Chernobyl, Chornobyl and Anthropocentric Narrative

The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th century, is a significant step in itself, but this was only one element in a radical reappraisal of the place of non-human animals in human sensibility and spirituality. For some bereaved pet-owners, the old question of the immortality of animal souls was retrieved and transformed, and sustained by a raft of unorthodox theological and spiritual speculation. The significance of this late Victorian and Edwardian response to non-human animals is assessed and treated as a problem of ethics, as a counterweight to the dominant anthropocentrism of past times and ours.

The paper explores news photographs from New Zealand between 1900 and 1932 and unpacks the happenings at agricultural and pastoral events. It utilizes an archival research strategy to find the news coverage of such events that is informed by an animalcentric philosophy. As such, it engages with critical posthumanist and poststructuralist thought. This allows the presence of nonhuman animals as sentient beings to be recognized and challenges previous approaches of scholarship. Thus, the paper writes farmed nonhuman animals into the history of agricultural and pastoral events. In illustrating what occurred at these events, the paper illuminates the anthropocentric bias and speciesism-grounded principles embedded in human attitudes toward farmed nonhuman animals. Humans treat fellow sentient beings unfairly and unjustly, which is problematic when nonhuman animal sentience provides moral worth. This study contributes to studies in leisure’s ‘animal turn’ by focusing on the entanglements of human and farmed nonhuman animals in events.

Abstract: This article addresses the question of how we can more adequately centre the lives of experimental animals in psychology, in line with the 'animal turn' and subsequent developments in animal studies and animal history. It does so via a specific case study — Pavlov's famous 'classical conditioning' experiments with dogs — drawing on recent comprehensive translations of Pavlov's publications, supplemented by historical-biographical accounts and archives. The article briefly summarizes Pavlov's career before 'following' the journey of the dogs through the various stages of life in the laboratory, including recruitment, housing, surgery and experimentation. Organized according to shifts in the concerns of animal studies over time as identified by Erica Fudge, the article establishes how the dogs have been represented, how they might be said to have agency, and how their agency, and the agency of others, emerges through the various relations that constitute the laboratory enterprise. In combining these elements the article offers an historical account of the experiences of Pavlov's dogs that aims to decentre the usual protagonists (Pavlov, methods, concepts) and recentre the animals involved, and their various interactions and entanglements. In situating the animals in dynamic networks of interaction, within specific material, social and historical settings, a sense of canine agency is enriched and qualified, and any assumption that Pavlov's dogs were interchangeable and passive experimental objects profoundly challenged.

Summary In the last decade, “animal studies” has arisen in belated parallel to other counter-hegemonic disciplines. In order to discuss this new departure of considering animals in the humanities rather than solely the natural sciences, we use the case study of the horse. We discuss what the “animal turn” might mean in disciplinary terms. We show that there is a significant move towards embracing new subject matter, and concomitant new sources, in history writing in southern Africa. We argue, however, that it is difficult to label it a new “paradigm” as it remains largely in the social (or socio-environmental) history camp. Instead, it encompasses a continuing process of inclusion and measured mainstream acceptance of the animal as subject, object and even perhaps agent. The “animal turn” (and, indeed, “green social science”) is not founded on any one method or approach, instead it remains diverse in terms of its methodology and raison d’être, mirroring the multiplicity of its object of study. We discuss changes within socio-environmental history that might permit a transformed understanding of the horse as historical actor with the acceptance of the animal as subject, object and even agent-in short, how academics in the humanities might find the “bloody horse”.

Animals, writes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’: they haunt human concerns, but rarely appear as themselves. This is especially notable in contemporary Scottish fiction. While other national literatures often reflect the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary theory, the number of twenty-first-century Scottish novels concerned with human–animal relations remains disproportionately small. Looking at a broad cross-section of recent and understudied novels, including Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013), Ian Stephen’s A Book of Death and Fish (2014), Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), Malachy Tallack’s The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), James Robertson’s To Be Continued (2016), and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015) highlights the marginalisation of both nonhuman animals and texts centred on them. The relative absence of engagement with animal studies in Scottish fiction and criticism suggests new opportunities for reevaluating the formulation of environmental concerns in a Scottish context. By moving away from the unified concepts of ‘the land’ to a perspective that includes the precarious relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and their environment, these texts highlight the need for greater, and more nuanced, engagement with fictional representations of nonhuman animals.

This chapter examines contemporary novels that grapple with species extinctions, including our own. The ‘zoo cli-fi’ here includes literature that does not necessarily mourn ‘our’ extinction, and may wean us off the idea that we are central to planetary survival. Zoo cli-fi that follows the broader ‘animal turn’ attributes greater significance to animals as beings-in-themselves and illustrates a powerful ‘point of view’ often missing: animals have their own ‘point of view’ that may or may not include ‘us’. The word extinction is taxonomic, working at the scale of population, and describes a condition of species death rather than the conditions under which death comes about. The distinction is important in a political and ethical sense because, as animal studies scholars have shown, how animal deaths are represented greatly influences how attached or distanced we are from the problem. The word extinction does little to bring home how humans are connected to what can seem a mere ‘biological’ process that occurs somehow outside of a cultural political context. Extinctions are cultural processes, not just biological events that happen offstage; indeed, they may represent a ‘choice’, to quote Margaret Atwood on a recent visit to Australia.

Over the past few decades, the study of animals in intellectual history has emerged as a vibrant, interdisciplinary field rooted in both human-animal studies and environmental history. Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to how animals have shaped the development of scientific knowledge, religious beliefs, ethical systems, and cultural practices, moving beyond purely human-centered narratives of the past. This “animal turn” challenges older historiographical approaches that treated nonhuman creatures solely as backdrops or passive resources for human use. Instead, it views animals as active agents that co-constitute societies, landscapes, and epistemologies. At the heart of this scholarship lies a concern with how humans perceive, represent, and interact with other species, as well as how those relationships reflect broader ideas about nature. Crucially, “nature” itself is not a fixed or self-evident category, but rather a historically constructed discourse that has played a central role in shaping Western thought, structuring notions of civilization, hierarchy, and the human-animal divide. Intellectual historians have traced changing attitudes toward animals—ranging from medieval bestiaries to Enlightenment classifications and contemporary conservation movements—revealing how theories of animality intersect with debates about rationality, morality, and the boundaries of the human. Likewise, environmental historians have examined the dynamic role of animals in ecological transformations, documenting how agricultural expansion, urban growth, and colonial projects depended on (and profoundly altered) multispecies relationships, which has led to the creation of a new field: animal history. Within this growing corpus, scholars draw on an array of methodologies. They investigate archival records for clues to animals’ lived experiences, employ ethological insights to interpret historical accounts of animal behavior, and use mapping tools to reconstruct changing environments that animals and humans co-inhabited. The result is an ever-expanding set of questions: How do categories of race, gender, and class shape human-animal relations? In what ways does the colonial enterprise hinge on controlling and classifying nonhuman life? What happens when we view animals not simply as symbols or metaphors but as participants in historical events? By foregrounding animals, new avenues for understanding the past have opened. Contemporary theoretical frameworks—from postcolonial studies to intersectionality—further sharpen our awareness of how conceptions of “nature” can reinforce social hierarchies or challenge them. This entry underscores the significance of approaching animals as central to human history and as key protagonists in the ongoing story of ideas about nature.

A new reading of medieval manuscript is being forged by scholars of medieval literature interested in texts that reference and image the animal body. As part of a “post-humanist” project, the parchment book has been interrogated specifically for its place at the intersection of the animal and material “turns.” Medievalists who address questions of animal life and the “parchment ethics” of medieval manuscripts engage primarily with deconstructionist and post-humanist theory and interpretive methodologies of materialist “surface reading.” Yet the literature of the past fifty years on the scientific analysis of parchment and leather manufacture, the conservation treatment and assessment of historical parchment, medieval animal husbandry, and zooarcheology have had little bearing upon these discussions. This essay provides a critique of the “animal turn” as it has addressed the parchment book, by challenging the presumed epistemological identification between the skin of the medieval reader, the animal subject, and the parchment page. A medieval understanding of parchment through texts on pastoral care and allegories of parchment, historical evidence for the animal husbandry of domesticated animals, and nuances in parchment-making based on the investigations of conservators are discussed. And a case study is presented highlighting the Major Laws of Vidal de Canellas, Bishop of Huesca (1237–52), a manuscript in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum containing the Major Laws of the Kingdom of Aragon and dating to c. 1290–1310, after the unification of lands under Jaume I the Conquerer (1213–76), when Merino wool sheep cultivation flourished across the Iberian Peninsula.

Reviewed by: A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry Frank Zelko A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By emily wakild and michelle K. berry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. 200 pp. $24.95 (paperback). In 2011, Duke University Press released Antoinette Burton's A Primer for Teaching World History, the first book in its series "Design Principles for Teaching History." With Burton as editor, the series promised numerous helpful volumes for those teaching various aspects of transnational and global history. Like a tree with an irregular fruiting cycle, however, the series did not bear any new books for a while. But 2018 proved a bumper crop, yielding Trevor Getz's primer on African history, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby's A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History, and Wakild and Berry's environmental history volume. [End Page 232] With a quarter of a century of teaching experience between them, Wakild and Berry have taught environmental history in high schools, graduate seminars, and most everything in between. This book's goal is to help instructors, whether old hands or novices, design new courses or infuse environmental history into existing ones. From that perspective, the book succeeds admirably. It makes a case for the pedagogical and political importance of environmental history, suggests and breaks down numerous engaging texts and classroom exercises, offers concrete advice on assessment strategies, and urges instructors to take seriously the tools and student learning environments of the digital age. Readers of this journal will find the specific topics and case studies, frequently derived from the authors' global environmental history courses, particularly helpful, although I suspect not everyone will agree with all of their pedagogical imperatives. The first part of the book, titled "Approaches," contains four chapters that lay out a range of topics and learning objectives. The first examines how to make environmental history relevant to students' lives by linking it to their lunch. The focus is on food history, and the authors offer staples such as bananas, corn, and wheat as particularly useful and ubiquitous products to engage students in the history of plant domestication, agriculture, trade, and capitalism. Such an approach, they have found, pays "big dividends as your students begin to see nature and networks in everything" (p. 25). Chapter Two, "The Seed," sets out a list of learning objectives to help build a course. In line with the pedagogical theories emanating from university education departments, Wakild and Berry advocate prioritizing skill acquisition, such as locating and evaluating sources, over content knowledge. Those who take this stance frequently employ the "everything is on the internet" argument to downplay the importance of content. Wakild and Berry do not go this far, but their heavy emphasis on learning objectives and skill acquisition is nonetheless contestable. One can also make the case that well-presented content is vital to engaging students' initial interest in a subject and that skill building is more effective once this interest has been fully engaged. Furthermore, Wakild and Berry's discussion seems predicated on small classes in which instructors have the time and wherewithal to deeply immerse students in small group activities. Over the past decade, I have taught a first year global environmental history course with over 150 students. Wakild and Berry's intensive skill-oriented approach sounds like it would be difficult to implement in large classes; in my experience, a content-driven approach is both more realistic and more likely to hook students who might subsequently [End Page 233] enroll in smaller upper level classes where instructors can devote greater emphasis to skills and methods. The chapter on integrating animals into history is one of the book's highlights, reminding us how historians frequently neglect the lives of other species. In keeping with Levi-Strauss's famous formulation, animals are "good to think," Wakild and Berry cogently demonstrate how the interdisciplinary insights of the "animal turn" can undermine anthropocentric histories while at the same time offering compelling material for lectures and discussions. For those wondering how to integrate such material, the authors offer a chapter titled "The Hatchet," a set...

It is well established that discursive innovations in literature and philosophy encouraged pro-animal sentiments in 18th-century England. Far less well known in this regard is the "animal turn" in the graphic arts. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by documenting the extensive representation of animals in the paintings, drawings, and printed engravings of the English artist William Hogarth (1697-1764). It outlines the four chief ways in which Hogarth pictured animals-namely, as hybrids, as edibles, as "pets," and as signs of satire. In so doing the article asks, how did Hogarth see animals? How should we see Hogarth’s animals?

Recent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this ‘animal turn’, zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeology's ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdiscipline's firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of ‘subsistence’ and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human–whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbæk.

This special issue, which constitutes the first Human-Animal Studies edited collection in southern Africa, includes vibrant, creative and theoretically far-ranging articles. Even as these attest to the transdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), the influence of such core narratives as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland resonate, with literature anchoring not only the historical research by Sandra Swart included here but also the article and artwork by Wilma Cruise on the figural animal. All the articles in this edition have been gleaned from the HAS colloquia which have their own narrative. Held at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, the first colloquium, Figuring the in Post-Apartheid South in 2011 was followed by Animal Vulnerabilities (2012) before reprising Figuring the in Post-Apartheid South Africa II (2013). This year the theme was Animal Absence/Animal Presence. articles included in this special issue constitute a representative glimpse of the literary, historical and figural debates at these events, but other non-represented discussions also contributed substantially to making the colloquia vibrantly transdisciplinary. Don Pinnock and Adam Cruise delivered papers on effective strategies for elephant activism. Duncan Brown discussed the indigeneity of trout in the postcolony. Sharyn Spicer asked: What's Race Got to Do with It? in her investigation into the pet-keeping practices of a sample of township residents. Shirley Brooks and Dayne Botha presented research on a project to locate owls in a number of townships, and critiqued the discrepancy between discursive constructions and practical consequences. Brooks also co-presented a paper with Mahlatse Moeng on the social-nature divide in relation to flamingos at Kamfers Dam, Kimberley. terms Studies (AS) and Human-Animal Studies (HAS) have been used almost interchangeably in this fairly recent, burgeoning field. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely entitle their edited collection Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Studies (2012), whereas Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh call their collection the Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014). Either way, AS or/and HAS challenge accepted beliefs as their basic theories, and subsequent research undermines the dualism of anthropocentric thought underpinning the humanities. HAS as a term has the edge for us, as it suggests the intertwining of human and non-human and the belief that animals cannot exist in isolation in our research or imaginations. Critical Studies, which has become more visible locally in recent years, has its provenance in social justice concerns. (1) Since roughly 2000, the animal turn in the humanities has drawn heavily from Ur theorists Jacques Derrida via That Therefore I am and J.M. Coetzee via Lives of Animals both of whom connect animals and humans. Both texts insist on the presence of the live, embodied non-human animal. While Derrida opens a philosophical space for the to be empowered to respond (rather than merely reacting), Coetzee has Elizabeth Costello focus on representations of animals through philosophers and poets and maintain that poets are more primed and equipped to imagine and represent animals. If the essays in this special issue engage with international theorists and philosophers, all evince a deep sense of the embodied in southern Africa (and within a broader political context). In The Post-humanist Gaze: Reading Fanie Jason's Photo Essay on Carting Lives, Woodward discusses Fanie Jason's photographs of carthorses and humans on the Cape Flats in the class-based carting industry. In his article Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels, Wylie stresses the pedagogic urgency of teaching children about the future of elephants within the environment of southern Africa. …

Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question

Posthuman Folklore explores how our human condition is increasingly thought of, and performed, in posthuman terms. Insights from animal studies have triggered the “animal turn” in scholarship, while the increasing digitization of human culture and the newly emerging roles of androids and artificial intelligences provide yet another crux for reconsidering what it means to be a person. Taken together, such outlooks cast in doubt the previous assurances of human ontology which were lodged in Western discourse. This book explores not only the scholarship behind such moves, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which everyday people are increasingly enacting posthumanism in their everyday lives. The book follows a narrative thread of various case studies ranging from the pre-hominid to the cyborg, and ends with a futurist appraisal of current trajectories.

Historic British Royal Memes