Read more
About the author
Samantha Hurn is Lecturer in Anthropology and Director of the MA Programme in Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Humans and Other Animals: Human-Animal Interactions in Cross-Cultural Perspective and editor of Modern Myths, Unusual Heritage, and Anthropology and Cryptozoology: Researching Encounters with Mysterious Creatures.
Summary
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.
