The Edges of Environmental History: Honouring Jane Carruthers
This volume of RCC Perspectives, featuring artwork by Australian artist Mandy Martin, is a tribute to the wonderful career of Jane Carruthers.
This volume of RCC Perspectives, featuring artwork by Australian artist Mandy Martin, is a tribute to the wonderful career of Jane Carruthers.
This volume of RCC Perspectives, featuring artwork by Australian artist Mandy Martin, is a tribute to the wonderful career of Jane Carruthers.
The categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.
Jean Langford discusses what happens “when species fall apart” in the relationships of care at primate and parrot sanctuaries. Care involves an improvised orchestration of social life—through spatial arrangements and regulation of movement—to facilitate often nonnormative, intraspecies, and cross-species intimacies.
Harriet Ritvo’s article complicates the categorical separation of “wild” and “domesticated” that has organized much Western thought on species distinctions. Ritvo invites us to think beyond the boundaries and fixedness of dominant concepts.
Daniel Münster takes us to the troubled history of improving dairy production in India, from the crossbreeding and high-cost industrialized care of delicate hybrids to the equally complex implications of a native-cow revival.
Caring for one set of species at the cost of another is the subject of Amir Zelinger’s article about bird conservation and its implications for the life of cats in Imperial Germany.
Etienne Benson considers the role that material interventions into the vernacular landscape play in solidifying our understandings of bodily difference across species.
Thom van Dooren draws on his current research on people’s shifting relationships with crows around the world to outline some of the core questions and approaches of “field philosophy.”
Recognizing elephants as moral actors in the institutional space of the elephant stable, Piers Locke reconceives traditionally humanist ethnography as interspecies ethnography.