Animals And Society Rle Social Theory

Animals and Society uses a variety of historical sources and a coherent social theory to tell the story of the invention of animal rights. It moves from incidents like the medieval execution of pigs to a discussion of the politics and strategies of modern rights organisations. The book also presents radical interpretations of nineteenth-century animal welfare laws, and the accounts of the Noble Savage. The insights generated by social science are always at the core of the discussion and the author daws on the work of Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. This wide-ranging and accessible book provides a fascinating account of the relations between humans and animals. It raises far-reaching questions about the philosophy, history and politics of animal rights.

In more than thirty essays, Social Animals examines the role of animals in human society. Collected from a wide range of periodicals and books, these important works of scholarship examine such issues as how animal shelter workers view the pets in their care, why some people hoard animals, animals and women who experience domestic abuse, philosophical and feminist analyses of our moral obligations toward animals, and many other topics.

What kind of social animal are we? A provocative and stimulating answer

Animals are crucial to the functioning of any society: they provide humans with food, labour, raw materials, modes of transport, companionship, scientific knowledge through observation and experimentation, and forms of leisure and entertainment. Given both the wide variety of ways in which animals are involved in human societies, and also the broad range of controversies (from vivisection for scientific and commercial purposes, to factory farming) that have arisen, the study of animals is by its very nature interdisciplinary. Each social scientific discipline has distinctive and interesting things to say about the relations that pertain both historically and in the present day between humans and animals. In subjects such as anthropology and geography, the study of human-animal relations has become in recent years a key area of analysis. Other subjects, such as sociology, are now increasingly recognising the need to put animals firmly on their research agendas. This collection brings together the rich diversity of research work from across the social sciences on the topic of human-animal relations, and also provides overviews of research that has been carried out within particular disciplines in this area.

This textbook provides a full overview of human-animal studies. It focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted in racism, sexism, and class privilege.

This book exists at the intersection of two complementary and conflicting perspectives, law and biology. From the vantage point of both disciplines, Juris Zoology provides a comprehensive and realistic framework to objectively assess the role and significance of animals in American civil and criminal law. Contrasting the views of animal rights activists, Duckler examines animals in terms of their prehistory, history, biology, social utility, economic effect, and aesthetic value. Focusing on animal captivity, control, use, and value, Duckler refutes the proposal of granting animal's legal rights. The book offers a new and controversial voice to the national conversation on the propriety of animal rights, and would be of interest to lawyers, economists, sociologists, as well as scholars and professionals in animal-related fields.

Auguste Comte proclaimed himself the founder of sociology and, on the whole, this claim is accepted. His most important work is the six-volume Cours de Philosophie Positive of which this present book is a selective abridgement. Comte, as this selection shows, was a methodological visionary. He was an eminently successful terminological innovator and to him we owe not only 'sociology' and 'positivism' but also 'biology' and 'altruism'. Professor Andreski, in his lucid introduction, assesses Comte's place under six headings, as scientist, philosopher, sociological theorist, sociological historian, reformer and methodologist. But this selection from Comte's works will be most welcomed because it provides a modern English translation of the main body of his thought.