Animals in the Anthropocene. Human–animal relations in a changing semiosphere | University of Stavanger (Norway) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Changing Relationships With Non-Human Animals in the Anthropocene -An introduction
2016
This is the introductory chapter of the volume Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans; Blurring Boundaries in Human-animal Relationships, Springer, October 2016, edited by Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz. In this introduction we address the following topics. The first section deals with the Anthropocene - What is it? When did it start? How did it develop? The second section shows how the concept works as a major bone of contention that divides the academic community into those who consider the Anthropocene a planetary catastrophe and those who embrace the human domination over the Earth as a great achievement. The third section considers the biodiversity conservation options in the age of humans. The fourth and final section provides an overview of this volume.
Rethinking the Human-Animal Divide in the Anthropocene
This is the title of my chapter in the recently published "Political Animals and Animal Politics", edited by Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg (Palgrave 2014). I upload here both the Table of contents and the Introduction. A summary of my chapter within the latter says the following: "Manuel Arias-Maldonado opens by arguing that the translation of the call in animal ethics for a ‘more equal’ treatment of animals intoenvironmental and animal politics must start with the recognition of ourselves as political animals, and that recognition must take account of the specific kind of animal that we humans are: the exceptional animal, defined by a relatively open nature. Arias-Maldonado suggests a novel way to foster a more fraternal relationship between human beings and animals. He argues that an approach based on similarities between individual animals and humans has a limited political potential. Transcending the traditional ethical debate, he explores an alternative way of organising our social – rather than individual – relationship to animals, defined by the refinement rather than abolition of human domination. Departing from the notion that the human being is the exceptional animal, Arias-Maldonado argues that domination can and should evolve into sympathy towards animals, and he makes the case for a viable form of sympathy: one that employs technology in order to balance animal needs and human wishes".
The animal question: the Anthropocene’s hidden foundational debate
História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2021
As globalization accelerated after 1492, often in the service of European imperial expansion, human destruction of the habitat in which animals could express their natural behaviors also increased. Within this context, the question arises: just how much are we like other animals, and if they are like us, how much do we owe them? From the 1500s to the 1800s, travelers, imperialists, the colonized, and intellectuals tried to answer this question and produced three positions: animals as mere exploitable devices; confusion about animals’ status and what we owe them, and concern about the suffering of nonhuman animals, their freedom to express their behaviors, and their very existence.
Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene
Springer, 2021
This Open Access book brings together authoritative voices in animal and environmental ethics, who address the many different facets of changing human-animal relationships in the Anthropocene. As we are living in complex times, the issue of how to establish meaningful relationships with other animals under Anthropocene conditions needs to be approached from a multitude of angles. This book offers the reader insight into the different discussions that exist around the topics of how we should understand animal agency, how we could take animal agency seriously in farms, urban areas and the wild, and what technologies are appropriate and morally desirable to use regarding animals. This book is of interest to both animal studies scholars and environmental ethics scholars, as well as to practitioners working with animals, such as wildlife managers, zookeepers, and conservation biologists.
2014
Animals´ omnipresence in human society makes them both close to and yet remarkably distant from humans. Human and animal lives have always been entangled, but the way we see and practice the relationships between humans and animals – as close, intertwined, or clearly separate – varies from time to time and between cultures, societies, and even situations. By putting these complex relationships in focus, this anthology investigates the ways in which human society deals with its co-existence with animals. The volume was produced within the frame of the interdisciplinary “Animal Turn”-research group which during eight months in 2013–2014 was hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund university, Sweden. Along with invited scholars and artists, members of this group contribute with different perspectives on the complexities and critical issues evoked when the human-animal relationship is in focus. The anthology covers a wide range of topics: From discussions on new disciplinary paths and theoretical perspectives, empirical case-studies, and artistic work, towards more explicitly critical approaches to issues of animal welfare. Phenomena such as vegansexuality, anthropomorphism, wildlife crimes, and the death of honey-bees are being discussed. How we gain knowledge of other species and creatures is one important issue in focus. What does, for example, the notion of wonderment play in this production of knowledge? How were species classified in pre-Christian Europe? How is the relationship between domesticated and farmed animals and humans practiced and understood? How is it portrayed in literature, or in contemporary social media? Many animals are key actors in these discussions, such as dogs, cows, bees, horses, pigeons, the brown bear, just to mention a few, as well as some creatures more difficult to classify as either humans or animals. All of these play a part in the questions that is at the core of the investigations carried out in this volume: How to produce knowledge that creates possibilities for an ethically and environmentally sustainable future.
Species at War? The Animal and the Anthropocene
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Environmental politics has become inextricably entwined with planetary deep time. This article calls for a reconceptualization of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. It rejects the ontological singularity of the human, either as a biological species (Homo) or as a planetary super-agent (Anthropos) and argues for a perspective centred on companionship and shared vulnerability. Animal philosophy serves here to counter a growing tendency to generalize and address the human species at large, in the singular. The cultural force of the animal, it is suggested, stems from a productive tension between the abstract singular (‘the Animal’) and the unique specificity of each particular nonhuman other. In the context of Anthropocene Studies, references to Anthropos follow a similar logic. The planetary future of humans cannot be deduced from any specific geopolitical context or expressed through universalizing categories. It must be understood, against the vertiginous backdrop of g...
Introduction: Human-Animal Relationships From a Long-Term Perspective
Current Swedish Archaeology, 2020
Humans, like other animals, are inextricably bound to their local complex web-of-life and cannot exist outside of relationally interwoven ecosystems. Humans are, as such, rooted in a multispecies universe. Human and non-human animals in their variety of forms and abilities have been commensal, companions, prey, and hunters, and archaeology must take this fundamental fact – the cohabiting of the world – to heart. Human societies are, therefore, not so much human as web-of-species societies. Recently, anthropological theory has explored non-modern societies from the perspective of an anthropology of life which incorporates relationality of local humans and non-human animals, a pursuit that is significant for the diverse contributions in this special section of Current Swedish Archaeology: a themed section which deals with past multispecies intra-actions in a long-term perspective.
Introduction: Human-Animal Relations
Environment and Society: Advances in Research, vol. 4, 2013
In studying the lives and livelihoods of human beings, the social sciences and humanities oft en fi nd their lines of inquiry tugged in the direction of other, nonhuman beings. When Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) suggested that "thinking with" animals was relevant and fruitful to the study of humankind, scholars began to follow these leads with academic rigor, enthusiasm, and creativity. Propelled into the new millennium by the passion of the environmental movement, compounded by natural and anthropogenic disaster, and now entrenched in the discourse of the Anthropocene, recent scholarship has simultaneously called into question the validity of human exceptionalism and expanded our social and political worlds to include animals and myriad other nonhuman beings. Th is move is paradoxical: as the signifi cance of human action on this planet has increased, the category of the human is continually challenged and redrawn. While contemporary posthumanist critique rethinks the importance of animals and strives to destabilize long-standing ontological exceptions, it does so just as the eff ects of human presence overwhelmingly single out our species as the dominant agents of planetary change (see Chakrabarty 2009; Steff en, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007).
Animals in Our Midst: An Introduction
2021
In this introduction we describe how the world has changed for animals in the Anthropocene—the current age, in which human activities have influenced the planet on a scale never seen before. In this era, we find many different types of animals in our midst: some—in particular livestock—are both victims of and unwittingly complicit in causing the Anthropocene. Others are forced to respond to new environmental conditions. Think of animals that due to climate change can no longer survive in their native habitats or wild animals that in response to habitat loss and fragmentation are forced to live in urban areas. Some animals are being domesticated or in contrast de-domesticated, and yet others are going extinct or in contrast are being resurrected. These changing conditions have led to new tensions between humans and other animals. How can we shape our relationships with all these different animals in a rapidly changing world in such a way that both animal welfare and species diversity...