Walking, eating, sleeping. Rhythm analysis of human/dog intimacy

Abstract

This article argues that human/dog co-habitation and the interspecies routines of walking, eating, sleeping and the emotions they create, can be fruitfully analyzed through the conceptual frame built from ‘intimacy’ and ‘rhythm’. The rhythmic analytical approach to interspecies routines, including breaks in them and the emotions these breaks create, contributes with a spatio-temporal understanding of human/animal intimacy. As intimacy is inherently a spatial phenomenon, it creates places. Intimate social relations also transform and get transformed by places. ‘Home’ is the typical example, where the iconic emplaced attachment of intimacy with the family is manifested. But the place itself does not create intimacy; instead, it is situationally formed through relations between, in this case, interspecies practices and space. By theorizing auto-ethnographical observations of everyday human/dog routines, the article explores intimacy as a particular social form. Building on recent developments in cultural geography in the field of ‘rhythm analysis,’ it is argued that while intimacy is performed in everyday life, it is foremost produced though 'arrhythmia,' in the moments when the routines are broken.