Review of Janick Auberger and Peter Keating. Histoire humaine des animaux de l'Antiquite a nos jours

Abstract

One reason for the recent burgeoning of scholarly interest in other animals (that is, of interest outside disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine where they have always held center stage) is their ubiquity. They are everywhere, as they have been since our beginnings. Once animals were recognized as legitimate research subjects in the humanities and social sciences, they inevitably inspired attempts to define a new multi-disciplinary field (often called “animal studies”) and then to package it in conferences, journals, and textbooks. But the expansiveness and variety that constitute much of the appeal of this incipient field also produce impediments to its institutionalization. The ambitious overview under review illustrates some of the inherent challenges, even when the attempt at comprehensiveness is limited to a more-or-less single discipline and a more-or-less single geographical area (the West, generously defined, with occasional nods to China, India, South America, and other places).