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Consumable Metaphors
This book studies the various definitions of animal nature proposed by nineteenth-century currents of thought in France. It is based on an examination of a number of key thinkers and writers, some well known (for example, Michelet and Lamartine), others largely forgotten (for example, Gleizes and Reynaud). At the centre of the book lies the idea that knowledge of animals is often knowledge of something else, that the primary referentiality is overlaid with additional levels of meaning. In nineteenth-century France thinking about animals (their future and their past) became a way of thinking about power relations in society, for example about the status of women and the problem of the labouring classes. This book analyses how animals as symbols externalize and mythologize human fears and wishes, but it also demonstrates that animals have an existence in and for themselves and are not simply useful counters functioning within discourse.
The Beast in the Boudoir
Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding—all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more m...
The Great Apes
A unique, beautifully illustrated exploration of our fascination with our closest primate relatives, and the development of primatology as a discipline This insightful work is a compact but wide-ranging survey of humankind’s relationship to the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans), from antiquity to the present. Replete with fascinating historical details and anecdotes, it traces twists and turns in our construction of primate knowledge over five hundred years. Chris Herzfeld outlines the development of primatology and its key players and events, including well-known long-term field studies, notably the pioneering work by women such as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. Herzfeld seeks to heighten our understanding of great apes and the many ways they are like us. The reader will encounter apes living in human families, painting apes, apes who use American Sign Language, and chimpanzees who travelled in space. A philosopher and historian specializing in primatology, Herzfeld offers thought-provoking insights about our perceptions of apes, as well as the boundary between “human” and “ape” and what it means to be either.
