What makes human–animal relations ‘organizational’? The de-scription of anthrozootechnical agencements (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
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).
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...
The ‘Animal Cause’ and the Social Sciences : from anthropocentrism to zoocentrism
2019
How do the social sciences and humanities deal with human-animal relationships? Between epistemic and political aims, animals have progressed on either side of the Atlantic as legitimate subjects of study and even as political subjects in their own right. This essay is an excerpt from S'engager pour les animaux, a book edited by Fabien Carié and Christophe Traïni and scheduled for publication in February 2019 in the Puf/Vie des idées collection. 'Obscurantism'. This was Jean-Pierre Digard's verdict on a large portion of recent social science and humanities (SSH) studies on human-animal relations. When asked by his colleagues to discuss whether anthropology had taken an 'animal turn', this domestication specialist explained that social changes in the representation of animals have had a direct impact on knowledge production in this regard. According to him, since the nineteenth century and the rise of animal protection, 'animalism' has grown by dint of progressively calling into question the idea that there is a radical boundary between humans and animals. From the 1970s onwards, intellectuals began producing normative theories on the humananimal relations and this then influenced the emergence of SSH research on the topic. In Digard's view, these theories called a second boundary into question: the boundary separating
The event Animal Mind (Mente Animale) organized by SIUA across Italy in 2013 registered a great success of audience. SIUA, the School of Human-Animal Interaction founded and directed by Roberto Marchesini -the well-known cognitive ethologist who is also considered worldwide a leading figure within the field of human-animal interaction -planned in fact several conferences open to everyone who may be interested or intrigued by nonhuman animals lives. The major Italian cities touched by the event throughout the entire year were Turin, Milan, Rome, Verona, Trieste and Bologna. The events hosted scholars, animal rights activists and stakeholders who are in different ways involved in the animal issue in order to spread largely a new way and culture to think about nonhuman animal worlds.