Being-with-Animals: Modes of Embodiment in Human-Animal Encounters

Abstract

This chapter argues for an alternative perspective, namely that direct, embodied experience should be central to the effort to understand human and animal nature. There is currently something of a 'renaissance' of interest in the embodied nature of experience that cuts across disciplinary boundaries in both the social and biological sciences. This trend has reinitiated a concern with 'lived experience', with the everyday manner of 'being-in-the-world' , drawing upon phenomenological methods to furnish new insights into processes such as empathy, intersubjectivity and relationship. The chapter identifies some of the intersubjective processes by which human-animal relationships develop. In focusing on the more embodied aspects of interaction the aim to examine those qualities of relationship which are best captured by a phenomenological approach; that is, the dynamic, transformative and indeterminate character of interaction. Keywords:animal nature; human nature; human-animal relationships; phenomenological methods; renaissance