Damien Contessa - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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Papers by Damien Contessa

This dissertation is about the stories people tell about animals when they don’t do what they are... more This dissertation is about the stories people tell about animals when they don’t do what they are expected to do in contemporary social life. More specifically, it examines three case studies where “wild” animals unexpectedly challenge, transgress, or blur socially defined boundaries in public spaces. Drawing on cultural and interactionist studies of animals and environment, I explore popular animal stories written in news media, social media, and enacted in situ. Each qualitative case study illustrates a moment in time/space where the surprising movements or presence of wild animals causes the cultural categories of wildness/order to breakdown and destabilize. These “surface breaks” of social expectations provide an occasion to tell “animal stories.” Animal stories help people explain how the lives of animals can be allegorical strategies modern people use to communicate and enact moral lessons about the social world. In the first chapter, I analyze news stories that emerged after ...

Environmental History, 2012

In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogd... more In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogden traces the lives of poor, rural whites called gladesmen through the hidden cultural, political, and ecological history of the Florida Everglades. She invites the reader to imagine a world of mythological outlaws, giant reptiles, political intrigue, conservation, and rural life in order to reveal how "oppositional culture and social class operate in our understandings of wilderness in the United States" (p.2). Her monograph is based on the stories and practices of gladesmen, and unfolds as a fluid, tangled, and lush record of the history of the Everglades landscape. Throughout her book, Ogden challenges notions of the landscape as a space of cultural significance scripted by human ideas, customs, practices, and stories. She seeks to reclaim the landscape "as a place of people and human history" through understanding "how what it means to be human is constituted through changing relations" with other species and objects (p.2).

This dissertation is about the stories people tell about animals when they don’t do what they are... more This dissertation is about the stories people tell about animals when they don’t do what they are expected to do in contemporary social life. More specifically, it examines three case studies where “wild” animals unexpectedly challenge, transgress, or blur socially defined boundaries in public spaces. Drawing on cultural and interactionist studies of animals and environment, I explore popular animal stories written in news media, social media, and enacted in situ. Each qualitative case study illustrates a moment in time/space where the surprising movements or presence of wild animals causes the cultural categories of wildness/order to breakdown and destabilize. These “surface breaks” of social expectations provide an occasion to tell “animal stories.” Animal stories help people explain how the lives of animals can be allegorical strategies modern people use to communicate and enact moral lessons about the social world. In the first chapter, I analyze news stories that emerged after ...

Environmental History, 2012

In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogd... more In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogden traces the lives of poor, rural whites called gladesmen through the hidden cultural, political, and ecological history of the Florida Everglades. She invites the reader to imagine a world of mythological outlaws, giant reptiles, political intrigue, conservation, and rural life in order to reveal how "oppositional culture and social class operate in our understandings of wilderness in the United States" (p.2). Her monograph is based on the stories and practices of gladesmen, and unfolds as a fluid, tangled, and lush record of the history of the Everglades landscape. Throughout her book, Ogden challenges notions of the landscape as a space of cultural significance scripted by human ideas, customs, practices, and stories. She seeks to reclaim the landscape "as a place of people and human history" through understanding "how what it means to be human is constituted through changing relations" with other species and objects (p.2).