"Structures of Captivity and Animal Agency, The London Zoo, ca. 1865 to the Present Times," Chiara Mengozzi (ed.), Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies, New York/London, Routledge, 2020, 40-57. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Outside the Anthropological Machine. Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies
London-New York, Routledge , 2020
In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.
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.
Exploring the Animal Turn: Human-animal relations in Science, Society and Culture
2014
Animals' omnipresence in human society makes them both close to and ye tremarkably 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...
Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations
Annals of Science, 2013
In 2005 a small group of academics gathered at the University of Western Australia for a modest yet highly significant interdisciplinary conference focused on scholarship in the emerging field of human-animal studies. A critical mass of academics from the University of Tasmania attended that first conference and pledged to host a second human-animal studies conference two years later. True to their word a second human-animal studies conference was held in Hobart, Australia, in 2007. The organisers called the second conference "Considering Animals" and the book under review here is a compilation of papers presented at that conference. The first striking feature of the book Considering Animals (hardback version), is the artwork on the dust jacket (Figure 1). While some may not pay a book's dust jacket much heed, I view Considering Animals stunning cover-art as quite a coup. In an age of publishing rationalisation and belt-tightening, I imagine that the editors must have fought hard for permission to display a colour image on the book's cover; and for the inclusion of such a large number of pictures throughout the book. If this is the case, then their persistence paid off. Not only is Yvette Watt's cover-art beautiful and thought provoking in and of itself, it also serves to remind readers that this book is dealing with a highly interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Human-animal studies is not only about words. It is about images, representation, art and interpretation. One of the most noteworthy features of the biannual Australian Animal Studies Group, and the Minding Animals, conferences is the extent to which visual and other creative artists contribute to the field. With the use of such powerful cover-art the editors give effect to the contribution made by creative arts to the emerging discipline of human-animal studies. The book opens with a forward by well-known ecologist Marc Becoff and an introduction by two of the book's editors: Carol Freeman and Elizabeth Leane. The remainder of the book consists of 14 papers by (often prominent) academics, all of who presented at the 2007 University of Tasmania "Considering Animals" conference.
Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans: Blurring boundaries in human-animal relationships
International Library of Environmental Agriculture and Food Ethics, 2016
This book provides reflection on the increasingly blurry boundaries that characterize the human-animal relationship. In the Anthropocene humans and animals have come closer together and this asks for rethinking old divisions. Firstly, new scientific insights and technological advances lead to a blurring of the boundaries between animals and humans. Secondly, our increasing influence on nature leads to a rethinking of the old distinction between individual animal ethics and collectivist environmental ethics. Thirdly, ongoing urbanization and destruction of animal habitats leads to a blurring between the categories of wild and domesticated animals. Finally, globalization and global climate change have led to the fragmentation of natural habitats, blurring the old distinction between in situ and ex situ conservation. In this book, researchers at the cutting edge of their fields systematically examine the broad field of human-animal relations, dealing with wild, liminal, and domestic animals, with conservation, and zoos, and with technologies such as biomimicry. This book is timely in that it explores the new directions in which our thinking about the human-animal relationship are developing. While the target audience primarily consists of animal studies scholars, coming from a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethology, literature, and film studies, many of the topics that are discussed have relevance beyond a purely theoretical one; as such the book also aims to inspire for example biologists, conservationists, and zoo keepers to reflect on their relationship with animals.
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).
we , animals. Artistic Positions on Human-Animal Relations. (catalogue)
The concept for the project and exhibition series »we , animals« is based on a view of human-animal relations as defined in Human-Animal Studies. They are viewed as having developed over the course of history, being in a constant state of flux and which, in our dealings with animals, are continuously being produced and reproduced anew. Addressing the agency of animals in societal spaces leads to one of the core issues: how can we perceive animals as independent actors within historical, social and cultural processes? For the five projects I invited 10 artists whose works reflect upon our language and actions concerning animals on a daily basis. They throw light on specific interactions, human misconceptions and contradictions in relation to animals. They challenge the rigid categories that are applied to animals as working animals, livestock, mythical figures, pets or beasts. Their scientific references and performative or activist approaches helped shape the curatorial concept. This catalogue published by the curator Anne Hoelck documents the selected artistic contributions to the current debate on human-animal relations. It is enriched by the essays »Deconstructing the Anthropological Machine« by Jessica Ullrich and »Animal Biographies« by Stephan Zandt.
Animals, 2010
Simple Summary: The impact that the divide between human and nonhuman animals, between nature and culture, actually has on the planet, on nonhuman animals, cannot be underestimated. The divide is a socially constructed separation, an 'othering', of all life on the planet, and has been imposed and systematically used by humanity in order to exploit nonhuman animals and utilise the environment without little thought as to the ramifications. The paper examines such complex questions as 'what is nature?', 'what is an animal?' and 'what does it mean to be human?' Issues considered include species concepts, nature culture dualisms, and the human place within animality. What is recommended is an an urgent need for the adoption of an ethic of ecological inclusion.
Humanimalia, 2022
Review of: Chiara Mengozzi (ed.): Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human–Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, Routledge, London, 2021, 283 pages.
Beasts and boundaries: An introduction to animals in sociology, science and society
Qualitative Sociology Review, 2007
Traditionally, sociology has spent much more time exploring relationships between humans, than between humans and other animals. However, this relative neglect is starting to be addressed. For sociologists interested in human identity construction, animals are symbolically important in functioning as a highly complex and ambiguous “other”. Theoretical work analyses the blurring of the human-animal boundary as part of wider social shifts to postmodernity, whilst ethnographic research suggests that human and animal identities are not fixed but are constructed through interaction. After reviewing this literature, the second half of the paper concentrates on animals in science and shows how here too, animals (rodents and primates in particular) are symbolically ambiguous. In the laboratory, as in society, humans and animals have unstable identities. New genetic and computer technologies have attracted much sociological attention, and disagreements remain about the extent to which humana...