Kirjahaku

What are our attitudes towards other animals, and how does this affect our humanity? This work of anthrozoology explores 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. This book looks at case studies covering blood sports (such as hunting, fishing and bull fighting), pet keeping and ‘petishism’, eco-tourism and wildlife conservation, working animals and animals as food. It addresses the idea of animal exploitation raised by the animal rights movements, 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.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the UK, Southern Africa and Spain, Human-Animal Farm examines a varied array of often conflicting relationships which are enacted between human and nonhuman animals involved in agricultural production networks. It explores the ways in which humans think about and interact with others, human and nonhuman alike, in pursuit of a rural livelihood, whilst situating and interpreting these human experiences in relation to the actions and experiences of the nonhuman animals involved. An important contribution to the growing field of multi-species ethnography, the book challenges the notion of human exceptionalism which lies at the core of much anthropological disciplinary identity. Focusing on the perspectives and experiences of the nonhuman as well as the human actors involved in social interactions, it opens the possibility of including animals as social actors in their own right, thus developing new understandings of intersubjectivity and highlighting the importance of a cross-disciplinary approach in our understanding of multi-species relationships. A rich, multi-sited and multi-species study that points to the methodological possibilities for future research, Human-Animal Farm will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers undertaking research into human-animal relations and rural livelihoods, as well as scholars and students of anthrozoology.