Description: The number of ways in which humans interact with animals is almost incalculable. From beloved household pets to the steak on our dinner tables, the fur in our closets to the Babar books on our shelves, taxidermy exhibits to local zoos, humans have complex, deep, and dependent relationships with the animals in our ecosystems. In Displaying Death and Animating Life, Jane C. Desmond puts those human-animal relationships under a multidisciplinary lens, focusing on the less obvious, and revealing the individualities and subjectivities of the real animals in our everyday lives.
Desmond, a pioneer in the field of animal studies, builds the book on a number of case studies. She conducts research on-site at major museums, taxidermy conventions, pet cemeteries, and even at a professional conference for writers of obituaries. She goes behind the scenes at zoos, wildlife clinics, and meetings of pet cemetery professionals. We journey with her as she meets Kanzi, the bonobo artist, and a host of other animal-artists--all of whom are preparing their artwork for auction. Throughout, Desmond moves from a consideration of the visual display of unindividuated animals, to mourning for known animals, and finally to the marketing of artwork by individual animals. The first book in the new Animal Lives series, Displaying Death and Animating Life is a landmark study, bridging disciplines and reaching across divisions from the humanities and social sciences to chart new territories of investigation.Brief description: Jane C. Desmond is professor of anthropology and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Review Quotes: "This is a wonderful book. Desmond's writing moves between the scholarly and the personal, between the well-trained curiosity of the anthropologist and the deeply felt concern of an intimate friend in order to examine a range of practices from blockbuster exhibitions to marginalized memorials that address and engage interactions between human and non-human animal lives. In those practices she seeks to understand, and sometimes to change, the ways that non-human lives are and are not rendered meaningful, are and are not granted subjectivity. Indeed she reveals how animals are stripped of potential meaning and individuality in the human directed performances and displays of their bodily or species being and death."-- "Kari Weil, Wesleyan University"