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Contribution short abstract:

The artist-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) based his wildly popular “realistic” animal stories on provocative insights into animal lives gained by engaging firsthand with the “interlinear matter” of their sensory worlds.

Contribution long abstract:

Best known for his collection of widely –and wildly– popular “realistic” animal stories Wild Animals I Have Known (1898); the Anglo-North American artist-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) spent a lifetime seeking to legitimize his hard-won insights into the “interlinear matter” of animal lives against the rising tide of modern experimentalist science, including behaviourism. Born in England and raised in Toronto in a Scottish Reformed Presbyterian tradition that emphasized both righteous criticism and humanity’s redemptive duty of stewardship toward nature as a lost Eden, Seton found solace –and a way forward for his lifelong love of living animals– in a post-Darwinian world shaped by his reading of contemporary works, including art criticism. Practising a “new” natural history infused by its late-19th-c. biological turn, Seton gained his most provocative –yet ultimately his most influential– insights into animal behaviour by engaging firsthand with the sensory worlds of birds and mammals expressed as adaptations to environment. Alternating between pioneering fieldwork in Manitoba, Canada and urban life among the museums, galleries, and publishing houses of New York and Washington, Seton applied evolutionary theories of the day to seek meaningful translations of animal agency in a revised understanding of instinct through expressions of will and feeling. The resulting challenge not only to longstanding Cartesian mechanistic assumptions about non-human minds and bodies, but also to more recent claims about the inaccessibility of other inner worlds, garnered painfully sticky charges of “nature faking” and “sentimental” anthropomorphism, yet nevertheless inspired 20th-c. ecological reimaginings in animal studies, including ethology.