| Wednesday, January 23, 2008 10:18AM | | | | What is Animal? What is Human? | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Animal Studies, What is Human?, Anthrozoology, Animals | In a sense the term Animal Studies may be deceptive, since, for the most part, we do not study animals. We generally leave that to the zoologists and others. The real subject of Animal Studies, it seems to me, is human-animal relations. Perhaps we could just as well call it Human Studies, though the term Anthrozoology might be most accurate.
The essential insight of Animal Studies (I stick to the term out of custom), it seems to me, is that our understanding of ourselves as human beings, with everything that entails, is intimately bound up with our relations to animals. By ourselves we are almost nothing at all. We construct our identity as human beings primarily through identification with, or in opposition to, other kinds of creatures. So perhaps the most fundamental question of Animal Studies is really, "What is a human being?"
Does this mean that Animal Studies is anthropocentric after all? I think not. Our ultimate quest is to understand our place in the cosmos, but to do that we must focus outward. Just as an individual human being learns his roles in society through interaction with other people, we learn ours as a species through contact with other species. With the increasing disappearance of animals, especially undomesticated ones, from our daily lives, that becomes increasingly difficult. | | | |
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