www.sagepublications.com the most astonishing fact was not his young age. Hans answered questions by tapping his right foot on the floor. Hans was a horse.How could a horse do that? This was the issue these gentlemen were called upon to investigate. This story had actually begun a few months earlier, when a local newspaper published an article relating the marvellous feats of the horse. Day after day, an increasing number of curious visitors had been coming to the courtyard to observe the horse and his master at work. Scientists and famous people followed. Thus emerged one of the most intense controversies of that time: for some of the people who saw Hans there were no doubts about the accomplishments of the horse, while for others, the story was nothing more than a tale of credulity founded on a fraud. Mr von Osten, offended by the suggestions of fraud, appealed to the board of education in Berlin. A committee was therefore formed, consisting of the 13 gentlemen mentioned. After hours of observation, they all agreed. No signals could be perceived; no tricks like those that are used in the circus with trained animals could be noticed. But the best evidence was that Hans could answer these gentlemen in his master's absence!
The aim of this paper is to explore the different manners in which scientists' bodies are actively engaged when interacting with the animals they observe in the field. Bodies are multiple, as are the practices that involve them: sharing the same diet, feeling similar affects, acting the same, inhabiting the same world of perceptions, constructing empathic affinities, etc. Some scientists aim to embody the animals' experiences. Some are willing to empathetically experience situations "from inside", while others "undo and redo" their own bodies in order to interact more closely with the animals and to respond to them more cautiously. Still others are faced with the question: what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals? All of these practices present a very different version of "embodied empathy", a concept which describes feeling/seeing/thinking bodies that undo and redo each other, reciprocally though not symmetrically, as partial perspectives that attune themselves to each other. Therefore, empathy is not experiencing with one's own body what the other experiences, but rather creating the possibilities of an embodied communication.
When philosophers deal with the issue of the difference between human and animal beings,
Some scientists who study animals have emphasized the need to focus on the "point of view" of the animals they are studying. This methodological shift has led to animals being credited with much more agency than is warranted. However, as critics suggest, on the one hand, the "perspective" of another being rests mostly upon "sympathetic projection," and may be difficult to apply to unfamiliar beings, such as bees or even flowers. On the other hand, the very notion of agency still conveys its classic understanding as intentional, rational, and premeditated, and is still embedded in humanist and Christian conceptions of human exceptionalism. This paper seeks, in the first part, to investigate the practical link between these two notions and the problems they raise. In the second part, following the work of two historians of science who have revisited Darwin's studies of orchids and their pollinators, it will observe a shift in the meaning of the concept of agency. Indeed, creatures may appear as "secret agents" as long as we adopt a conventional definition of agency based on subjective experience and autonomous intention. However, when reframed in the terms of "agencement"-an assemblage that produces "agentivity"-agency seems to be much more extensively shared in the living world. We will then explore some of the concrete situations in which these agencements are manifested, and through which creatures of different species become, one for another and one with another, companion-agents.
In recent decades, in the South of France some young people from urban backgrounds have chosen to become shepherds and to learn to reconnect with the herding practices that many livestock breeders had abandoned under the pressure of agricultural modernization policies. In some cases they have found themselves entrusted with sheep that are as naive about herding as they themselves were. Before their introduction to transhumanceseasonal movement between pastures-these animals were primarily confined and fed indoors or in small fenced areas. The shepherds had to learn how to lead, how to understand other modes of living, how to teach their sheep what is edible and what is not, and how to form a flock; the sheep had to learn how to "compose with" dogs and humans, to acquire new feeding habits, a new ethos, and moreover, new ways of living in an enlarged world. These practices cannot be reduced to a livestock economy: shepherds consider herding a work of transformation and ecological recuperation-of the land, of the sheep, of ways of being together. Learning the "arts of living on a damaged planet," as Anna Tsing has termed it, humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmoecology, creating cosmoecological connections and contributing to what Ghassan Hage has called alter-politics.
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