Outside the Anthropological Machine

Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies

Chiara Mengozzi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000075014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species' arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal's perspective, rather than a human's. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals' experience and perception into human words and visual language.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Ways Out of the Anthropological Machine, or How and Why to Defamiliarize Ourselves
• PART I “Playing a Part in the Dramaturgy of the Real”: (Hi)story on the Side of Animals
• PART II “I Relate, Therefore I Am”: Human-Animal Encounters
• PART III “Across the Narrow Abyss of Non-comprehension”: Entering Animals’ Lives
• Biographical Statements
• Index