Human-Animal interaction in the city: the urban ontologies of the other

Abstract (English)

For the last few decades studies of non-human sociality have been becoming an increasingly popular trend in global anthropological scholarship. The four ontologies of Philippe Descola (Descola 2012), de Castro’s concept of perspectivism (Castro 2014), the most thought out to date research based on non-human ethnography by Eduardo Kohn in “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human” - all of this recent research explores and tries to find words to describe the way humans and animals coexist and interact. However, most of these studies and concepts are based on material gathered with indigenous communities. The animals that live within the cities and their interactions with humans is researched significantly less - and when it is, the researches have to admit that the animal in the city is constructed as “unseen”, some, like rats and pigeons, are marginalized. Despite the lack of acknowledgement in urban planning, the urban animals become relevant in the scholarship discussing the future of cities, where the inclusion of animals into the infrastructure is thought of alongside the overall consideration of the non-human - Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, the idea of cyborg urbanization by Matthew Gandy.
The goal of this panel is to gather anthropoligists that in their research combine usually separated topics of the animal and the city. Researchers Artyom Pankin and Santiago Orrego in their article "Rats as urban infrastructure", based on a series of ethnographic observations and cartography of rats, conclude that rats in the city create their own, separate urban infrastructure invisible to humans, such as, for example, a network of tunnels dug by rats in New York. Which means that the crossing of the paths of a rat and a human is an out of the ordinary experience, not a rule of co-existence, that is why it is usually so disturbing for the both parties, but it still is one of the assemblages of the human-animal interaction within the city. The situation calls for not only theoretical, but practical anthropological research into the way animals and humans interact and coexist in the urban space now, to successfully include the non-human into the way we think of and build cities, as they are much of a home for it as they are for the human. The goal of the panel is to look deeper into the existing research on the topic and outline the future of the discipline.