Edition: Santiago M. Cruzada; Olatz González-Abrisketa
Year of publication: 2024
Language: Spanish
Format: free ebook, downloadable here
Collection: Biblioteca de Antropología (Biblioteca de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares hasta 2019)
Abstract:
Animals are a constituent part of human life, just as we, as human animals, belong in one way or another to their worlds. It is difficult to imagine how we could define ourselves or identify ourselves as humans if not with other animals. Human-animal studies, an academic field that has grown exponentially in the last two decades, addresses the diversity of these relationships to understand how we imagine, experience, and ultimately shape them. This new “turn” in anthropology stresses both the object, method and representation in the discipline, as well as the pillars of the humanist project on which it was built, renewing interest in concepts such as relationship, agency, personality, or the human, but also in the dense plots that tie us to history, language, politics, society or culture. This task requires a gaze that goes “beyond the human” and is interested in the mutual influences and cares, the asymmetries, the affective bonds and the violence that mark the coexistence with other beings. In this endeavor, this volume presents fifteen stories between humans and animals that occur throughout the length and breadth of Spain. All of them explore paths where contingencies, challenges, problems and events are not only human, and where a diversity of creatures (partridges, roosters, tuna, bulls, cats, dogs, bears, wolves, sheep, horses, cows, goats, pigs, pigs, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, sheeps, goats, pigs, pigs, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, sheep and goats, pigs and goats, pigs and goats) are not only human.