Here are 100 books that Primate Visions fans have personally recommended if you like
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My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
This is an extraordinary study about life in and around the strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, home for Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi people and many other lively things, before and after the arrival of Russian and American colonial powers.
I admire the nuanced way in which Demuth exemplifies how capitalist and communist resource management transformed not only human but also animal cultures (whales, for example, strategize against whaling ships).
Along the Bering Strait, through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia, Bathsheba Demuth explores an ecosystem that has long sustained human beings. Yet when Americans and Europeans arrived, the area became the site of an experiment and the modern ideologies of production and consumption, capitalism and communism were subject to the pressures of arctic scarcity.
Demuth draws a vivid portrait of the sweeping effects of turning ecological wealth into economic growth and state power over the past century and a half. More urgent in a warming climate and as we…
I am an aficionado of the fresh start. I make it a point to celebrate all the New Years—that way, I can re-up my resolutions every few weeks! Paradoxically, I’m not great at sudden change. I like stability and working systematically. I reconcile these two sides of myself by observing other people’s transformations and caterpillar-to-butterfly stories on a regular basis. Whether it’s Beyonce going country or a Nigerian god turning to crime, I’m on the ride, picking up pointers. If you are looking to make a change, I hope this list is a fun place to start gathering ideas!
Is it weird that a space opera is one of my all-time comfort reads? Because it is. The first book of the Ancillary series, it’s got aliens, intergalactic war, an all-powerful ruler whose clones reach into every corner of the system, and one lonely remnant of a ship who reinvents herself to survive and ultimately fulfill her last order.
When everything is turbulent, I like to re-read Ancillary Justice and imagine I have one-tenth of protagonist Breq’s competence in a pinch.
Once, she was the Justice of Toren -- a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
Anderson examines how domestic animals played into English colonization of the Chesapeake and New England in the seventeenth century.
She shows how the English conceptions of the natural world, which clashed with Native American visions, directed their territorial expansion. At the same time, the new environment transformed the English methods of livestock husbandry.
I learned from this book how to discern the role of animals in even the most commonplace legal arrangements. For example, legislation related to damages done by free-ranged cattle raised fundamental questions about the ownership of nature.
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans-not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played a vitally important role in the settling of the New World. Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in the expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists believed that they provided the means to realize America's potential.…
When I was a doctoral student in historical musicology, I went to Paris to study postwar government budgets for music, but it was really boring. So I started hanging out listening to Parisian songbirds instead. The more I learned about birdsong, the more I realized it raised some really big questions, like why biologists and musicians have completely different standards of evidence. Those questions led me to write my book, which is about what it means to sing if you’re not considered fully human, and most of my work today is about how thinking about animals can help us understand what we value in those who are different.
Butler is known for bringing a black, feminist, and queer perspective to science fiction, a genre of futuristic and outer-space storytelling that traditionally features white male protagonists.
But what really captivates me about this book, which is set in a post-apocalyptic future where human survivors are mated with their alien rescuers (really!), is the way it asks icky-yet-intensely-meaningful questions. What does it mean to “be human” in a future of genetic hybridity and gender fluidity? What does it mean to love a partner or children whose genetics and culture are radically different from your own? When is violence futile, and when is it the only way to be heard?
I’m pretty much obsessed with this book, and I promise that any reader who has thought deeply about what it means to be really different will love it too.
My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
In this field-defining classic, Ritvo boldly showed the academic world that the relations between humans and other animals are worthy of historical inquiry.
The book delves into various subjects in Victorian life: hunting and the designation of nature reserves, the emergence of pet shows and their relations to class formation, meat consumption, and its national symbolism. The book’s impressive breadth of sources spans from popular newspapers’ illustrations to agricultural studbooks.
While primarily focused on nineteenth-century England, Ritvo's insights have inspired researchers, including myself, to examine similar themes in different cultures and historical periods.
When we think about the Victorian age, we usually envision people together with animals: the Queen and her pugs, the sportsman with horses and hounds, the big game hunter with his wild kill, the gentleman farmer with a prize bull. Harriet Ritvo here gives us a vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations.
Victorian England was a period of burgeoning scientific cattle breeding and newly fashionable dog shows; an age of Empire and big game hunting; an era of…
My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
The newest publication on my list, this book offers future directions for researching the history of human-animal relations.
Arguing against the Eurocentrism of animal history, the book brings in multiple species into the historical inquiry of colonial Myanmar. Saha explores colonized people's interspecies relationships, with a particular emphasis on commodification processes.
I recommend the book to those who are interested not only in a captivating analysis, but also in a thought-provoking theoretical discussion about the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial scholarship.
Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered…
When I was a doctoral student in historical musicology, I went to Paris to study postwar government budgets for music, but it was really boring. So I started hanging out listening to Parisian songbirds instead. The more I learned about birdsong, the more I realized it raised some really big questions, like why biologists and musicians have completely different standards of evidence. Those questions led me to write my book, which is about what it means to sing if you’re not considered fully human, and most of my work today is about how thinking about animals can help us understand what we value in those who are different.
C’mon, doesn’t everybody need a book by a guy who explains that the Black-Billed Cuckoo is finally, finally a bird “who appreciates measured silence such as that which characterizes the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”?
This amazing, idiosyncratic, and beautiful book from 1904 has got pages of gorgeous colored illustrations of birds, musical scores that are a weird hybrid of actual birdsong and random additions the author thinks will “make clear” a bird’s connections to human music, and heartfelt statements like the one above extolling the musical abilities of various American birds.
True, this is not the book to address issues of gender, race, and power in the sensitive and thoughtful ways that Butler and Haraway do. But you won’t care, because you will be having so much fun reading about the Hermit Thrush’s deep connection to the Moonlight Sonata.
In this beautifully written and well-illustrated guide to birds' songs from 1904, Mathews describes 127 bird species, mostly of Eastern United States, and their songs. This fieldbook contains descriptions of the physical characteristics and habits of each, as well as detailed comments on their songs and calls. He includes musical scores of at least two songs for each species.
When I was a doctoral student in historical musicology, I went to Paris to study postwar government budgets for music, but it was really boring. So I started hanging out listening to Parisian songbirds instead. The more I learned about birdsong, the more I realized it raised some really big questions, like why biologists and musicians have completely different standards of evidence. Those questions led me to write my book, which is about what it means to sing if you’re not considered fully human, and most of my work today is about how thinking about animals can help us understand what we value in those who are different.
This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s got a lot of academic jargon, and it can be tough reading.
But it’s well worth the work, because it is also one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen, anywhere, of how and why widely accepted categories like “human” and “animal” come from a bigger story influenced by slavery and its aftermath. Jackson’s book also has lovely and subtle case studies that will introduce you to writers and artists you won’t forget, like the incredible paintings of Wangechi Mutu or the sensitive creativity of writer Nalo Hopkinson.
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association
Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association
Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies
Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human
Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia…
I’ve been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV and the next Stephen Hawking by Gear Magazine. My passion is flying over all the sciences, all of history, and a chunk of the arts and pulling it all together in a new big picture. I’ve called this approach Omnology, the aspiration to omniscience. Sounds crazy, right? But I’ve published scientific papers or lectured at scholarly conferences in twelve different scientific disciplines, from quantum physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, psychology, information science, and astronautics. And I’ve been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,Wired, and many more.
This is the book with which Wilson introduced sociobiology in 1975. It is encyclopedic and sometimes academic. But the big picture Wilson presents and the stories he turns to pixels in that panorama are astonishing. Wilson helps you see the connections between the social bonds that join you with the people you love and the way all of life works. And it’s not the tired old view of animals and humans in isolation.
View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"
Harvard University Press is proud to announce the re-release of the complete original version of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis--now available in paperback for the first time. When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time, Sociobiology is probably more widely known as the object…
I’m an evolutionary biologist and a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University, Sweden. My research focuses on the biology of genetic conflicts and what they can tell us about the evolution of conflict and cooperation more generally. I develop population genetic theory and perform comparative analyses to ask how and why such conflicts occur and how they fit into models of social evolution. I also work on the foundations of the so-called gene’s-eye view of evolution, also known as selfish gene theory. I studied at Edinburgh and Toronto and was a postdoc at Cornell and Harvard.
The theory of evolution touches us in a way other scientific theories do not. It deals directly with who we are and where we come from. But how exactly?The Selfish Gene came out only a year after E.O. Wilson’s Socbiology and both books helped ignite an ill-tempered debate over this question. Ullica Segerstråle's book is a comprehensive history of this particularly intense disagreement and is full of personal anecdotes and insights from all the major players.
For the last twenty-five years, sociobiologists have come under continuous attack by a group of left-wing academics, who have accused the former of dubious and politically dangerous science. Many have taken the critics' charges at face value. But have the critics been right? And what are their own motivations? This book strives to set the record straight. It shows that the criticism has typically been unfair. Still, it cannot be dismissed as 'purely politically motivated'. It turns out that the critics and the sociobiologists live in different worlds of taken-for-granted scientific and moral convictions. The conflict over sociobiology is best…
