11/9/2022 0 Comments Alice cynthia sainthill woodhouseMany owners sold elephants, fired mahouts, and “quit” the tourism industry. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, elephants, caregivers and owners found themselves facing income loss, decreased welfare from housing and husbandry issues, and food shortages. In addition, zoonotic disease, natural disasters and political strife affect the lives of captive elephants and mahouts. Captive elephants are caught in the crossfire between local communities, elephant owners, mahouts, and NGOs in debates over their treatment, health, welfare and use in tourism. Developing the concept widens the focus of understanding the multispecies nature of urban environments and includes animals in the experiences and perceptions of city space – where they belong.Īsian elephants and humans have long shared their lives, but recent changes in human perspectives on animal use have created ripples through the small country of Nepal. To be able to analyze human–animal encounters and interaction in urban space as they are experienced, imagined, remembered, and collectively shared, I suggest a novel concept of multispecies urban imaginary. I approach the material as performances of animality and human–animal relations, concentrating on shared interpretations and representations of the horses and their agency. I ask how equine agency, animal work, interspecies care, and the relational networks of memory are interpreted, communicated, and performed on social media, contributing to the co-production of urban imaginaries. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Mounted police units around the world have entered social media, with the aim of bringing the police closer to the public. Finally, we reflect on the cumulative findings of the four essays – and how they add a new dimension to our understandings of modern British family life. As there has been significant research on the role of pet animals in family life across the social sciences, we will also review some of the key work in sociology, social geography and psychology, thinking through the implications of these studies for historians. We will review the development of animal histories – paying attention to how they might usefully be brought to bear on the study of the family. In our introduction we bring together two important strands of recent scholarship – the history of the family and histories of animals. Taken together they demonstrate the relationship between changes in the way the family was understood and experienced and the development of pet keeping practices. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evolving relationship between pets and family life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. The choices people made in precarious or restricted material circumstances exposes the classed character of pet keeping and the ‘hierarchical entanglement’ of human-animal relations within a working-class context. Resources of time, space and money shaped what pets were possible for people to keep, where they were kept and how relationships with those animals were forged. It tries to understand how human family members could experience or, at least, articulate a sense of connection with animal members of the household. Drawing on three principal methods, this essay explores what pet keeping meant in the financial, spatial and affective context of British working-class family life. While it is broadly acknowledged that working-class families kept birds or animals in domestic settings, there has been little consideration of what animal companionship meant in Victorian and Edwardian working-class family life or, more to the point, the ways in which pet keeping was classed and why this matters. Such models risk establishing middle-class values and practices as the norm, creating the implicit assumption that working-class difference amounts to deviance or, that middle-class norms ‘trickle down’ the socio-economic scale eventually. Histories of human-animal companionship have expanded in recent years but studies of British pet keeping prior to the twentieth century have been skewed towards the middle and upper classes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |