| Wednesday, March 19, 2008 1:20PM | | | | Alphabet Soup (and a dumb joke) | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Anthrozoology, Ethnozoology, Antrhopozoology, Zooanthropologia | People, I've been feeling a little confused. We now have Animal Studies, Ethnozoology, Ethnobiology, Anthrozoology, Anthropozoology, Zooanthropologia, and I don't know what else. It is very hard to say which if any of these terms are synonyms. They all all focus on the same questions and many of the same texts. There are differences among them, but these are often relatively subtle, perhaps incomprehensible to those outside their scholarly communities. In addition, various convergent areas of study seem to be segregated by linguistic barriers. Even though ISAZ (International Society for Anthrozoology) has "international" in its name, it seems in practice to be confined mostly to the English-speaking world, and that goes for Animal Studies as well. A lot of interesting work is probably being done in places such as, say, Japan or Turkey, but I have no idea what it is.
So what do the labels mean? They clearly do not define unique areas of study, though they do mark the boundaries of communities, which may or may not overlap. This convergence of fields suggests that the division of knowledge into disciplines is becoming increasingly meaningless. We are seeing the demise of the vision of academia, articulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin during the early nineteenth century, as creating a hierarchically ordered edifice of knowledge, with Philosophy (or, sometimes, Mathematics, Physics, Biology...) at the foundation. This conception still has its defenders, for example, Edward Wilson in Consilence (1998), but it does not describe the way scholars work today.
The following may be enjoyed by those who like an occasional dumb joke, and, hopefully, excused by those who don't:
"Knock! Knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Animal Studies."
"Animal Studies what?"
"Animal studies Anthrozoology, Ethnozoology, Anthropozoology.... Oh, and Human Development."
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