Bringing animals in – ethnographic challenges in animal studies

But first out on the second day of the conference was keynote Morten Tonnessen, from University of Tartu, who talked about the symbolic construction of the Big Bad Wolf in contemporary Norway. As oppose to the Swedish wolf debate, where the dog is the prime animal being placed in conflict with the wolf, the debate in Norway seems to perceive the sheep-wolf issue as a much bigger problem.

As Morten Tonnessen pointed out, wolves and sheep have historically often been juxtaposed, especially in the context of the Bible. And in cultural terms, hardly any animals are as loaded with symbolic value as the wolf and the sheep. “And the shared importance is no coincidence, since the symbolism of the two animals has frequently developed in explicit opposition to each other”, Morten Tonnessen writes in his paper.

The second keynote for the day was Pär Segerdahl, from the Centre for Gender Research, who talked about apes as co-writers to scientific papers. Read more about his talk in our news list.

Future publications

Jacob Bull, one of the organizers from the Centre for Gender Research, summarizes the different animal issues discussed at the conference:

- We have been dealing with questions of anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, how to combine quantitative and qualitative methods, how to bring animals in, both methodologically but also writing with them, and of course power relations. We need to further emphasize threads like affect, emotion and unruliness and bring that in.

And according to Jacob Bull, we can look forward to reading an outcome of the interesting conference.

- We are definitely hoping to be able to publish some of the intriguing questions dealt with at this conference. More information will probably appear on our website, he says.

Pre-conference for Minding Animals 2012

The Zoo-ethnographies conference is one of several pre-conferences organized all over the world to introduce the big international conference “Minding Animals: Building Bridges Between Science, the Humanities and Ethics”, which will be held in Utrecht, Netherlands, in July next year. The association behind the Utrecht conference is Minding Animals International (MAI), which aims to act as a bridge between academia and advocacy, is a network of more than 2,500 academics, artists, activists and advocates, dedicated to the study and protection of all planetary life through the advancement of Animal Studies.

Read more about the Zoo-ethnographies conference

Read more about the HumAnimal group (Länk borttagen)