The Others: How Animals Made Us Human / Edition 1

by Paul Shepard

Overview

Paul Shepard has been one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology for more than forty years. His thought-provoking ideas on the role of animals in human thought, dreams, personal identity, and other psychological and religious contexts have been presented in a series of seminal writings, including Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and now The Others, his most eloquent book to date.

The Others is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.

Shepard considers animals as others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781559634342
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	03/01/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Before his death in 1996, Paul Shepard was Avery Professor of Human Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School. Among his books are The Others: How Animals Make Us Human (Island Press/ Shearwater Books, 1995) and Encounters with Nature, (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Encounter
 
PART I. The Animal Fare
Chapter 1. The Ecological Doorway to Symbolic Thought
Chapter 2. The Swallow
 
PART II. Cognition
Chapter 3. The Skills of Cognition: Pigeonholes, Dinosaurs, and Hobbyhorses
Chapter 4. Savanna Dreaming: The Fox at the Fringe of the Field
 
PART III. Identify
Chapter 5. The Self as Menagerie
Chapter 6. Aping the Others
Chapter 7. The Ecology of Narration
Chapter 8. Membership
 
PART IV. Change
Chapter 9. The Masters of Transformation
Chapter 10. Heads, Faces, and Masks
Chapter 11. The Pet World
Chapter 12. The Gift of Music
Chapter 13. Ontogeny Revisited: Teddy, Pooh, Paddington, Yogi, and Smokey
 
PART V. The Cosmos
Chapter 14. The Meaning of Dragons and Why the Gods Ride on Animals
Chapter 15. Augury and Holograms
Chapter 16. Bovine Epiphanies: Fecundity and Power
Chapter 17. Lying Down With Lambs and Lions in the Christian Zoo
Chapter 18. Hounding Nature: The Nightmares of Domestication
 
PART VI. Counterplayers
Chapter 19. The Miss Muffet Syndrome: Fearing Animals
Chapter 20. Cuckoo Clocks and Bluebirds of Happiness: Animals as Machines
Chapter 21. The Great Interspecies Confusion
Chapter 22. Final Animals and Economic Imperatives
Chapter 23. Rights and Kindness: A Can of Worms
Chapter 24. The Many and the Fuzzy: Plurality and Ambiguity
 
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this provocative, illuminating volume, Shepard examines the role of animals in human history from the Pleistocene to the present. He argues that anthropomorphism binds our connection to the rest of the natural world. Noting that narratives in which animals are protagonists occur in all kinds of societies and in different forms at all stages of life, Shepard (Thinking Animals) analyzes fairy tales (child), folktales (juvenile) and myths (adult), concluding that the last is the most revealing source of information about how people relate to the nonhuman world. He reviews the sources of biblical natural history and parable, and he discusses the ``nightmare of domestication.'' Shepard argues that the benefits to other species of being domestic are fictitious; they are merely slaves. Additional topics include animals in language, the cult of the cow and the rise of pastoralism, augury and the biblical zoo. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Shepard's (Man in the Landscape, 1967) dry, academic prose is bogged down with so much jargon that it obscures his argument that human beings use animals as a metaphor to define themselves. Shepard draws upon myth, philosophical writing, and religious tradition to make his point, but his conclusions do not always seem to follow logically from his background material. Not for popular collections.-Laurie Tynan, Montgomery Cty.-Norristown P.L., Pa.

Library Journal