Paul Shepard has been one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology for more than forty years. His thought-provoking ideas on the role of animals in human thought, dreams, personal identity, and other psychological and religious contexts have been presented in a series of seminal writings, including Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and now The Others, his most eloquent book to date.
The Others is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.
Shepard considers animals as others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.
Contents
Introduction: The Encounter
PART I. The Animal Fare
Chapter 1. The Ecological Doorway to Symbolic Thought
Chapter 2. The Swallow
PART II. Cognition
Chapter 3. The Skills of Cognition: Pigeonholes, Dinosaurs, and Hobbyhorses
Chapter 4. Savanna Dreaming: The Fox at the Fringe of the Field
PART III. Identify
Chapter 5. The Self as Menagerie
Chapter 6. Aping the Others
Chapter 7. The Ecology of Narration
Chapter 8. Membership
PART IV. Change
Chapter 9. The Masters of Transformation
Chapter 10. Heads, Faces, and Masks
Chapter 11. The Pet World
Chapter 12. The Gift of Music
Chapter 13. Ontogeny Revisited: Teddy, Pooh, Paddington, Yogi, and Smokey
PART V. The Cosmos
Chapter 14. The Meaning of Dragons and Why the Gods Ride on Animals
Chapter 15. Augury and Holograms
Chapter 16. Bovine Epiphanies: Fecundity and Power
Chapter 17. Lying Down With Lambs and Lions in the Christian Zoo
Chapter 18. Hounding Nature: The Nightmares of Domestication
PART VI. Counterplayers
Chapter 19. The Miss Muffet Syndrome: Fearing Animals
Chapter 20. Cuckoo Clocks and Bluebirds of Happiness: Animals as Machines
Chapter 21. The Great Interspecies Confusion
Chapter 22. Final Animals and Economic Imperatives
Chapter 23. Rights and Kindness: A Can of Worms
Chapter 24. The Many and the Fuzzy: Plurality and Ambiguity
