Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions (Anthropology, Culture and Society) [Paperback]

This book by Samantha Hurn introduces readers to an area of growing anthropological significance – how humans relate to the animal world and their own place in it through a myriad practical engagements and ideational entanglements. She does this with reference to debates about food, science, conservation, sexuality, and virtually every other subject that has a bearing on our humanity. We are provided with a highly useful overview of the subject, connecting our mundane experiences of living amongst animals, to philosophical notions of ‘human exceptionalism’ and the heady methodological possibility of ‘multi-species’ ethnography. Hurn brings coherence to a large and diverse literature, in a clear and accessible way, that will make this book a refreshingly novel text for beginning students, as well as stimulating a wider interest in an intelligent discussion of human-animals relations. (Roy Ellen, Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology, University of Kent Canterbury )

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.

Samantha Hurn explores the work of anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines concerned with the growing field of anthrozoology. 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.

Key debates surrounding these issues are raised and assessed and, in the process, readers are encouraged to consider their own attitudes towards other animals and, by extension, what it means to be human.

Samantha Hurn is Lecturer in Anthropology, and launched an award winning MA in Anthrozoology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She has recently been appointed to the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Exeter and is now establishing an MA in Anthrozoology there. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Wales, Andalusia, South Africa and Swaziland.