Presentation

Abstract

Animals are not new to anthropology. Since the early days of the discipline they appear in rituals, classifications and symbols. Animals are hunted, raised, domesticated, eaten, feared and venerated. Of course anthropology is generically defined as the discipline that studies "man", and it is thus common that animals only appear in a supporting role: they are part of the scenery described, assistants in activities or a means to help understand how humans think and organize themselves in the world. One of the many consequences of this attitude was to authenticate the generalized idea that animals are seen as resources of all sorts of types, given that they only appear as part of ecosystems -cultures or societies -which are anthropically centered. Animals have thus been relegated in the traditional anthropological project to figurative functional or mediating roles in contrast to the majesty of human agency.1 To some degree, this dossier is part of an agenda that is critical of this more traditional posture, and accompanies a set of debates that have been expanding in the discipline and that shift animals from their position as simple appendixes of humans or as elements in the environment, to position them in the foreground of ethnographies, making more visible how the lives of animals and humans interact and are co-produced.In this critical direction, Rebeca Cassidy (2007), when discussing the literature about domestication, makes explicit references to how the anthropological tradition can be understood in terms of humans' relationship with animals (and with plants). For Cassidy, the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture were treated in the discipline in terms that are similar to the explanation of the passage from savagery to barbarity and from the affirmation of civilization, to the defeat of a feminine mode of the world, and the consolidation of private property. This anthropological posture mirrored zoological thinking, which emphasized human control over plants, animals and "primitive" peoples and incorporated1 The famous controversy between Marvin Harris (1976) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1983a, 1983b emblematically illustrates this tendency. In Harris' cultural ecology, societies were understood as a cultural adaptation to pressures from their natural environments. In Levi-Strauss's structuralism, we find the idea that mythic thinking organizes certain salient elements of the empiric world in signifying systems. Thus, in a non-exclusive reduction, nature, including animals, in both cases, are an objectifiable externality. For Harris they are inscribed in a naturalistic semantic (animals are good for the environment or good for evolving) and in Lévi-Strauss' structural semiotic they are good for thinking. A significant change in the anthropological perspective on animals began to take shape with the work of Philippe Descola, in particular in the realm of his anthropology of nature. Dscola indicates that (i) nature cannot be considered as a universal condition (or as a category) upon whic...

Smallholders and pigs in northern Uganda : an ethnographic study of pig rearing, disease management and local knowledges

“…A similar shift has taken place regarding perceptions and explorations of animals within anthropology at large and, as mentioned briefly above, including the sub-field of medical anthropology (Mullin 2002;Brown & Nading 2019). Although many anthropological texts from a variety of subfields still tend to approach animals much as a means to acquire a better understanding of how humans think and organise themselves, there has been a shift away from the entirely anthropocentric anthropological approaches of the past towards placing animals in the foreground of ethnographies (Mullin 2002;Segata & Lewgoy 2016). This has meant that animals and other nonhuman actors no longer remain on the margins "as part of the landscape, as food for human beings or as symbols" (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010:545).…”