Umani e animali nell’antropologia socioculturale contemporanea

Abstract

In the chapter, I show the connection between the ways in which the nineteenth-twentieth century sociocultural anthropologists became interested in the study of human-animal relationships and the dominant conceptions about the relationship between humanity and animality in philosophical and scientific thought of these two centuries. Till the last part of the twentieth century non-human animals were considered by anthropologists mainly as material and/or symbolic resources for the reproduction of humans and their social orders. This view paralleled the dominant vision in Western modern philosophical and scientific thought in which non-human animals were assimilated to mindless machines belonging to ‘nature’ as a separate ontological domain with respect to “culture’ and ‘society’. These ways of conceiving the relationship between humanity and animality were reflected in ethical and political ideas about the treatment of non-human animals, juridically assimilated to things devoid of any subjectivity. By the end of the twentieth century, the so-called ontological turn in anthropology, philosophy and STS have led a strong rethinking of this reified concept of non-human animals. I review some new approaches to the study of relationships between human and non-human animals, among which multispecies ethnography. Nonetheless, still today the relationship these new approaches and the debates on and social movements for animal rights and welfare remain quite tense. I explore the reasons for this tensions and some possibilities, in the near future, to develop a closer dialogue between these new fields of study emerged in sociocultural anthropology, on the one hand, and, on the other, critical animal studies and debates and movements in the field of animal advocacy.