For our latest Emerging Voices feature, we are thrilled to hear from Jisoo Lee at the University of Michigan about her research on pigeons in late imperial and Republican China!
Jisoo Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. She studies the history of pigeons in East Asia, focusing on interspecies bonds and communication, scientific and cultural ways of knowing animals, and questions of animal ethics. She holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Shanghai University.
Hi Jisoo! To start, what first inspired you to include animals in your research?
Adopting my dog, Alkong, five years ago made me realize that animals have personalities, histories, and subjectivities all their own. This was during a period when I had stepped away from my Ph.D. to work in media and webtoon localization in Seoul. I started volunteering at animal shelters, following the work of South Korean animal rights organizations, and spending time at Keungkeung Library, run by Korea Animal Rights Advocates, which has an amazing collection of animal books. I was also inspired by screenings at the Seoul Animal Film Festival—documentaries about the fight for legal personhood for captive chimpanzees, people dedicated to wildlife rescue, and the beauty of migratory birds and crabs in fragile tidal flat ecosystems. I’d liked animals since I was a child and even considered becoming a veterinarian at one point, but I hadn’t realized animals were something you could study in the humanities or social sciences. Then, while participating in a study group on animal protection laws and seeing how people looked to the UK or Germany as progressive models, I began wondering about the historical reasons for those differences and whether Korean or East Asian traditions offered more indigenous reference points for thinking about animals and ethics. These questions ultimately drew me back to my Ph.D. in 2024 to study animal history.
Your Ph.D. focuses on pigeon-keeping and -breeding in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Asia. Could you summarise your thesis topic for us?
I study the many roles pigeons played in late imperial and Republican China, and to some extent in Korea and Taiwan. Many people are probably familiar with homing pigeons deployed to deliver messages during World War II, but pigeons have historically been raised for many other purposes, such as for meat and medicine, as competitors in racing (still a lucrative industry today), and as aesthetic objects or companion animals. The grey pigeons we see in cities today are just one form of the rock pigeon. People bred them for centuries all over the world to produce hundreds of different colors and shapes, and they appear widely in nineteenth-century illustrations and paintings. Even Charles Darwin crossbred fancy pigeons to study variation within species!
Because pigeons have moved between categories—wild and domestic, utilitarian and ornamental or affective—they offer a rich case study for thinking about the broad spectrum of human-animal relationships. I’m interested not only in how people have shaped pigeons through selective breeding and training, but also in how pigeons’ own instincts, behaviors, and navigational abilities made them agents in communication systems and racing, even when humans held most of the power. I’m also attempting to make sense of interspecies communication, including how humans and pigeons interpret each other’s sounds, signals, and cues. More broadly, my project uses pigeons and birds as a comparative lens to trace how knowledge about animals evolved from premodern to modern times and along different trajectories in East Asia and the West.
Is there anything surprising you’ve come across in your research so far?
I’m surprised by how much communication can happen between humans and animals. I’m trying to understand how interspecies communication works—what kinds of shared meaning make relationships with working or companion animals possible. It’s important not to anthropomorphize animal communication by calling it “language,” since animals have their own exceptional ways of signaling, and we can never fully know what it’s like to be a pigeon or a dog. But we do share enough with them that these relationships can exist. Gary Tomlinson distinguishes between information and meaning, not to say organisms that create meaning are “better” than “meaningless” life-forms, but to argue that only some evolutionary branches developed the capacity to create meaning from their perceptions; a capacity humans share with nonhuman animals like songbirds but not honeybees.1 Eduardo Kohn’s notion of “trans-species pigdins” is also helpful.2 These are hybrid communication forms that borrow from both human and animal realms—for example, when humans combine elements of human language with reduplicated dog sounds when talking to dogs. I’m trying to figure out what the shared semiotic space might be between humans and pigeons, especially in training.
Is there a resource or theory you’ve found particularly helpful while developing your research?
One concept that’s been useful is labor, as discussed in Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? animals have historically been exploited for their labor, but this framework asks whether it might be possible to imagine non-exploitative working relationships with animals and see them as workers or co-workers, just as humans have struggled to secure decent work.3 This would mean figuring out what activities different animals might find fulfilling, since many enjoy developing skills or taking on social roles, and what they would consent to. This might sound a bit utopian, and it doesn’t really apply to domesticated animals in the meat industry. But I find it a helpful concept for thinking about whether carrying messages in military or police communication networks, complete with budgets, lofts, and handlers, could be considered “work” for pigeons and whether it might have been “good work” for them.
How can we find out more about your research?
I’m writing an article to be published in a special issue of Animal History in 2027 or 2028, so stay tuned!
Finally, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
I would definitely be some kind of migratory bird, like a red-crowned crane or a sandpiper, so I can fly across continents and see oceans and landscapes from the sky. I like the idea of living in Siberia for part of the year, then stopping over on the Korean peninsula before flying somewhere warmer for the winter. As long as my migratory stops aren’t destroyed by humans, that is! Birds in general have some incredible, superhuman abilities. Pigeons can see ultraviolet light and hear infrasound at frequencies far below what humans can detect, which helps them navigate, and hummingbirds beat their wings over fifty times per second. It would be cool if I could do any one of those things!
- Gary Tomlinson, The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (Zone Books, 2023). ↩︎
- Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013). ↩︎
- Charlotte E. Blattner, Kendra Coulter, and Will Kymlicka, eds., Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎