Humans And Animals Intersecting Lives And Worlds

Addressing the non-human animal from the standpoint of various social and cultural constructions from a global and multidisciplinary perspective, this volume seeks to draw attention to the complexity of the underlying issues and the manifold dimensions of the animal-human bond.

A personal journey into our evolving relationships with animals, and a thought-provoking look at how those bonds are being challenged and reformed across disciplines We love animals, but does that make the animals' lives any happier? With factory farms, climate change and deforestation, this might be the worst time in history to be an animal. If we took animals' experiences seriously, how could we eat, think and live differently? How to Love Animals is a lively and important portrait of our evolving relationship with animals, and how we can share our planet fairly. Mance works in a slaughterhouse and on a pig farm to explore the reality of eating meat and dairy. He explores our dilemmas over hunting wild animals, over-fishing the seas, visiting zoos and saving wild spaces. What might happen if we extended the love we show to our pets to other sentient beings? In an age of extinction and pandemics, our relationship with animals has become unsustainable. Mance argues that there has never been a better time to become vegetarian or vegan, and that the conservation movement can flourish, if people in wealthy countries shrink their footprint. Mance seeks answers from chefs, farmers, activists, philosophers, politicians and tech visionaries who are redefining how we think about animals. Inspired by the author's young daughters, his book is a story of discovery and hope that outlines how we can find a balance with animals that fits with our basic love for them.

Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter. It works toward a more radical politics and theory directed at the shifting boundary between human and animal. Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures with original case studies in order to see how efforts by some humans to control and order life – human and not – violate, constrain, and impinge upon others. Central to all chapters is a commitment to grappling with the stakes – violence, death, life, autonomy – of human-animal encounters. Equally, the work in the collection addresses head-on the dominant forces shaping and dependent on these encounters: capitalism, racism, colonialism, and so on. In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections series

Living with Animals is a collection of imagined animal guides—a playful and accessible look at different human-animal relationships around the world. Anthropologists and their co-authors have written accounts of how humans and animals interact in labs, in farms, in zoos, and in African forests, among other places. Modeled after the classic A World of Babies, an edited collection of imagined Dr. Spock manuals from around the world—With Animals focuses on human-animal relationships in their myriad forms. This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read. If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.

Leading feminist scholars and activists as well as new voices introduce and explore themes central to contemporary ecofeminism. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth first offers an historical, grounding overview that situates ecofeminist theory and activism and provides a timeline for important publications and events. This is followed by contributions from leading theorists and activists on how our emotions and embodiment can and must inform our relationships with the more than human world. In the final section, the contributors explore the complexities of appreciating difference and the possibilities of living less violently. Throughout the book, the authors engage with intersections of gender and gender non-conformity, race, sexuality, disability, and species. The result is a new up-to-date resource for students and teachers of animal studies, environmental studies, feminist/gender studies, and practical ethics.

Riding, hunting, fishing, bullfighting: Human-animal relations are diverse. This anthology presents various case studies of situations in which humans and animals come into contact and asks for the anthropological and philosophical implications of such encounters. The contributions by renowned scholars such as Albert Piette and Kazuyoshi Sugawara present multidisciplinary methodological reflections on concepts such as embodiment, emplacement, or the »conditio animalia« (in addition to the »conditio humana«) as well as a consideration of the term »situationality« within the field of anthropology.

Animal studies is a growing interdisciplinary field that incorporates scholarship from public policy, sociology, religion, philosophy, and many other areas. In essence, it seeks to understand how humans study and conceive of other-than-human animals, and how these conceptions have changed over time, across cultures, and across different ways of thinking. This interdisciplinary introduction to the field boldly and creatively foregrounds the realities of nonhuman animals, as well as the imaginative and ethical faculties that humans must engage to consider our intersection with living beings outside of our species. It also compellingly demonstrates that the breadth and depth of thinking and humility needed to grasp the human-nonhuman intersection has the potential to expand the dualism that currently divides the sciences and humanities. As the first holistic survey of the field, Animal Studies is essential reading for any student of human-animal relationships and for all people who care about the role nonhuman animals play in our society.

Many contemporary explanations of conscious human experience, relying either upon neuroscience or appealing to a spiritual soul, fail to provide a complete and coherent theory. These explanations, the author argues, fall short because the underlying explanatory constituent for all experience are not entities, such as the brain or a spiritual soul, but rather relation and the unique way in which human beings form relations. This alternative frontier is developed through examining the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger and the semiotic theory of Charles S. Peirce. While both of these thinkers independently provide great insight into the difficulty of accounting for human experience, this volume brings these insights into a new complementary synthesis. This synthesis opens new doors for understanding all aspects of conscious human experience, not just those that can be quantified, and without appealing to a mysterious spiritual principle.

A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.