Lynda Birke

Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non-human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro-American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what emerges in these differential discourses is that a paradox is put into play to make a distinction between traditional and contemporary ways of being in relation to nature and the animal; it is the paradox of what we want to refer to as ‘natural technologies’. We suggest that the paradox of ‘natural technologies’ is a proliferating feature of Euro-American cultural life that troubles old divisions between nature and culture and propose that it indicates less about a politics of nature than a politics of culture. Specifically, we show that the preoccupation with bringing nature, and the non-human, more into alignment with the human promotes ethics and equality as matters of lifestyle choice to the exclusion of very specific ideas about tradition, hierarchy, evolution and socialization.

"Much more than a book about animal welfare, it explores how the scientific questions and answers would be different if biology operated from a paradigm of respect for the objects of study. Thirteen contributions are arranged in four distinct sections; individual topics vary extensively but each is first-rate." --Choice "Ruth Hubbard and Lynda Birke have asked an important question: how would the practices of biology change if organisms were considered subjects with agency? They have gathered an array of excellent scholars and a broad spectrum of perspectives.... this is a fresh and important question." --Londa Schiebinger Essays explore how the practice of biology could change if scientists treated the organisms they use in their experiments respectfully: what it means to raise animals or plants as experimental resources; what guides decisions about which animals to breed for experimental purposes.

Birke, a feminist biologist who has written extensively on the connections between feminism and science, seeks to bridge the gap between feminist cultural analysis and science by looking "inside" the body, using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. She rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.