Animals and non-humans

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

"If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals." This essay argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'becoming-animal' offers a a supple framework for reading the nonhuman outside the templates provided by psychoanalysis and structuralism. At the same time, it argues that 'becoming-animal' entraps the reader at the very moment that it acquires any normative force, because the will to 'become-animal' presupposes a modality of narcissistic ego-formation. It makes these arguments by way of DreamWorks' 'Madagascar' animated film franchise, read through psychoanalytic, structuralist and queer lenses, and pays special attention to despotic lemur King Julien, an "anomalous" figure of cultural mobility.

A well-known definition of music states that what we understand with this term may be subsumed under "humanly organized sound:" This was formulated by John Blacking (1973, 3) in his celebrated book "How Musical is Man?" His proposal, however, was not uncontested, and many authors have tried to complement, contradict, or reaffirm this idea of how the phenomenon music could be framed. What is of interest here is the adverb "humanly," because it limits musical action and appreciation to processes that are essentially human, thereby excluding non-human agency. In this chapter, I will explore how far "the human" can be essentialized in relation to music and in which sense agency beyond the human could be, or even has to be, acknowledged within this context.

Demonic geography is an approach to practicing human geography that operates from the premise that there are no such immaterial entities as 'souls', 'spirits', 'minds', integrated, stable 'selves', or conscious 'free will'. This paper elaborates the theoretical framework of demonic geography by spelling out how it is different from non-representational theory and by articulating it with recent developments in experimental psychology, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind. Counterintuitively, the paper shows that the deflationary, materialistic ontology of human nature espoused by demonic geography need not lead to meaninglessness, unhappiness, or the collapse of moral behaviour. Instead, subscribing to demonic geography opens up new ways to find meaning, to pursue happiness, and to live the good life.

Vulnerable realism can imply two different understandings: one presenting weak realism as incomplete, and mixed with other literary styles; the other bringing realistic vulnerable experience into narration. The second is the key meaning for this work, but it does not exclude the first since the book asks questions about realism as such, entering into a polemic with the tradition of literary realism. Realism, then, is not primarily understood as a narrative style but a narration that tests the probability of nonhuman vulnerable experience and makes it real. 

The book consists of three parts. The first presents examples of how realism has been redefined in trauma studies and how it may refer to animal experience. The second explores that which is added to the narrative by literature, including the animal perspective (a zoonarrative) and how it is done (zoocriticism). The third analyses cultural texts (such as painting, circuses, and memorials) which realistically generate animal vulnerability and provide non-anthropocentric frameworks, anchoring our knowledge in the experience of fragile historical reality.

This study reviews ethological literature and the views of working riders on the manners in which horses communicate nonverbally; explores social-scientific paradigms of human nonverbal communication as presented in the academic discipline of Communication Studies; and outlines crucial ways in which horse-horse, horse-human, and human-horse communication can be viewed using paradigms for human-human nonverbal communication. With this in place, I explore and present photographs of what I have termed horses’ ability for “corporeal synchronicity”—the ability to move in exact, foot-for-foot synchrony with one another—and the meaning this may hold for both human and horse.

Depuis quelques années nous assistons à un tournant épistémologique et théorique majeur dans les études de genre grâce à l’entrée massive dans nos agendas scientifiques d’acteurs non humains tels que les animaux, les forêts, la poussière, les objets, les cyborgs… Ce décentrement de l’humain interroge radicalement les fondements anthropocentriques de nos disciplines et nous oblige à la fois à repenser le genre mais aussi l’animalité, la technologie, la végétation, les enjeux de la construction des espèces et les artefacts au prisme des luttes féministes, anti-patriarcales et anticapitalistes. L’entrée de ces nouveaux sujets dans les études de genre et les luttes féministes conduit à envisager des coalitions politiques inter/trans-espèces dans lesquelles l’humain et le non humain dans toute sa diversité et complexité sont pris en compte de façon holistique, symétrique
et postdualiste. Ce débat permet d’interroger la manière dont les études queer, les études critiques de la race et les études féministes mobilisent le non humain dans les controverses politiques. Ainsi, l’écoféminisme menace-t-il les acquis du féminisme matérialiste ? Les nouvelles alliances qui surgissent entre queers, végans et sorcières risquent-elles de minoriser d’autres groupes, traditionnellement disqualifiés ? Dans le champ intellectuel et/ou politique, l’agentivité des un·e·s s’actualise-t-elle au détriment de celle des autres ? Est-il possible et souhaitable de construire sur ce décentrement de l’humain une convergence des luttes de genre, de race et de sexualité ?

O trabalho busca apontar um conjunto de justificativas para que a teoria sociológica passe a atentar mais profundamente para a relação entre humanos e não-humanos, especialmente para o papel dos animais de estimação na sociedade contemporânea. Discutem-se os impedimentos e resistências ainda encontrados pelo tema no interior da produção sociológica e apresenta-se um panorama daquilo que já vem sendo trabalhado.

Among the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in northeastern Siberia, it is
commonly held that humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking
on one another's bodies. However, this is dangerous for a hunter, because he may thus
lose sight of his original species identity and undergo an irreversible metamorphosis. He
therefore assumes the viewpoint of his prey, but not in any absolute sense, which would
mean literally becoming the animal. This article explores the mimetic practice that allows
the hunter to be similar to the animal impersonated, yet also different, giving him a
'double perspective' by which he can seduce and kill his prey.

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

According to Marianne Dekoven, Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," published in 1985, "signals the end of utopian feminist theory….and the inception of postmodern feminist theory" (1694). Haraway argues that technology constantly challenges gender binaries and in a world of continuous technological advancement, "we become unable to think of ourselves according to these categories or even as merely biological beings" (Richter 1966). She states, "[c]yborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" (Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" 601).

The title of the exhibition alludes to the sense of the approaching catastrophe, the fatal haunting image of the future, the promise of an ending understood in various manners. It refers to the anticipated end of capitalism, the ominous mass species extinction, and the general state of anxiety, which has become the most common model of experiencing the presence. The Anthropocene is not only a notion describing the destructive changes in the external environment but also an internal feeling: fear, tension, and vexation experienced daily by the human body in a very tangible way. One could even speak of the increasing fascination with natural disasters, the fetishisation of dying, functioning not just as a terrifying threat but an inevitable, unchanging, and strongly appealing element of the cultural landscape.

Nonhuman animals are primarily defined according to their form of relation with human beings, which broadly depends on the perceived utility of those animals to humans. These relations may be analyzed to generate typologies, membership of which circumscribes the probable fate of nonhuman animals when they enter into contact with humans. However, these judgments of utility and category membership are contingent and socially constructed, as demonstrated by cultural and historical variability in the species and individual animals assigned to particular types. This paper explores how the combination of childhood literary and film traditions relating to animals and associated promotional food tie-ins aimed at children contribute to a food socialization process whereby children learn to conceptually distance the animals they eat from those with whom they have an emotional bond or for whom they feel ethically responsible. In so doing, we develop a theoretical scheme for the differentiated positioning of animals.

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.

A lo largo del tiempo , los seres humanos hemos construido nuestras vidas junto con los animales . Los cuales  han sido objetos de múltiples investigaciones desde la antropología clásica; tal y como los trabajos propuestos por el antropólogo norteamericano Marvin Harris.

Cabe tener en cuenta que no todas las relaciones  humano/animal se construyen bajo las mismas características . Por el contrario,  cuando se realiza una investigación en torno a estos fines , debemos contemplar  los factores externos que marcan estos vínculos ; tales como los intereses culturales , la posición histórica , las relaciones económicas , simbólicas , políticas;  entre otras.

De esta manera , teniendo en cuenta la incorporación de las mascotas (para este caso los perros) dentro de las estructuras familiares . Este trabajó busca identificar la manera en como los perros  han ocupado un espacio dentro del ciclo de vida familiar . Teniendo en cuenta las condiciones materiales como un factor determinante dentro de la relación humano/animal ; con el objetivo de  evidenciar a partir de un estudio etnográfico , la manera en como los seres humanos se relacionan con las mascotas dentro del contexto familiar bogotano , y a su vez , como estas prácticas  se han extendido en espacios como los centros de belleza  , las guarderías y los cementerios  caninos. Para  finalizar con una discusión  absolutamente innovadora dentro del campo antropológico contemporáneo , la cual contempla la humanización de los animales y la animalización de los humanos.

What exactly is innocence—why are we morally compelled by it? Classic figures of innocence—the child, the refugee, the trafficked victim, and the animal—have come to occupy our political imagination, often aided by the important role of humanitarianism in political life. My goal is to see how innocence, a key ethico-moral concept, has come to structure what we think of as politics in the contemporary Euro-American context—how it maps political possibilities as well as impossibilities. The centrality of innocence to the political imagination is shaped by a search for a space of purity, one that constantly displaces politics to the limit of innocence and thereby renders invisible the structural and historical causes of inequality. We need, then, to open up political, moral, and affective grammars beyond innocence.

In order to develop an identification key for distinguishing between human and non-human osteological samples, bone structure of several animal taxa was studied using quantitative microscopy. Both domestic and wild species were included in the sample, analysed at both micrometric (13 variable parameters) and macrometric (3 variable parameters) scales. The observed data was first used to evaluate inter-and intra-species diversity. Least determinative parameters were then eliminated via stepwise discriminant function analysis. The most discriminating micrometric properties of compact bone tissue appeared to be: number of osteons in 1 mm 2 , maximum osteon diameter, maximum diameter and area of Haversian canal, and mid-shaft femoral cortical thickness. Ultimately, two different equations for discriminating between human and non-human bone are formulated. The first type uses only histometric properties of bone structure. The second type of equations combines histometric measurement and grossest morphometric parameter -cortical thickness. The latter equations correctly predict taxonomic classification in 100% of cases.

Salas Carreño, Guillermo. 2018. “On Quechua Relatedness to Contemporary and Ancient Dead.” In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America. Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs, edited by Juan Javier Rivera, 197–223. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

The rights of nature can be a powerful tool for thinking anew our relationships with so-called "natural beings" conceived as political subjects, and for protecting them against exploitative corporate interests. In this paper, I first inquire into the theory behind this idea and the underlying conceptions of political subjectivity and representation allowing for giving rights to nature. I then analyze some actual cases where rights have been given to nature - notably in Ecuador, Bolivia, the United States, New-Zealand and India - and their relations with the theory.

This paper surveys the zooarchaeological evidence for the practice of hawking in England from its origins up to around AD 1500. Although there are some tantalising possible traces of hawking during the Roman (AD 43–410) and Early Anglo-Saxon (AD 410–650) periods, it became firmly established during the Middle Anglo-Saxon (AD 650–850) and Late Anglo-Saxon (AD 850–1066) periods. It continued to be popular from the Saxo-Norman period (AD 1066–mid-12th century) at least until the end of the 15th century and this time range produced bones from the widest variety of hawking birds. Hawking was potentially practiced by people belonging to various social levels, although it was especially popular amongst elites. However, from the Late Saxon period onwards, there are indications of some distinctions in the types of hawks favoured by different parts of society.

Advocates of veganism frequently present their case holistically, outlining its benefits for nonhuman and human animals and for our shared environment. However, a consistent feature of
‘mainstream’ public discourse on veganism is the tendency to fracture that holistic case. In particular, the case for nonhuman animal liberation tends to be set aside, so as to clear the path
for a reassertion of anthropocentric values that, despite otherwise radical appearances, work to re-entrench speciesist privilege. In this paper, I present a detailed case study of one high-profile example of this process. In October 2008, the prestigious UK periodical, The Ecologist, published
an issue that focused on the issue of ‘meat’-eating. The contributing authors to the issue stressed the anthropocentric benefits of a particular form of ‘meat’-eating, while simultaneously failing to confront the holistic case for veganism.

Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming 命 took a central position. In this article, I present a common pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. I call it the reifying pattern because it consisted in thinking about ming as a hypostasized entity with object-like features. Although external and independent, ming was not endowed with human qualities such as the capacities for empathy, responsivity, and intersubjectivity. The reifica-tion of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting inter-communication with them, thereby causing feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and existential incompetence. I first show that the different meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external reality, and hence can be connected to the overarching meaning of fate. Then, I offer an account of the process of reification of fate in early China and its consequences, theoretical and practical, through cases study of received (Mengzi 孟子) and found (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道) texts. I end with some reflections on the implications of ming as a nonpersonal and nonsubjective type of actor for both early Chinese and twenty-first-century accounts of agency. Overview Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to (sometimes implicit) debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of

Welcome to Aesop’s Anthropology, an effort to theorize culture and society across species lines. This project pursues a basic question: what can we learn about culture from other species? Studies of nonhumans are generating new perspectives on intelligence, media, and
networking, but they’ve yet to impact how we understand sociality. This is because of the notion that culture uniquely characterizes us as a species—much like racial and classed conceits equated culture and cultivation with the highest achievements of European society in the last millennium.
This is also attributable to the dependence of social theorists on the notion of social construction. In this  view, we only ever engage nonhumans through representations, reflections of our cultural conditioning and social order. But the usefulness of social construction—along with certainty about the uniqueness of humans—has eroded. It’s time to recognize that sociality, in its origins and elaborations, begins with nonhumans. We’re late to the game of culture, and it’s time to catch up in our thinking about the social.

This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate agency. Secondly, fat has implications for agency by virtue of the power relationships implied in the act of fattening, which has been repeatedly framed in the West with reference to animal consumption. Discourses of fat and fattening are thus saturated with allegations of failed agency, whether by citing the confining materiality of fat itself or by associating the fattened person with abject animality. After exploring these claims with reference to select examples from classical antiquity, the essay presents surveys how similar ideas mobilized weight-loss discourses from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, by which time most of our current anti-fat thinking had been firmly entrenched.

Dogs were introduced into Indigenous Amazonian groups by the whites during the Conquest of the Americas, and they have since been ubiquitous in the region’s villages. Having quickly spread throughout the South American lowlands, there are few groups which have not established relations with dogs. Even though early travellers and chroniclers – and, later, a few anthropologists – have reported on the role of these animals in villages, the relations between Indians and dogs remains understudied. However, many researchers have informally recorded ethnographic experiences on the theme. Relying on data obtained through interviews with various ethnographers of lowland South America, and also on secondary sources, this dissertation seeks to address this gap in Amazonian ethnology. First, I will focus on the processes that led to the introduction of the dog in the lowlands, and on how the animal is conceived, treated and fed by Amerindian people. Lastly, I will turn to the techniques through which these foreign animals are qualified for hunting and predatory activity. Contrary to what has been described for familiarized pets or (other) domesticated animals (such as chickens), it is necessary to produce dogs as auxiliary animals, or, in other words, as animals whose predatory potential, desired by enemies, is put in the service of human-kinspeople.

Pursuing Animal History as Body History, this paper focuses neither on animals nor on humans, but rather on bodies and the different societal demands made on them. It rejects the simple attribution of a history and an actor- or even subject-status to humans and animals per se. Instead, the paper suggests a historical problematization of the processes that produce humans or animals as having a history and as being actors or even subjects. Against this background, I try to demonstrate the usefulness of distinguishing between a praxeological approach in a broad sense on the one hand and a genealogical perspective in a narrow sense on the other. I thus understand Animal History less as an expanded form of Cultural History, but much more as a special form of Social History, placing at the center of interest neither the nature/culture dichotomy nor the concept of life, but rather the concept of the social.

1. The White Snake Films: Complicating “Hong Kong Horror Cinema”
2. Horror in the White Snake Tales: Sexual Encounters and Their Aftermaths
3. Horror in Early Experimental White Snake Films: the Tokyo and Shanghai Connections
4. The White Snake in Early Commercial Feature Film: Tianyi Film Company, Shanghai, 1926-7
5. Hong Kong-Japan Coproduction: Byaku fujin no yoren, Tokyo, 1956
6. Made in Hong Kong: The Shaw Brothers’ Madam White Snake, 1962
7. Connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan: The Love of the White Snake, 1978
8. Concluding Remarks: from Horrific Tales to Crowd Pleasers

This essay traces several productive points of overlap and departure between the recent philosophical work of Judith Butler and ecological thinking. While ecological philosophers and theorists have often dismissed Butler's treatment of politics and ethics as narrowly anthropocentric, this essay charges that there are considerable conceptual resources within Butler's oeuvre that are not only in accord with much recent ecological theorising but which also stand to enrich our approaches to ecological thinking and politics. Focusing specifically on three conceptual clusters – exposure and precarity; infrastructure and coexistence; and assemblies and assemblages – this essay demonstrates how Butler's work can be leveraged to augment the ways we approach both ecosystems and our more-than-human cohabitants as elements of and actors within the dynamic play of forces that make coexistence more or less possible.

This chapter, co-authored with Y S Lo, discusses the question of whether biodiversity is valuable and relations between biodiversity and other natural values.
This is a pre-publication version of a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics.

El presente Informe presenta datos y reflexiones de índole antropológica en torno al modo indígena de apropiación y uso del medio ambiente tal como se verificara hacia comienzos del siglo XX en el área de influencia de lo que fue, a partir de la primera década del siglo, la Reducción de Indios de Napalpí. Este escrito tiene por objetivos mostrar la racionalidad del modo en que los aborígenes que poblaron la Reducción, en su mayoría Qom o tobas y Moqoit o mocovíes-- ocuparon el espacio de la misma y utilizaron los recursos allí disponibles  Para cumplir con estos objetivos, el Informe se detiene brevemente en la historia y sociología de la Reducción, y su relación con las políticas estatales de tratamiento de la problemática indígena. Más tarde, se revisa el modo en que los aborígenes combinaron sus estrategias socio-económicas con una inserción incipiente en el mercado laboral, y el conocimiento del ambiente puesto en práctica en su uso del espacio. En síntesis, cómo se desarrolló la praxis cazadora-recolectora, que fue el factor clave en la incomprensión por parte de autoridades y colonos blancos, de qué tipo de vida llevaron los habitantes indígenas de la Reducción.

Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history: Persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain. Law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects. Drawing on anthropology and legal scholarship, I will show the links between law and magic. In this endeavor, I examine two groups of legal cases from Argentina where people and animals respectively obtained personhood through the magic of law. First, I analyze the so-called human rights trials that are judging the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), and I argue that these are working to restore the legal personhood of those who enforcedly disappeared. Second, I examine a series of judgments that have recently ruled—for the first time in modern legal history—that orangutans, chimps, and elephants are " non-human persons. " I conclude this Paper by contrasting legal magic with shamanic practices. I argue that even if these two are linked, it is possible to find in some forms of shamanism a different way of framing the relationship between persons/things that can offer an alternative (to) law. * PhD Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London ([email protected]). A previous and shorter version of this Paper was read in the " Persons/Things " Workshop held at the University of Turku, Faculty of Law, Finland, on May 12–13, 2016. I deeply thank the organizers of this event, Toni Selkälä and Mikko Rajavuori, for the invitation to present my work, and to all the participants for the invaluable comments and discussions. As editors of this volume, Toni and Mikko have made very important suggestions to improve this Paper, either indicating sources to explore, things that went unnoticed to the author, or offering incredible ideas to continue exploring. I would like to think that I have reciprocated their intellectual generosity by presenting a work that is now less imperfect than what it was before.

In Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times, Karl Kroeber reminds us "storytelling is perhaps humanity's primary tool for changing reality," and "genuine storytelling is essentially antiauthoritarian." 1 Retelling Fantastic Tales concerns itself with the metamorphoses of fantastic tales in modern East Asian and global contexts. It is particularly interested in the travels of fantastic tales across historical demarcations and geographical boundaries, and how the retelling of these tales in different media function in contemporary politics and popular culture. The following chapters collectively investigate the relationship between fantasy and reality in the retellings of fantastic tales, and the power of such retellings in interrogating, resisting, and shaping reality. Retelling Fantastic Tales shares the three main focuses of the East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture series edited by Professor Zhang Longxi and Professor Wiebke Denecke at Brill, in doing intra-Asian comparisons, East-West comparisons, and multi-polar studies of East Asia in relation to the wider world. It converses well with interdisciplinary works in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, on the central issues of spiritual transformation, sense of belonging, gender and sexuality, the body in performance, and human-animal relations. 1 Karl Kroeber, Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 1992, 3-4. Draft, please do not cite or circulate without permission 2 This volume takes inspiration from the back-to-back seminars I organized at the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association conference at Harvard University, entitled "Retelling Fantastic Tales in East Asian and Global Popular Cultures." Thirteen presenters from Canada, Hong Kong, the United States, and Sweden, ranging from graduate students to established scholars, presented their findings in a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts with a central focus on the metamorphoses of fantastic tales in modern times. There are historians, literary scholars, scholars of performing and visual arts, as well as comparative theorists in our midst. Although not all presentations made it into this volume for various reasons, we want to thank all the presenters for their engaging participations and fruitful exchanges at the conference.

This paper argues that colonial biopolitics and informality co-produce a 'state of exception' for nonhuman animals in cities, based on the socio-political construct of a human/animal binary. This state is enacted by exceptionalising animals as not-persons, and humans as not-animals, and through urbanisation, a uniquely human claim on land. 'Colonial' is understood in an anthropocentric sense of (privileged) human imperialism over nonhumans and poor humans. Informality, a carefully produced condition that is exceptional to formal governance and planning, legitimises the view of animals (and poor humans) as 'trespassers' in urban spaces. This paper examines street canines in Indian cities, demonstrating their marginalisation and eviction at the intersection of colonialism and informality. Last, this paper builds upon ‘subaltern urbanism’ that recognises the agency inherent in marginalised citizens and spaces, to conceptualise ‘subaltern animism’ as a way of acknowledging animal spaces and citizenship in the city.

As an acute observer and critic of his age, Dickens reproduces in his writing the ubiquity of animals in the everyday lives of Victorians as raw material, labour, transport, food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and objects of scientific knowledge. Over the past four decades, animal studies scholars have begun to think seriously about such questions as the permeability of the human/animal distinction, non-human agency,
interspecies structures of feeling, the function of zoological language, and the materiality of animal lives in relation to situated knowledges and practices. Central to this project has been the ethical imperative of how we might think about animals as animals rather than simply as symbols or metaphors to explain human concerns. This chapter assesses
Dickens’s representation of animals in the context of scholarship in both Victorian and human–animal studies, with a view to how such questions might initiate new lines of enquiry for future work in Dickens studies.

Nowhere is the porous threshold that interpolates life into death more tangible than in reproductive behaviours that embed the bodily mortality of their actants at the same time as they seek to extend those bodies in replicated biological code. This paper explores the death/life ecologies that flourish along the queered axes of spider reproductive behaviours—from cannibalistic sex to matricidal birth—and how the affective language and concepts through which these behaviours are understood both reflect and distort heteronormative human accounts of gender/sex, life/death. Our understanding of this behaviour is underwritten by accounts of spider sex roles that borrow from anthropomorphic gender tropes: the disinterested/passive female, the active/performative male, the deceptive conceit of the sexual lure. These accounts are buoyed by popular media narratives, supported by scientific observation, and, as has been argued, written into scientific practice and theory in ways that ‘naturalize’ misogynistic conceptions of gender/sexual relations and violence. Implied in spider sex stories is the thrill of possible death, in which mortality becomes both eroticized and biologically rationalized. The teleological outcome of ‘reproductive sex’—generation of spider progeny—also embeds a deathly caution: potential cannibalism of the mother by her children, overwritten in scientific and popular accounts as an altruistic act of ‘maternal self-sacrifice’. This paper seeks to recalibrate storied accounts of spider death rites through a critical, creative posthumanist approach to nonhuman life as zoë (Braidotti). It presents a queered reading of fatal arachnid narratives of sex/birth in which death is not violence or programmatic terminus, but a zoëtic expression of desire as conatus: endlessly reaching for affirmative becomings through (re)productive cominglings of bodies—whether by penetration, modulation, ingestion, absorption. A spiderly weaving together of sex and death thus effects the conditions for the creative survival (inherence) of life itself.

Para aproximarnos al mundo de manera analítica es preciso "disecarlo" a partir de categorías que agrupen elementos que posean rasgos comunes para observarlos luego de manera conjunta. Así, vamos dotando a estas etiquetas clasificatorias de atributos, significados y las organizamos en esquemas clasificatorios que confieren orden a una escena que, al principio, parece sujeta por el caos. Cuando nos enfrentamos a la zoología de otras sociedades, lo hacemos con el bagaje de nuestras propias categorías clasificatorias del entorno biológico que, en numerosas ocasiones, se enfrentan y se ponen en perspectiva con la manera diferente que esos "otros" tienen de concebirse en relación a los animales. A este ejercicio se han dedicado numerosos etnógrafos quienes lograron cuestionar la propuesta occidental que ubica a la naturaleza en la esfera de "lo dado" y a la cultura en el terreno de "lo construido".

Philosophers frequently focus on the differences between humans and (non-human) animals. To be sure, there is much to say about the differences in perception, movement, sensation, and the world-directedness of humans and specific animals. In this paper, however, with the help of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Helmuth Plessner's phenomenological approaches, I want to focus on what humans and specific animals have in common. Concretely, I will try to investigate in what sense humans and some (non-human) animals (can) share lasting situations and therefore share habits acquired in these situations. To share a situation does not merely mean that both humans and animals are spatially or temporally situated, i.e. that we have a common environment or habitat. Instead, sharing a situation presupposes the direct contact, participation, and interaction of agents that extends over a longer period of time. As such, I want to argue that one essential characteristic of such situations, namely the one that makes it sustainable and particular at the same time, is the formation of habits in both humans and animals. In this sense, situations and lasting habits in agents mutually presuppose each other. In the first part of my paper, I will present the general conditions of embodiment that human and animals have in common and that make it possible to share situations. In the second part, I refer to examples of concrete situations we (can) share with animals: how we interact, mutually respond to each other, but also how we indirectly attune our behavior to one another or to the respectively generated situation. Consequently, I want to argue that we not only have experiences and habits in common with animals with similar embodiment and sensory experiences, but rather that we can share experiences and habits in a stronger sense, that is to say, that we develop habits together in repeated cooperation.