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Living Beings examines the vital characteristics of social interactions between living beings, including humans, other animals and trees. Many discussions of such relationships highlight the exceptional qualities of the human members of the category, insisting for instance on their religious beliefs or creativity. In contrast, the international case studies in Living Beings dissect views based on hierarchical oppositions between human and other living beings. Although human practices may sometimes appear to exist in a realm beyond nature, they are nevertheless subject to the pull of natural forces. These forces may be brought into prominence through a consideration of the interactions between human beings and other inhabitants of the natural world.
The interplay in Living Beings between social anthropologists, philosophers and artists cuts across species divisions to examine the experiential dimensions of interspecies engagements. In ethnographically and/or historically contextualized chapters, contributors examine the juxtaposition of human and other living beings in the light of themes such as wildlife safaris, violence, difference, mimicry, simulation, spiritual renewal, dress and language.
Introduction: Living Beings and Vital Powers
Penny Dransart, University of Wales, Trinity St David, UK
Interspecies Interaction
Being-together with Animals: Death, Violence and Non-cruelty in Hindu Imagination.
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Symbolic Meanings Between People and Trees/Forests
The Nature of Nature in Ramon Llull
Sarah Jane Boss, Roehampton University, UK
The Tree of Guernica: Political Poetics of Rootedness and Belonging
Safet Hadzimuhamedovic, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Bringing the Forest to the City: Spaces Imagined in Israeli ‘Sacred Song Circles’
Ronit Grossman-Horesh, The Open University of Israel/Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Interspecies Interaction in Physical Settings
Sensuous Photographies: Living Things Explored through Phenomenological Practice
Carole Baker, University of Plymouth, UK
The Field: An Art Experiment in Biopower in a Woodland Near Stansted Airport, Essex
Alana Jelinek, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK
Human Responses to ‘Wildness’
Hunting the Wild ‘Other’ to Become a Man: wildlife Tourism and the Modern Identity Crisis in Israeli Safaris to East Africa
Rachel Ben David, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Becoming Animal in the Chinese Martial Arts
D. S. Farrer, University of Guam, Guam
Moral Issues in Engagements Between Animals and the Environment
'Anthropomorphism', 'Anthropocentrism' and the Study of Language in Primates
David Cockburn, University of Wales, Trinity St David, UK
Dressed in Furs: Clothing and Yaghan Multispecies Engagements in Tierra del Fuego
Penelope Dransart, University of Wales, Trinity St David, UK
Bibliography
Index - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/living-beings-9780857858429/#sthash.yZTtTfVP.dpuf
Penelope Dransart is Reader in Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.
