- Publisher: Pluto Press
- ISBN: 9780745331195
- Price: $32.00 CAD
- Publication Date: Jul 2012
- Rights: Canada
- Pages: 228
unavailable until Jul 2012
Examination Copy
Professors/Instructors in Canada: We will provide examination copies of our books for consideration as course texts. We do reserve the right to limit examination copy requests and/or to provide books on a pre-payment or approval basis.
Request Exam CopyHumans and Other Animals
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions
Samantha Hurn
Humans and Other Animals is about the myriad and evolving ways in which humans and animals interact, the divergent cultural constructions of humanity and animality found around the world, and individual experiences of other animals.
Case studies from a wide range of cultural contexts are discussed, and readers are invited to engage with a diverse range of human-animal interactions including blood sports (such as hunting, fishing and bull-fighting), pet-keeping and ‘petishism’, eco-tourism and wildlife conservation, working animals and animals as food. The idea of animal exploitation raised by the animal rights movements is considered, as well as the anthropological implications of changing attitudes towards animal personhood, and the rise of a posthumanist philosophy in the social sciences more generally.
Contents
1. Why Look at Human-Animal Interactions?
2. A History of ‘Animality’
3. Continuity and Difference
4. The ‘West’ and the Rest: Conflicting Ideas About Animals and ‘Animality’
5. Animal Domestication: Human ‘Domination’ Over Nature?
6. Good to Think: Animal Classification and Symbolism
7. Good to Eat: Dietary Taboos Reconsidered
8. Petishism: a Cross Cultural Look at Pets and their Owners
9. Inter-species Communication
10. Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: The Power of Animals in Human Relationships
11. Ethnoprimatology
12. Animals, Science and Medicine
13. Conservation in Action
14. ‘Hunting’ and Blood Sports in Cultural Context
15. Animal Rights and Wrongs
16. Overcoming Anthropocentricity: A new Challenge for Anthropology
About the Author
Samantha Hurn is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David where she convenes an award-winning MA programme in Anthrozoology. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Wales, Andalusia, South Africa and Swaziland.