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Donna Jeanne Haraway
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When Species Meet (Volume 3) (Posthumanities) Paperback – Illustrated, November 26, 2007

by Donna J. Haraway (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 61 ratings
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“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine

In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion  species”—knotted from human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.”

In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters.

In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed.  There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.”

Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism.

One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.
Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Posthumanities
  2. Print length
    360 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Univ Of Minnesota Press
  5. Publication date
    November 26, 2007
  6. Dimensions
    5.88 x 1.1 x 9 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0816650462
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0816650460
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This eclectic, semi-academic volume is one part philosophical treatise, one part rambling memoir and one part affectionate look at a singular Australian sheepdog named Cayenne ("It's hard to be grumpy myself in the morning watching this kind of joyful doggish beginning!"). With intellectual precision and obvious enthusiasm, author and "posthumanities" professor Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto) delves into topics as diverse as the rigors of breeding purebreds, the ethics of using animals in laboratories and the grand leaps of anthropomorphism people use to justify thousands of dollars in medical care for a pet. A professor in the History of Consciousness program at U.C. Santa Cruz, Haraway's prose is rigorous but readable, her ideas backed up with generally clear examples; she can, however, veer into abstract academic language ("People and animals in intra-action do not admit of preset taxonomic calculation") and gratuitous digression (as in a distracting chapter on her sportscaster father). These complaints aside, Haraway's serious, challenging approach to the human-animal relationship web should prove a novel, gratifying read for animal-owning science and philosophy buffs.
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Review

Donna Haraway’s latest book, When Species Meet, is a stunning meditation on the ordinary. Tying together questions of interspecies encounters and alternative practices of world building, Haraway explores how contemporary human beings interact with various critters to form meanings, experiences, and worlds. The text effortlessly slides between theory and autobiography; one of the driving connections in this regard is Ms. Cayenne Pepper, an Australian sheepdog whose “darter-tongue kisses” compel Haraway to look closely at what biologist Lynn Margulis calls “symbiogenesis,” a process that explains how life forms continually intermingle, leading to ever more “intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life forms.” From lab animals to interspecies love to breeding purebreds, Haraway ensures that her readers will never look at human-animal encounters of any sort in the same way again.

While those familiar with Haraway’s oeuvre will find numerous connections to her earlier work, she does an excellent job of narrating how she came to the questions at the heart of When Species Meet and (perhaps most importantly) what is at stake for her in these questions, politically and otherwise. Of particular interest to philosophy buffs are Haraway’s gratifying critiques of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s well-known writing on “becoming-animal”; these critiques arise as part of Haraway’s overall challenge to the boundaries between “wild” or “domestic” creatures. Similarly, her response to Jacques Derrida’s ruminations on animals reveals the provocations that can arise from work that pokes holes in conventional disciplinary engagements with any given topic. Haraway’s willingness to take on both biology and philosophy, to cite only two of her resources, results in suggestive insights on a number of issues, but especially (with Derrida, et. al.) regarding the question of what it means to take animals seriously.

I found Haraway’s considerable enthusiasm and knowledge in When Species Meet to be invigorating. This book should appeal to a broad audience including animal lovers, scientists and their allies, theorists, and people who love random and little known information (e.g., the history of imported North American gray wolves during South African apartheid). While Haraway emphasizes that her desire to look more carefully at companion species, those “who eat and break bread together but not without some indigestion,” does not come with any guarantees, she infectiously believes that there is a good deal at stake in the mundane and extraordinary details of the co-shaping species she documents across these pages. Given her hope for the worldly orientations, such as curiosity and respect, that might be cultivated by looking at companion species differently, it is appropriate that she begins and ends the text by reminding us that “[t]here is no assured happy or unhappy ending — socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.”

Review by Marie Draz, Feminist Review Blog

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ Of Minnesota Press; Illustrated edition (November 26, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0816650462
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0816650460
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.88 x 1.1 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 61 ratings

About the author

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Donna Jeanne Haraway

Donna Jeanne Haraway

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One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay "The Cyborg Manifesto," she received the J.D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
61 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Nana
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2023
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The book is fantastic
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M. L. Galbreath
5.0 out of 5 stars Haraway and posthumanism
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2010
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Donna J. Haraway's _When Species Meet_ is a great resource for anyone interested in animal/human relations in the context of posthumanism. Haraway has always been an astute observer of social/political/natural interactions, and this book follows in the same tradition. No ideology is safe from her questioning mind as she explores the science and ethics behind industrial food animal farming, the use of animals in biomedical research, and pedigreed animal breeding.
17 people found this helpful
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Train Reading
5.0 out of 5 stars Reading the last chapter, and when I encountered the ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2014
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Reading the last chapter, and when I encountered the phrase of Haraway, "I had found my nourishing community at last," my heart pit-a-patted. And I was reminded my own community, how delightful it is to eat with them. Reading Haraway, I learn too much, with never settled stomach. Touching it is.
4 people found this helpful
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umbrellist
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book.
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2019
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Haraway is so great. This book really helped me see my relations with animals through systems.
One person found this helpful
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RDD
4.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Examination of Humanity's Realtionship with the Species Around It!
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2017
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In "When Species Meet", Donna J. Haraway asks two questions, “(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (pg. 3). She examines the interaction between humans and other species, predominantly focusing on domestic species such as dogs for their historically close relationship to humanity. She works to undo concepts of human exceptionalism, “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies. Thus, to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great Divide from all the others and so afraid of – and in bloody love with – what goes bump in the night” (pg. 11). Her work intersects not only with posthumanism, but also with discourses of race and gender, especially in the exceptionalism blended with eugenics that is the concept of purebreds.
Haraway writes, “<i>Canis lupis familiaris</i>, indeed; the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks. Further, the uncanny is where value becomes flesh again, in spite of all the dematerializations and objectifications inherent in market valuation” (pg. 45). This examination of the uncanny recalls the concept of the uncanny valley, something not-quite-human, yet almost so. With the manner in which humans, and Haraway in particular, anthropomorphize their dogs, these subjects are both familiar and novel simultaneously the more we think about our interactions with them. Discussing the role of healthcare in “humanizing” animals, Haraway writes, “Dogs in capitalist technoculture have acquired the ‘right to health,’ and the economic (as well as legal) implications are legion” (pg. 49). As consumers in a marketplace increasingly catering to their unique needs, the pet-parent concept so popular in the blogosphere no longer accurately describes the role of animals in the economy. Dogs, especially, are not just subjects/patients, but also commodities in a Marxist system (pg. 52).
Discussing the role of humanity in the world, Haraway suggests “that it is a misstep to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to live outside killing” (pg. 79). While she is not trying to reduce the world to the view of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s <i>In Memoriam A.H.H.</i>, she does encourage empathy in the laboratory setting. After all, “the puppies had to become patients if they were to become technologies and models” (pg. 59). Even this concept of certain animals as having a unique place in society is relatively recent. Haraway writes, “In the United States, dogs became ‘companion animals’ both in contrast and in addition to ‘pets’ and ‘working and sporting dogs’ around the late 1970s in the context of social scientific investigations into the relations of animals such as dogs to human health and well-being” (pg. 134). This idea, however, still privileges humanity.
In one of her strongest conclusions, Haraway writes, “Ways of living and dying matter” (pg. 88). The traditional humans-only method does not do justice to the reality of the world. Like Azetbur, the Klingon Ambassador in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" (1991, dir. Nicholas Meyer) critiqued the United Federation of Planets, an anthropocentric view is “little better than a <i>Homo sapiens</i> only club.” Interestingly, Haraway finds the most prescient comparisons to these cross-species encounters in the realm of science fiction. She concludes, “Animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with. Human and nonhuman animals are companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (pg. 301).
3 people found this helpful
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thi
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2018
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great book
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Matthew Penniman
5.0 out of 5 stars Cited by Pope Francis in "Laudate Deum"
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2023
"When Species Meet" was cited by Pope Francis in the apostolic exhortation "Laudate Deum: To All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis", published Oct. 4, 2023:

66. God has united us to all his creatures. Nonetheless, the technocratic paradigm can isolate us from the world that surrounds us and deceive us by making us forget that the entire world is a “contact zone”. (Footnote 41: Cf. D. J. HARAWAY, When Species Meet, Minneapolis, 2008, pp. 205-249.)
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Hollyann Shelton
4.0 out of 5 stars Was easy to read on kindle
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2020
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Came in quick and was super easy to order! I love ordering my textbooks through Amazon because not only are the cheaper for us struggling college students! But they are easier to deal with too and their textbooks are in great shape!!
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C., Katja
5.0 out of 5 stars must have zum Thema human animal studies
Reviewed in Germany on June 22, 2018
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Zum Thema human-animal studies ein Muss. Ein Perspektivwechsel vom Mensch zum Tier, bzw. Der Versuch die Welt aus der Sichtweise des Tieres zu betrachten. Oder zumindest die Möglichkeit in Betracht zu ziehen, dass es auch eine andere Sicht auf die Welt gibt, als die anthropzentrische. Dadurch ergeben sich interessante Verschiebungen und Denkansätze. Haraway zeigt viele Beispiele, zitiert und diskutiert andere Philosophen und Wissenschaftler. Ein spannendes Spektrum an Gedanken zum Thema Mensch-Tier.must
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avik chatterjee
5.0 out of 5 stars Read more of this woman by avik chatterjee
Reviewed in India on June 14, 2017
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Best living female philosopher. Very uncanny and truly transversal .
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peter gidal
5.0 out of 5 stars original, radical what more can one want, or need. a must …
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2016
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what a great iconoclastic original radical book!
One person found this helpful
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pc
4.0 out of 5 stars A philosophical work
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2011
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This is a great book. I love animals so am biased when it comes to reading about them. But this is a different kind of read. In a word, this is philosophy, of which I am also a big fan. So, again, I am biased. I love how the author presents her position on the human objectification of animals. We need to take a greater stand on this as a human race, but again, this is the philosopher in me and my love of animals taking over. If you are not into animals, it is still a wonder piece of profound thinking, and will inspire you to question your beliefs, values, etc. The only thing that sort of made me sneer was the over use in my opinion of difficult discourse applied throughout. I found myself having to stop and think about what she meant at times, not for the short story reader. I also found myself thinking of how she could have said the same thing more easily.
4 people found this helpful
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alison higson
3.0 out of 5 stars Useful but self indulgent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2013
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It is important to draw on one's own experiences when writing a book on this subject, but the author goes over the top, particularly when discussing her father. Nevertheless, there are useful insights here from an influential author.
One person found this helpful
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