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Added to the introduction on Animal Studies.

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Animal studies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search This article is about the academic discipline. For experimental studies using animals, see Animal testing. For other uses, see Animal studies (disambiguation).

Throughout human history animals have always been there during major milestones whether it is in our transition from hunter/gatherers to settlers or during the first agricultural revolution. To get a better understanding of humanity and its history then we have to understand the history of our interactions with animals and how we have been affected by it. Animal studies is a recently recognised field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars who engage in animal studies may be formally trained in a number of diverse fields, including geography, art history, anthropology, biology, film studies, geography, history, psychology, literary studies, museology, philosophy, communication, and sociology. They may engage with questions about literal animals, or about notions of "animality" or "brutality," employing various theoretical perspectives, including feminism, Marxist theory, and queer theory. Using these perspectives, those who engage in animal studies seek to understand both human-animal relations now and in the past, and to understand animals as beings-in-themselves, separate from our knowledge of them. Because the field is still developing, scholars and others have some freedom to define their own criteria about what issues may structure the field.

History

As an interdisciplinary subject, animal studies exists at the intersection of a number of different fields of study. Separation and differences between humans and animals have been at the from of social sciences, in doing so we do not see the commons things that we have with animals. Different fields began to turn to animals as an important topic at different times and for various reasons, and these separate disciplinary histories shape how scholars approach animal studies. Historically, the field of environmental history has encouraged attention to animals.

Materialist Animal Studies

The Materialist approach to animal studies looks to not see animals as what we think of them, but rather to look at and be mindful of the animals material reality. This approach, "explicitly widens the field of sociological studies on human-animal interactions by emphasizing the animals in the world." According to York, and Longo, in a realist approach we humans must accentuate the importance we see in animals, how we think of them, in the meanings that we give them.

Research topics and methodologies

Researchers in animal studies examine the questions and issues that arise when traditional modes of humanistic and scientific inquiry begin to take animals seriously as subjects of thought and activity. Students of animal studies may examine how humanity is defined in relation to animals, or how representations of animals create understandings (and misunderstandings) of other species. In order to do so, animal studies pays close attention to the ways that humans anthropomorphize animals, and asks how humans might avoid bias in observing other creatures. For instance, Donna Haraway's book, Primate Visions, examines how dioramas created for the American Museum of Natural History showed family groupings that conformed to the traditional human nuclear family, which misrepresented the animals' observed behavior in the wild. Critical approaches in animal studies have also considered representations of non-human animals in popular culture, including species diversity in animated films.

By highlighting these issues, animal studies strives to re-examine traditional ethical, political, and epistemologicalcategories in the context of a renewed attention to and respect for animal life. The assumption that focusing on animals might clarify human knowledge is neatly expressed in Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous dictum that animals are "good to think."