Animals

Abstract

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.