Displaying Death and Animating Life

The number of ways in which humans interact with animals is almost incalculable. From beloved household pets to the steak on our dinner tables, the fur in our closets to the Babar books on our shelves, taxidermy exhibits to local zoos, humans have complex, deep, and dependent relationships with the animals in our ecosystems. In Displaying Death and Animating Life, Jane C. Desmond puts those human-animal relationships under a multidisciplinary lens, focusing on the less obvious, and revealing the individualities and subjectivities of the real animals in our everyday lives. Desmond, a pioneer in the field of animal studies, builds the book on a number of case studies. She conducts research on-site at major museums, taxidermy conventions, pet cemeteries, and even at a professional conference for writers of obituaries. She goes behind the scenes at zoos, wildlife clinics, and meetings of pet cemetery professionals. We journey with her as she meets Kanzi, the bonobo artist, and a host of other animal-artists all of whom are preparing their artwork for auction.Throughout, Desmond moves from a consideration of the visual display of unindividuated animals, to mourning for known animals, and finally to the marketing of artwork by individual animals. The first book in the new Animal Lives series, Displaying Death and Animating Life is a landmark study, bridging disciplines and reaching across divisions from the humanities and social sciences to chart new territories of investigation.

"Desmond's fascinating book focuses on our engagement with animals in the practices of everyday life and death. With a remarkably accessible writing style that will appeal to a broad readership, she takes up some of the most important but rarely investigated topics in our relationship with other animals, including death mourning practices, roadkill, and exhibitions. Displaying Death and Animating Life makes a valuable contribution to animal studies and the legitimization of the multispecies family as a social unit and will provoke much discussion on the myriad ways human and animal lives are intertwined in co-constitutive worlds."-- "Linda Kalof, Michigan State University, author of Looking at Animals in Human History", "The boundaries between humans and other animals have themselves many boundaries, many margins, places where what counts as proper animal life--and death--is contested and uncertain. In this spellbinding book, Desmond takes us to the odd ends of taxidermy, to the limits of human mourning for animal companions, and to the edges of dominant sensibilities about animal aesthetic expression. Displaying Death and Animating Life promises to rearrange dominant definitions and deliberations about the matter of animal agency."-- "Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"

Jane C. Desmond is professor of anthropology and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Staging Tourism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.