. This affected the way Nina could perform in relation to Piet as well, because she had to turn her back to Piet, holding Olivier in her arms. Nina also noticed herself becoming very calm and slow in her movements, while she continued to try to move Olivier and Piet closer together.

The next step will be for us to design a new fieldwork method, based on our experiences so far, at the intersection of our disciplines, and to document through poetry. Poetry has our main focus for documenting, because it enables us to focus on the tactile, emotional side of communication between us and the herd we observe and interact with. We find that there are subtleties in this communication that need a different type of language from academic language. We also want to keep experimenting with hybrid presentation forms for our research. 

For example, we presented a performative audio-walk as part of our project during Festival Cultura Nova 2024 in Heerlen, in collaboration with farmer Guus Huynen and the herd that lives on his farm. In the audio-walk, the audience could hear Leonie share her research, and recordings of the poetry that Nina and Merlijn created based on that research and their encounters with the cows on the farm of Guus Huynen. During the preparations, an article was published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (Embrechts, 2024) about their research. Positive reviews about the project also appeared in De Volkskrant and De Theaterkrant.