Böcker av Vinciane Despret

Broken hearts, edgy nerves, tightened throats—our emotions grab and take hold of us. But if our emotions appear obvious to us, are they necessarily real or universal? This, of course, is what researchers in physiology and psychology assert, but they will ultimately be disappointed. Vinciane Despret sets out in this book to show how some of our emotions, precisely those we thought were a natural part of our make-up, do not exist unless they have been inscribed in our subjectivity through the mediation of culture. Emotions do not exist per se, but only within relations to others. Anthropologists and ethnologists often return from distant regions and remote islands with emotions unknown to their peers at home, and which can only be expressed in the tribal tongue they have learned. Following such discoveries, one should not be surprised to find that anger does not exist among the Uktus, and the Ikfalus have to teach fear to their children. One only has to consider the emotions of other cultures and traditions to recognize that they are human productions with wide and significant variations, like good manners. Our emotions, finally, represent the way that we see the world and try to make it our own.

A groundbreaking reflection on the process by which one arrives at an ethological theory How do humans study the complex worlds of animals without imposing their own societal and scientific gaze upon them? The biologist Amotz Zahavi stakes the controversial claim that Arabian babblers are said to raise themselves up each day to dance and tend to one another in the early morning sun. Such a claim will provoke the interest and intellectual curiosity of a young philosopher and psychologist recognizing that the best way for her to observe the practices of scientists at work is to join them on their terrain. Embedding herself in the field alongside ethologists in the Negev desert, Vinciane Despret deftly depicts and reflects on the process by which scientists construct their theories within the milieu of the animals they study. Along the way, and not without humor, Despret analyzes a variety of theories posited by many well-known thinkers, including Zahavi, who devoted his life to the interpretation, companionship, and conservation of the Arabian babbler bird, and naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Pierre Kropotkin.

The first major monograph on the work of contemporary Belgian artist Fabrice Samyn

Vinciane Despret argues that behaviors weidentify as separating humans from animals do not actually properly belong tohumans. Combining serious scholarship with humor, this book poses twenty-sixquestions that stretch our preconceived ideas about what animals do, what theythink about, and what they want.