Placing Angola: Racialisation,Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's Angola Rodeo

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallises violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanisation inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanisation are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centres empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialisation and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de‐anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.     

宁夏固原南塬水厂唐墓M4随葬马骨研究

2015年,宁夏文物考古研究所对固原市南塬水厂墓地进行抢救性发掘。其中,唐代墓葬M4出土两具马骨,一具为成年母马,一具为幼年个体,二马均被肢解,可能与遣奠用牲有关。这批马骨为研究隋唐时期墓葬礼仪用牲状况和唐代民间养马业的发展状况提供了重要资料。     

Mapping the subaquatic animals in the Aquatocene: Offshore wind power,the materialities of the sea and animal soundscapes

This paper examines the controversy around marine animal management in Taiwan Strait, where the sea has been territorialized by offshore wind power developers. Concerns have been focused on the impacts of pile-driving noise on the Taiwanese white dolphin which is on the IUCN list of extremely endangered species. To deal with the problem, both state and developers have been involved in volumetric practices which attempt to render the marine mammals knowable, and in turn, governable. While recent work on volumetric thinking has revealed that power is exercised through volume, we contend that insufficient attention has been given to those lively ‘non-human’ subjects living in the volumetric spaces. Inspired by recent scholarship on animal atmospheres and the wet ontologies, we argue that marine animals are sentient beings that cannot be known, or mapped, by the state-corporate volumetric practices which are mainly based on scientific experiments, conducted in isolated social contexts. To illustrate this, we draw on assemblage thinking and develop the idea of marine animal soundscapes. We suggest that marine animal soundscapes exist only through the embodied experience of a sensory, marine animal body, which is able to affect, and learn to be affected by, others, through non-linguistic ‘signs’, such as sound. We maintain that animal soundscapes are shaped by social, ecological and material circumstances, of which, the materialities of the sea, such as its liquidity, rapidity and fluidity, are of great importance. With an emphasis on the subaquatic animal soundscapes, our approach intends to extend social relationality to non-humans and calls for an ontology, distinct from the one with which existing volumetric analysts work.     

Can Animals Break Taboos?: Applications of ‘Taboo’ Among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia

ABSTRACT Like several other Malayo‐Polynesian speaking peoples, the Nage of central Flores apply a word meaning ‘taboo’ to certain undesirable behaviours by animals. Since ‘taboo’ is usually understood to incorporate the idea of prohibition and thus to refer specifically to human action, this application might appear to reflect either a polysemous usage, such that with reference to animals, ‘taboo’ does not really mean ‘taboo’, or a cosmology in which humans and animals are ultimately not distinct. An analysis of Nage ‘animal taboos’, however, demonstrates that the idea of breaching a prohibition is not necessarily absent from these applications of ‘taboo’, and that in this context ‘taboo’ cannot simply be understood as ‘omen’ or a reference to inauspiciousness. Rather than Nage ‘animal taboos’ implying an equivalence or identity of humans and animals, they express their crucial opposition and a disapprobation of anything that compromises their conceptual separation.     

灵宝西坡遗址动物骨骼的收集与整理

本文介绍了河南灵宝西坡遗址动物骨骼的收集与整理过程 ,并重点对收集方法和埋藏因素对动物遗存的影响作了评估。结果表明 ,自然和生物因素对骨骼埋藏过程的影响较小 ,而人为因素的影响比较显著。不同的收集方法对出土骨骼的绝对数量和重量有直接影响 ,但用相对比例分析主要动物的骨骼发现率 ,能够减小不同收集方法造成的差异     

Animal Remains from Industrial Iron Age Communities in Phalaborwa, South Africa

The Phalaborwa region in the Northern Province of South Africa has one of the richest copper- and iron-bearing deposits in southern Africa. These deposits have been worked for 1200 years and are still being worked. The abundance of ore reduction and metal production sites, dating mostly to the Late Iron Age, testifies to the importance of these deposits. Those sites that were excavated provide valuable insight into the industrial processes, economy, rituals, and use of animals by these specialized communities. The faunal remains reflect different lifestyles, but also indicate that animal husbandry was not of primary importance. The communities were focused predominantly on metal production. The soils and climate of the region are not very suitable for herding and agriculture. Subsequently products of the metal working activities such as hoes were used as replacement for cattle in bride wealth. La région Phalaborwa dans la province Nord d'Afrique de Sud constitue l'un des dépôts les plus riches de cuivre et de fer du sud d'Afrique. Ces dépôts ont été exploités pendant 1200 années et le sont toujours. L'importance de la réduction du minerais et de la production de métal de ces sites, datés pour la plupart sur la fin del'Age de Fer, témoignent de la richesse de ces dépôts. Deux sites qui furent fouillés, donnent des renseignements valables à propos des processus industriels, de l'économie, desrites et de l'utilisation des animaux par ces communautes spécialisées. Les ossements de la faune reflètent différents modes de view, mais indiquent également que l'économie animalière n'était pas de la première importance. Les sols et le climat de la région ne sont propices, ni à l'agriculture. D'autres produits issus du travail du fer, comme des houes, ont été utilisées en remplacement de l'élevage.     

Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals

This paper develops a framework for exploring resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. I illustrate the close linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality and captivity focusing on three types of sites and institutions: the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; and sites and institutions of exploited prisoner and animal labor. The main themes that call for a “carceral comparison” among these sites include: the emotional and psychological strain and violence enacted on bodies that is interwoven into their day‐to‐day operations; their geographies (locations, design, and layout) and carefully regulated movements within them; relationships between carcerality and “purpose breeding” that extends across both nonhuman and human populations; the ways in which “animalization” of incarcerated bodies works to create conditions for social death and killability; and the legal and political contexts that produce certain lives as disposable “bare lives”.     

The ingathering of (non-human) exiles: The creation of the Tel Aviv Zoological Garden animal collection, 1938–1948

This article examines the formation of the animal collection at the Tel Aviv zoological garden. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the article analyzes the images and practices of animal importation. It shows that in spite of the importance of Zionist enthusiasm in driving the establishment of the Tel Aviv zoo, and the attribution of Zionist vocabulary to animals living in it, its significance cannot be reduced to Zionist ideology and practice. The zoo’s animal collection was the product of the specific historical, colonial-imperial circumstances formed under the British Mandate. The gathering of the animals reflects the indispensable British contribution to the development of cultural endeavors in Palestine, and the coexistence of British and Zionist aspirations.     

The Rat-Catcher's Prank: Interspecies Cunningness and Scavenging in Henry Mayhew's London

Drawing upon Mayhew's interviews with rat-catchers, sewer workers and the dog-men of the rat pit, the article explores the varied relationships these aforementioned groups had with rats across three distinct spaces: the country, sewers and rat-pits. In addition to developing a framework for historicizing the practices of rat-catching, the article illuminates Mayhew's highly ambiguous relationship with two key rationalizing projects: the emerging discourses of sanitary progress and ‘animal welfare’, which had consequences for how he conceptualized the diverse cultures of London's working poor.     

Alexander von Humboldt: Galvanism,Animal Electricity,and Self-Experimentation Part 2: The Electric Eel,Animal Electricity,and Later Years

After extensive experimentation during the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt remained skeptical about “animal electricity” (and metallic electricity), writing instead about an ill-defined galvanic force. With his worldview and wishing to learn more, he studied electric eels in South America just as the new century began, again using his body as a scientific instrument in many of his experiments. As had been the case in the past and for many of the same reasons, some of his findings with the electric eel (and soon after, Italian torpedoes) seemed to argue against biological electricity. But he no longer used galvanic terminology when describing his electric fish experiments. The fact that he now wrote about animal electricity rather than a different “galvanic” force owed much to Alessandro Volta, who had come forth with his “pile” (battery) for multipling the physical and perceptable effects of otherwise weak electricity in 1800, while Humboldt was deep in South America. Humboldt probably read about and saw voltaic batteries in the United States in 1804, but the time he spent with Volta in 1805 was probably more significant in his conversion from a galvanic to an electrical framework for understanding nerve and muscle physiology. Although he did not continue his animal electricity research program after this time, Humboldt retained his worldview of a unified nature and continued to believe in intrinsic animal electricity. He also served as a patron to some of the most important figures in the new field of electrophysiology (e.g., Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond), helping to take the research that he had participated in to the next level.