The social construction of the value of wildlife: A green cultural criminological perspective
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Author | Daan P van Uhm |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618787170 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
787170TCR0010.1177/1362480618787170Theoretical Criminologyvan Uhm
research-article2018
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(3) 384 –401
The social construction
© The Author(s) 2018
of the value of wildlife: A
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618787170
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green cultural criminological
DOI: 10.1177/1362480618787170
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perspective
Daan P van Uhm
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Abstract
The trade in wildlife is not a new phenomenon. The earliest civilizations were linked to
the trade in live animals and parts thereof, from the Egyptian pharaohs to aristocrats
in the modern era. This article focuses on the history of the wildlife trade in order to
understand the social construction of the value of wildlife. In dynamic social and cultural
contexts, the meaning of wildlife changes. Historically, exotic animals and the products
thereof were associated with social elites, but today, wildlife attracts people from all
walks of life and a wide variety of live animals and products thereof are traded for
functional, symbolic and social purposes. Increasing ecocentric and biocentric values in
contemporary western society, however, may influence constructed demand patterns
for wildlife in the near future. By integrating cultural criminological concepts with the
social construction of green crimes, this article aims to understand constructed wildlife
consumerism through the ages.
Keywords
Animal abuse, animal rights, cultural criminology, green criminology, wildlife trade
Introduction
A growing public and governmental awareness of the local, regional and global implica-
tions of the illegal trade in wildlife illustrates the need to analyse the drivers behind this
phenomenon (see, for example, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2016; Wyler
Corresponding author:
Daan P. van Uhm, Utrecht University, Newtonlaan 231, Utrecht, 3584BH, The Netherlands.
Email: d.p.vanuhm@uu.nl
van Uhm
385
and Sheikh, 2013). Not only does the illegal wildlife trade threaten individual animals,
species biodiversity and Earth’s ecosystems, but local impoverished communities may
also lose their natural ‘resources’, for which there are no alternatives (Duffy, 2000; Van
Uhm, 2018). The involvement of organized crime and militias present additional con-
cerns in terms of human safety and security (Van Uhm, 2016a; Zimmerman, 2003).
Therefore, various initiatives have been launched in recent years to tackle the illegal
wildlife trade (European Commission, 2016; USA, 2014) and several international stud-
ies have been conducted to improve the knowledge of the trade networks.
Researchers have examined a variety of legal and illegal acts involving, inter alia, the
poaching, trafficking and consuming of wildlife by applying different criminological
frameworks (e.g. Hübschle, 2016; Moreto, 2016; Nurse, 2011; Pires and Clarke, 2011;
Schneider, 2012; Sollund, 2016, 2017a; Van Uhm, 2016a; Warchol, 2004; Wong, 2016;
Wyatt, 2013). Traditional criminological frameworks have been used that examine harm
to wildlife as proscribed by law, including market reduction approaches (Schneider,
2008), differential association theories (Eliason and Dodder, 1999) and situational crime
prevention (Petrossian, 2012; Pires and Moreto, 2011). Critical harm-based models
(Sollund, 2011; Van Uhm, 2017; Wyatt, 2014) have also been used by criminologists to
examine ‘lawful but awful’ (Passas, 2005) harm to wildlife. These criminologists look
beyond traditional definitions of crime, adopting a ‘perspective [that] is shaped by shared
understandings and scientific knowledge about what constitutes ecological harm rather
than being a socially constructed concept defined by politicians as in orthodox criminol-
ogy’ (Stretesky et al., 2013: 71).1
Notwithstanding those research efforts, the social and cultural drivers behind the
demand market for wildlife have received limited attention. In both the domestic and
global markets, numerous species are traded for a variety of reasons (Petrossian et al.,
2016; Van Uhm, 2016a, 2016b). For example, animal parts, such as tiger bones and rhino
horns, are used in traditional Chinese medicine (Goyes and Sollund, this issue; Van Uhm
and Wong, forthcoming); animal skins and furs, as well as body parts, such as ivory, are
used as clothing, ornaments and for other fashion items (Hutton and Webb, 2003; Martin
and Stiles, 2003; Sollund, 2011, 2016; Wyatt, 2009); live monkeys, parrots and tortoises
are destined for the pet or circus industry (D’Cruze et al., 2015; Herbig, 2010; Pires,
2012; Sollund, 2013, 2017b; Van Uhm, 2016c); and bushmeat and caviar (salted stur-
geon eggs) are considered delicacies (Van Uhm and Siegel, 2016; Wolfe et al., 2005).
The trade in wildlife is by no means a new phenomenon. There has always been a
demand for animals as sources for food and clothing, as companions or pets, or as strange
and curious ‘objects’ (Alexander, 1979). While the earliest civilizations engaged in wild-
life trade, the demand for wildlife has changed and continues to do so across social and
cultural contexts. Therefore, the current study embraces the green criminological
extended harm-based approach that rejects the conventional definition of crime by ortho-
dox criminology (Sollund, 2013; White, 2011); it focuses on the social construction of
the demand for various wildlife species from a broad socio-cultural and historical per-
spective. In so doing, it seeks to address the following questions: what kinds of wildlife
have been traded in the past? For whom was the trade intended? What can we learn from
history in order to understand the current set of social and cultural drivers behind the
trade in wildlife? By analysing the socio-cultural and historical context of the value of
386
Theoretical Criminology 22(3)
wildlife, this article aims to respond to the call to combine cultural and green criminolo-
gies (Brisman and South, 2013, 2014) to interpret the embedded demand for wildlife that
is at the heart of both the legal and illegal trade in wildlife.
The social construction of the value of things
Sociologist Georg Simmel and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai have enriched the theo-
retical understanding of the value of ‘things’ through their descriptions of social life as
the product of interactions and attributions. In his book, The Philosophy of Money,
Simmel (1978) explains that value is a judgement made by subjects through interaction.
Appadurai (1986) emphasizes in The Social Life of Things how the value of products is
embodied in exchanged commodities instead of the forms or functions of trade. For
example, the distance between a person and the (economic) object is important as ‘one’s
desire for an object is fulfilled by the sacrifice of some other object, which is the focus
of the desire of another’ (Appadurai, 1986: 3–4). Appadurai (1986: 5) states that things
have no meaning without ‘human’ transactions, attributions and motivations: ‘[t]his for-
mal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we
have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms,
their uses, their trajectories’. He approaches commodities as ‘objects in motion’ with
their own social context and ‘social lives’.
Simmel (1978) stresses that the exchange of items or objects of value is central to
human interaction. This perspective is in line with that of Blumer (1986), who coined the
term, symbolic interactionism, and argued that social meaning is generated not only
through personal interpretations, but by interactions between these interpretations in
social settings. Simmel (1978) explained that objects that are too close or too far away
would not be considered to be valuable, and thus, the social value of things would be
created through separating ourselves from those objects while trying to overcome the
distance: over time and due to scarcity and other challenges to obtain certain objects, the
value of those objects increases.
Thus, in the course of history, the social construction of the value of commodities is
determined in their socio-economic context. For example, the significance of sugar in the
history of the British economy in the context of its colonial trade has been illustrated by
‘the growing strength and solidity of the empire and of the classes that dictated its poli-
cies’ (Mintz, 1985: 157). The same is true for coffee, tea (Shand, 1927), oriental carpets
(Spooner, 1986) and wildlife (Van Uhm, 2016a). The possession of luxury or scarce
objects manifests one’s prestige, and ‘offers access to social networks and to other
resources that are closed to those lacking prestige’ (Renfrew, 1986: 161). Moreover,
producers and consumers are all interested in maintaining the high value of their com-
modities for different reasons (Brisman and South, 2014). For example, wildlife traders
want to guarantee that prices will not go down, while consumers want to ensure that they
made good investments (Van Uhm and Siegel, 2016).
Interestingly, in contradiction to the attributed value by humans, from a non-anthro-
pocentric perspective, wildlife is being ‘devalued’ when it is treated as a commodity or
as property, lacking intrinsic value (Sollund, 2017b). Indeed, green criminologists have
emphasized how ecocentric and biocentric views2 would give additional meaning to the
van Uhm
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concept of the social life of...
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