Download or read book Becoming Animal written by David Abram and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature. As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.
Download or read book Becoming Animal written by Nato Thompson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-06-17 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary artists investigate the boundaries between animal and human in a world of transgenics and dissolving distinctions; with 65 color images of new works. In an age when scientists say they can no longer specify the exact difference between human and animal, living and dead, many contemporary artists have chosen to use animals in their work—as the ultimate "other," as metaphor, as reflection. The attempt to discover what is animal, not surprisingly, leads to a greater understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Animal, 12 internationally known artists investigate the shifting boundaries between animal and human. Their explorations may be a barometer of things to come. The works included in Becoming Animal—which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA—range from the aviary and cabinet of curiosities of Mark Dion to the gun-toting bird collages of Michael Oatman. Nicolas Lampert's machine-animal collages and Jane Alexander's corpse-like humanoids suggest a new landscape of alienation. Rachel Berwick's investigation of the last Galapagos tortoise from the island of Pinto and Brian Conley's humanized mating call of the Tungara frog question the divide between human and animal communication. Patricia Piccinini imagines a bodyguard for a bird on the edge of extinction and Ann-Sofi Siden recreates the bedroom—and paranoia—of psychologist Alice Fabian. Natalie Jeremijenko presents another installment in her ongoing Ooz, reverse-engineering the zoo, and Kathy High's installation of "trans-animals" remembers lab rats who have given their lives for science. Sam Easterson's videos allow us to see from the viewpoint of an aardvark, a tarantula, a tumbleweed; Motohiko Odani's films show a surrealistic genetically modified bestiary. Becoming Animal documents these works with eye-popping full-color images, taking us on a visual journey through an unknown world.
Download or read book Becoming Wild written by Carl Safina and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 "In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Safina gives us a new way of looking at the natural world that is radically different."—The Washington Post New York Times bestselling author Carl Safina brings readers close to three non-human cultures—what they do, why they do it, and how life is for them. A New York Times Notable Books of 2020 Some believe that culture is strictly a human phenomenon. But this book reveals cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too come to understand yourself as an individual within a particular community that does things in specific ways, that has traditions. Alongside genes, culture is a second form of inheritance, passed through generations as pools of learned knowledge. As situations change, social learning—culture—allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes can adapt. Becoming Wild brings readers into intimate proximity with various nonhuman individuals in their free-living communities. It presents a revelatory account of how animals function beyond our usual view. Safina shows that for non-humans and humans alike, culture comprises the answers to the question, “How do we live here?” It unites individuals within a group identity. But cultural groups often seek to avoid, or even be hostile toward, other factions. By showing that this is true across species, Safina illuminates why human cultural tensions remain maddeningly intractable despite the arbitrariness of many of our differences. Becoming Wild takes readers behind the curtain of life on Earth, to witness from a new vantage point the most world-saving of perceptions: how we are all connected.
Download or read book The Spell of the Sensuous written by David Abram and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.
Download or read book A Nietzschean Bestiary written by Christa Davis Acampora and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A Nietzschean Bestiary' gathers essays treating the most vivid & lively animal images in Nietzsche's work, such as the howling beast of prey, Zarathustra's laughing lions, & the notorious blond beast.
Download or read book Becoming Human written by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."
Download or read book Becoming a Good Creature written by Sy Montgomery and published by HMH Books For Young Readers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A luxe, full color picture book adaptation of Sy Montgomery and Rebecca Green's New York Times bestselling How to Be a Good Creature"--
Download or read book Becoming Audible written by Austin McQuinn and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Audible explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists who get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural. To frame his analysis, McQuinn employs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multispecies becoming-with, and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object. McQuinn considers birdsong in the work of Beatrice Harrison, Olivier Messiaen, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniela Cattivelli, and Marcus Coates; the voice of the canine as a sacrificial lab animal in the operatic work of Alexander Raskatov; hierarchies of vocalization in human-simian cultural coevolution in theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka and Eugene O’Neill; and the acoustic exchanges among hybrid human-animal creations in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur. Inspired by the operatic voice and drawing from work in art and performance studies, animal studies, zooarchaeology, social and cultural anthropology, and philosophy, McQuinn demonstrates that sounding animality in performance resonates “through the labyrinths of the cultural and the creatural,” not only across species but also beyond the limits of the human. Timely and provocative, this volume outlines new methods of unsettling human exceptionalism during a period of urgent reevaluation of interspecies relations. Students and scholars of human-animal studies, performance studies, and art historians working at the nexus of human and animal will find McQuinn’s book enlightening and edifying.
Download or read book Representing Animals written by Nigel Rothfels and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are complex & often surprising connections between our imagining of animals & our cultural environment. Topics discussed in this collection include fox hunting, pet cloning, animatronic characters & how we displace our fear of aging onto our dogs.
Download or read book Becoming a Tiger written by Susan McCarthy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 727 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the co–author of the New York Times bestseller When Elephants Weep comes a book that uses true stories backed by scientific research to explore the way young animals discover their worlds and learn how to survive. How does a baby animal figure out how to get around in the world? How much of what animals know is instinctive, and how much must they learn? In Becoming a Tiger, bestselling author Susan McCarthy addresses these intriguing matters, presenting fascinating and funny examples of animal behaviour in the laboratory and in the wild. McCarthy shows us how baby animals transform themselves from clueless kittens, clumsy cubs, or scrawny chicks into efficient predators, successful foragers, or deft nest–builders. From geese to mice, dolphins to orang–utans, bats to (of course) tigers, McCarthy's warm, amusing, and insightful examinations of animal life and developments provides a surprising window into the mental worlds of our fine fuzzy, furred, finned, and feathered friends. oReaders will be fascinated by a close look at animal intelligence, learning, and family life.
Download or read book Becoming Centaur written by Monica Mattfeld and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.
Download or read book Becoming Nature written by Tamarack Song and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A step-by-step guide to animal communication, connecting with your primal mind, and immersing yourself in Nature • Includes exercises for learning how to become invisible within Nature, sense hidden animals, and communicate with wild animals and birds • Explains how to approach wild animals and form friendships with them • Details the intuitive awareness of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their innate oneness with Nature Animals and plants are in constant communication with the world around them. To join the conversation, we need only to connect with our primal mind and recognize that we, too, are Nature. Once in this state, we can communicate with animals as effortlessly as talking with friends. The songs of birds and the calls of animals start to make sense. We begin to see the reasons for their actions and discover that we can feel what they feel. We can sense the hidden animals around us, then get close enough to look into their eyes and touch them. Immersed in Nature, we are no longer intruders, but fellow beings moving in symphony with the Dance of Life. In this guide to becoming one with Nature, Tamarack Song provides step-by-step instructions for reawakening the innate sensory and intuitive abilities that our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied upon--abilities imprinted in our DNA yet long forgotten. Through exercises and experiential stories, the author guides us to immerse ourselves in Nature at the deepest levels of perception, which allows us to sense the surrounding world and the living beings in it as extensions of our own awareness. He details how to open our minds and hearts to listen and communicate in the wordless language of wild animals and plants. He explains how to hone our imagining skill so we can transform into the animal we are seeking, along with becoming invisible by entering the silence of Nature. He shows how to approach a wild animal on her own terms, which erases her fear and shyness. Allowing us to feel the blind yearning of a vixen Fox in heat and the terror of a Squirrel fleeing a Pine Marten, the practices in this book strip away everything that separates us from the animals. They enable us to restore our kinship with the natural world, strengthen our spiritual relationships with the animals who share our planet, and discover the true essence of the wild within us.
Download or read book EPZ Thousand Plateaus written by Gilles Deleuze and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘A rare and remarkable book.' Times Literary Supplement Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for ‘nomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement. Translated by Brian Massumi>
Download or read book Being a Beast written by Charles Foster and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate naturalist explores what it’s really like to be an animal—by living like them How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the non-humans, the beasts. And to do that, he tried to be like them, choosing a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer, and a swift. He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow. And he followed the swifts on their migration route over the Strait of Gibraltar, discovering himself to be strangely connected to the birds. A lyrical, intimate, and completely radical look at the life of animals—human and other—Being a Beast mingles neuroscience and psychology, nature writing and memoir to cross the boundaries separating the species. It is an extraordinary journey full of thrills and surprises, humor and joy. And, ultimately, it is an inquiry into the human experience in our world, carried out by exploring the full range of the life around us.
Download or read book Postmodern Animal written by Steve Baker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.
Download or read book Animal Philosophy written by Matthew Calarco and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-07-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought. A collection of essential primary and secondary readings on the animal question, it brings together contributions from the following key Continental thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Ferry, Cixous, and Irigaray. Each reading is followed by commentary and analysis from a leading contemporary thinker. The coverage of the subject is exceptionally broad, ranging across perspectives that include existentialism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology and feminism. This anthology is an invaluable one-stop resource for anyone researching, teaching or studying animal ethics and animal rights in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, environmental studies and gender and women's studies.
Download or read book Rhinoceros Success written by Scott Alexander and published by Ramsey Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Go get the life you want. Be a Rhinoceros! There is something dangerous about this book. Something big. Something full of power, energy and force of will. It could be about you. You could become three tons of thick-skinned, snorting hard-charging rhinoceros. It is time to go get the life you want.
