Presentation: Animals in anthropology

Animals are not new to anthropology. Since the early days of the discipline they appear in rituals, classifications and symbols. Animals are hunted, raised, domesticated, eaten, feared and venerated. Of course anthropology is generically defined as the discipline that studies "man", and it is thus common that animals only appear in a supporting role: they are part of the scenery described, assistants in activities or a means to help understand how humans think and organize themselves in the world. One of the many consequences of this attitude was to authenticate the generalized idea that animals are seen as resources of all sorts of types, given that they only appear as part of ecosystems -cultures or societies -which are anthropically centered. Animals have thus been relegated in the traditional anthropological project to figurative functional or mediating roles in contrast to the majesty of human agency. 1 To some degree, this dossier is part of an agenda that is critical of this more traditional posture, and accompanies a set of debates that have been expanding in the discipline and that shift animals from their position as simple appendixes of humans or as elements in the environment, to position them in the foreground of ethnographies, making more visible how the lives of animals and humans interact and are co-produced.

2016

Society and Animals, 2002

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...

What do animals mean to us? What did they mean to people in the past? Why do we kill and eat them, but also worship and love them? This course explores human-animal relationships thematically from an archaeological perspective. The relationships evidenced in the archaeological record will be oriented by broader works from the field of human-animal studies to assess the variable ways that humans may engage with animals, and how animals are instrumental in framing human subjectivities.

Society & Animals, 1993

cemus.uu.se

7, 5 hp Period: 6/12-10/12 (week 49) 2010, 100 % Credits: 7, 5 hp/ECTS Required qualifications: PhD students from all disciplines. Master students may be accepted. Form: One full time week with lectures and seminars. Requirements: Attendance and active involvement in lectures and seminar discussions, written composition.

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...

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.