The Others: How Animals Made Us Human - Hardcover

Shepard, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559634332 ISBN 13: 9781559634335

Publisher: Island Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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).

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559634332
• ISBN 13: 9781559634335
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384