Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements

Description

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 this volume 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 this book 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. Living Beings Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Preface 1. Living Beings and Vital Powers: An Introduction 2. Being Together with Animals: Death, Violence and Noncruelty in Hindu Imagination 3. The Nature of Nature in Ramon Llull 4. The Tree of Gernika: Political Poetics of Rootedness and Belonging 5. Bringing the Forest to the City: Spaces Imagined in Israeli Sacred Song Circles 6. Sensuous Photographies: Living Things Explored through Phenomenological Practice 7. The Field: An Art Experiment in Levinasian Ethics 8. Hunting the Wild ‘Other’ to Become a Man: Wildlife Tourism and the Modern Identity Crisis in Israeli Safaris to East Africa 9. Becoming-animal in the Chinese Martial Arts 10. Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism and the Study of Language in Primates 11. Dressed in Furs: Clothing and Yaghan Multispecies Engagements in Tierra del Fuego Appendix: Modes of Being and Destinies of Living Beings in a Mexican Book of Fate Index