What is an Animal?

by Tim Ingold (Editor)

This book offers a unique interdisciplinary challenge to assumptions about animals and animality deeply embedded in our own ways of thought, and at the same time exposes highly sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our common humanity.

Genres: Anthropology, Animals, Nonfiction

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Tim Ingold (born 1948) is a British social anthropologist, currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He was educated at Leighton Park School and Cambridge University. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His bibliography includes The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, 2000, which is a collection of essays, some of which had been published earlier.

Reviews

[Margaryta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could really tell how outdated this book was, in a lot of ways. It's also very dry and in a lot of ways not the best in terms of structure. It's also much more science and anthropology-heavy, as opposed to cultural studies and humanities, than I hoped it would be. A couple of interesting chapters but overall not as impressive as some more recent material that has come out on the same topic, especially if you're a humanities student like myself.

[Suellen Rubira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure if I'm studying literature or biology...

This collection of essays focus on the question What is an animal? though the answer is never totally found. Although researchers are more dedicated to blurr the barriers between "us" (who are we, actually?) and the other animals, the challenge is always to set the differences and maybe desconstruct such views or highlight important features of non human animals, sometimes better than ours, I think.