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Why We Are Obsessed With The Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World
Doubleday Religion
February 2010
On Sale: January 26, 2010
272 pages ISBN: 0385523637 EAN: 9780385523639 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What do Mickey Mouse, Ganesh, a leopard-skin pillbox hat, A
Lion Called Christian, and the Aflac duck have in common?
They all represent human beings' deeply ingrained connection
to the animal kingdom. In Being With Animals, anthropologist
Barbara King unravels the complexity and enormous
significance of this relationship. Animals rule our
existence. You can see this in the billions of dollars
Americans pour out each year for their pets, in the success
of books and films such as Marley and Me, in the names of
athletic teams, in the stories that have entertained and
instructed children (from The Cat in the Hat back to well
before Aesop created his fables), in the animal deities that
pervade the most ancient forms of religion (and which still
appear in sublimated forms today), to the paintings on the
cave walls of Lascaux. The omnipresence of animal beings in
our lives--whether real or fictional--is something so
enormous that people take often it for granted, never
wondering why animals remain so much a part of human life.
It has continuously maintained a powerful spiritual,
transcendent quality over the tens of thousands of years
that Homo sapiens have walked the earth. Why? King looks
at this phenomenon, from the most obvious animal connections
in daily life and culture and over the whole of human
history, to show the various roles animals have played in
all civilizations. She ultimately digs deeply into the
importance of the human-animal bond as key to our evolution,
as a significant spiritual aspect of understanding what
truly makes us human, and looks ahead to explore how our
further technological development may, or may not, affect
these important ties. BARBARA J. KING is Chancellor
Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and
Mary. She has studied monkies in Kenya and great apes in
various captive settings. She writes essays on
anthropology-related themes for bookslut.com and the Times
Literary Supplement (London). Together with her husband, she
cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in
Virginia.
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