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"Human-animal relationships-History"
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Animals as domesticates
Drawing on the latest research in archaeozoology, archaeology, and molecular biology, Animals as Domesticates traces the history of the domestication of animals around the world. From the llamas of South America and the turkeys of North America, to the cattle of India and the Australian dingo, this fascinating book explores the history of the complex relationships between humans and their domestic animals. With expert insight into the biological and cultural processes of domestication, Clutton-Brock suggests how the human instinct for nurturing may have transformed relationships between predator and prey, and she explains how animals have become companions, livestock, and laborers. The changing face of domestication is traced from the spread of the earliest livestock around the Neolithic Old World through ancient Egypt, the Greek and Roman empires, South East Asia, and up to the modern industrial age.
eBook
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call \"culture,\" she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the \"question of the animal.\"
eBook
Beastly : the 40,000-year story of animals and us
\"Animals have shaped our minds, our lives, our land, and our civilization. Humanity would not have gotten very far without them--making use of their labor for transportation, agriculture, and pollination; their protection from predators; and their bodies for food and to make clothing, music, and art. And over the last two centuries, humans have made unprecedented advances in science, technology, behavior, and beliefs. Yet how is it that we continue to destroy the animal world and lump its magnificence under the sterile concept of biodiversity? In Beastly, author Keggie Carew seeks to re-enchant readers with the wild world, reframing our understanding of what it is like to be an animal and what our role is as humans. She throws readers headlong into the mind-blowing, heart-thumping, glittering pageant of life, and goes in search of our most revealing encounters with the animal world throughout the centuries. How did we domesticate animals and why did we choose sheep, goats, cows, pigs, horses, and chickens? What does it mean when a gorilla tells a joke or a fish thinks? Why does a wren sing? Beastly is a gorgeously written, deeply researched, and intensely felt journey into the splendor and genius of animals and the long, complicated story of our interactions with them as humans.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Animals of Spain
An overlooked area in the burgeoning field of animal studies is explored: the way nonhuman animals in the early modern Spanish empire were valued companions, as well as economic resources. Montaigne was not alone in his appreciation of animal life.
eBook
An Environmental History of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages was a critical and formative time for Western approaches to our natural surroundings. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages is a unique and unprecedented cultural survey of attitudes towards the environment during this period. Humankind's relationship with the environment shifted gradually over time from a predominantly adversarial approach to something more overtly collaborative, until a series of ecological crises in the late Middle Ages. With the advent of shattering events such as the Great Famine and the Black Death, considered efflorescences of the climate downturn known as the Little Ice Age that is comparable to our present global warming predicament, medieval people began to think of and relate to their natural environment in new and more nuanced ways. They now were made to be acutely aware of the consequences of human impacts upon the environment, anticipating the cyclical, \"new ecology\" approach of the modern world.
Exploring the entire medieval period from 500 to 1500, and ranging across the whole of Europe, from England and Spain to the Baltic and Eastern Europe, John Aberth focuses his study on three key areas: the natural elements of air, water, and earth; the forest; and wild and domestic animals. Through this multi-faceted lens, An Environmental History of the Middle Ages sheds fascinating new light on the medieval environmental mindset. It will be essential reading for students, scholars and all those interested in the Middle Ages
eBook
Social Zooarchaeology
This is the first book to provide a systematic overview of social zooarchaeology, which takes a holistic view of human-animal relations in the past. Until recently, archaeological analysis of faunal evidence has primarily focused on the role of animals in the human diet and subsistence economy. This book, however, argues that animals have always played many more roles in human societies: as wealth, companions, spirit helpers, sacrificial victims, totems, centerpieces of feasts, objects of taboos, and more. These social factors are as significant as taphonomic processes in shaping animal bone assemblages. Nerissa Russell uses evidence derived from not only zooarchaeology, but also ethnography, history and classical studies, to suggest the range of human-animal relationships and to examine their importance in human society. Through exploring the significance of animals to ancient humans, this book provides a richer picture of past societies.
eBook