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Accepted Paper:
An ethnographic approach to co-being among animals
Mara Martínez-Morant
(Antropología de la Vida Animal. Grupo de estudios de etnozoología)
Paper Short Abstract:
The research aims to show how multispecies interactions end the exceptional nature of the human animal in nature. From post-humanist approaches, a new profile emerges that places the human being as one more species among all those that make up the cartography of living beings on the planet.
Paper Abstract:
Based on posthumanism, which alludes to the decentering of the human animal from its historically maintained position as the center of the universe, the so-called anthropocentrism, the research aims to show how multispecies interactions end the exceptional nature of the human animal in nature. From post-humanist approaches, a new profile emerges that places the human being as one more species among all those that make up the cartography of living beings. It is in this context where links arise provoking other ways of being or co-being with other animals and lead to previously unthinkable positions. When the female riders who educate in sensitive training and the people who protect horses talk about their relationship with them, a sense of interaction appears between these people and the horses for which they are responsible. The analysis of the narratives collected ethnographically in the different interviews carried out with people linked to the horse world in the area of Catalonia, identifies central themes of what we call the co-being of animal relations: how they express, feel and verbalize embodied moments of mutuality, of responsibility between two individuals with agency where one of them is the horse and how a practice that we could name anthropo-zoo-genetics operates, understood as a place where species domesticate each other at the same time. In this interstice created by the intertwining of species, the co-being emerges in the form of intra-action that reveals how the horse and the human meet and change as a result of their action.