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Intelligent bodies: Embodied subjectivity human-horse communication
Abstract
Symbolic interaction is by its very nature limited. Symbols are only one of the many vehicles of communication that human and animal species may utilize in order to communicate. Because symbols depend on abstract associations between signifi ers and signifi eds, their operation is at times uncertain, controversial, or even impractical, as it is often the case when human species attempt to interact with animal species. As Keri Brandt points out in this chapter, humans and animals - in this instance female riders and horses - in fact recur to a type of communication that can be defi ned as iconic. Icons, such as the various somatic forms of tactile contact between horsewomen and horses, embody what they represent. Meaning, therefore, can be understood as residing within the experience of somatic perception of the symbolic presence of the other. On one hand, this observation points to the pre-refl exive carnality of communication. On the other hand, it highlights the symbolism upon which the coexistence of conscious bodies depends. Horsewomen and horses, and more generally, humans and animals, thus seem to be united in a moment of ekstasis (see Vannini and Waskul this volume) that Brandt understands to be inevitably gendered and specied.
... Finally, the accounts highlight the emotional elements in intersubjectivity with nonhuman others. In the absence of a shared interaction frame governed by spoken language, emotions may become emphasized in the intersubjective experience and in reflections of the horse partner's experiences (Brandt, 2006;Gallese, 2003Gallese, , 2014. ...
... The simultaneously existing, even contradictory, human-focused and horse-focused accounts of agency echo earlier studies. Riders assign personhood and intentionality in action and even in mood manipulation to horses (Davis et al., 2015), yet they may be reluctant to grant the horse agency in action for fear of danger and loss of control (Brandt, 2006;Maurstad et al., 2013). ...
... Questo articolo è dedicato all'analisi del particolare sistema di parentele tra i cavalli del Palio di Ronciglione; parentele che non sono affatto frutto della libera evoluzione di una specie, bensì il risultato del millenario modellamento operato dalle società umane sul cavallo domestico. Non ci occuperemo delle possibili forme di "parentela simbolica" tra cavalli e umani né di specifiche modalità di relazione interspecie in contesti performativi (Lawarence 1985;Mullin 1999;Brandt 2006;Maurstad, Davis, Cowles 2013;Bindi 2017; Birke, Thompson 2018) ma, più propriamente, della manipolazione consapevole e mirata delle linee di parentela da parte dell'uomo, e di come essa si rifletta all'interno di un palio di provincia. Cercheremo di evidenziare come questo fenomeno, in altre parole, rientri nei termini di una "parentela interspecie". ...
I cavalli da corsa sono il risultato di un millenario addomesticamento umano per mezzo del breeding. Queste pratiche di riproduzione selettiva sono basate sulla creazione e la manipolazione di parentele non-umane, inscritte nella storia genetica dei cavalli purosangue e mezzosangue. Risultato di un intenso periodo di campo, sul piano metodologico questa ricerca impiega l'etnografia multispecie e i modelli genealogici per identificare ed esaminare uno di questi sistemi di parentele, legato ai cavalli del Palio di Ronciglione (Italia). Il confronto tra i pattern di parentela di questi cavalli dimostra l'influenza delle pratiche di breeding italiane (in special modo sarde). Le categorie culturali di stirpe e genealogia sono fondamentali per comprendere l'intreccio tra linee di sangue. Tuttavia – come il Palio mostra – questa forma profonda di controllo umano rimane incapace di afferrare fino in fondo un'alterità così manifesta, eppure così familiare.
... We juxtapose the naturalistic research of embodiment and research on the body (Schubert 2006; see also Laurier et al. 2006, Heath and Luft, 2007a, 2007b, Konecki 2005, Knoblauch 2008) with a phenomenological explication of body practices (Morley 2001;Smith 2007, Schütz 1967 and a contemplative approach to analyze body experiences (Bentz, Giorgino 2016, Konecki 2022. Individual experiences of the body are also often researched using interview techniques, which characterize the approach of symbolic interactionism (Schrock and Boyd 2006), phenomenology (Brandt 2006), or the model of research through mutual experiences (Wyka 1993; see also Woroniecka 1998, Zakrzewska-Manterys 2010. Visual techniques are often used in the knowledge transfer of hatha yoga (Singleton 2010a, Konecki 2015, Jakubowska 2017. ...
The main goal of the book is to describe and reconstruct the themes of experiencing the body in hatha yoga, such as emotions and body, learning through the body, experiencing the movement of the body (asanas), meditation in hatha yoga (experiencing the savasana pose), the concentration of the mind, and yoga as the therapy. There will be a phenomenological and contemplative description and explication of hatha yoga and how practitioners experience it with the help of the language that they have available.
The goals of the book are as follows: (1) To describe and analyze the
language of experiencing the body in yoga practice. We want to analyze the linguistic formulas used in the descriptions of the body practice (see Chapter 1). (2) To answer the following question when analyzing the autodescription:
What are the rules of knowledge transfer in the corporeal practice of hatha yoga? (see Chapter 2) and how the body is experienced in a particular space (see Chapter 3) (3) To analyze how the body, emotions and thoughts are described directly after the physical practice of hatha yoga and how they relate to the self. The emotions are inscribed in the reactions of the body (see Chapters 4 and 5). (4) To reconstruct the themes that describe the essence of experiencing hatha yoga and see the cognitive style of the yoga practice, using Alfred Schütz’s concept of the finite province of meaning (Chapters 6–8).
... Human-horse interaction has been the object of a small number of empirical studies, with most research emphasizing the nonverbal communication between horses and humans (Birke, 2017;Brandt, 2004Brandt, , 2006Zetterqvist Blokhuis & Lundgren, 2017). Riding lessons have been explored from an interaction-relevant perspective by Norris (2012), Dashper (2016), Zetterqvist Blokhuis (2019), Lundesjö Kvart (2020), Lundgren (2017Lundgren ( , 2020, Lundesjö Kvart and Melander Bowden (2022), and Rettig (2020Rettig ( , 2022, with a primary focus on how the communication between rider and horse is taught and acquired, and, in the case of Lundesjö Kvart (2020), how it is temporally organized. ...
... The potential to experience profound, embodied, co-operative relatedness within equestrian relationships has inspired the writings of equestrian ethnographers , Blokhuis 2008, Brandt 2006, Dashper 2017a, b, Davis and Maurstad 2016, DiGiacomo 2016, Game 2001, Wipper 2000. 3 Some writers (e.g. ...
n the context of the burgeoning literature on Animal History, we think this issue offers an original contribution by exploring new geographical and cultural frontiers, approaching transnational connections, and destabilising both the western model and global north paradigm. Our project is inspired by Global Environment’s mission ‘to transcend the western-centric and “developist” bias to effect the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view’. The array of authors is diverse in terms of gender, race and institutional affiliation, connecting scholars from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin and North America. We believe that advancing the rapidly expanding historiography on animals depends on global and multidisciplinary approaches and eschewing silos based on language or nation. We thus embrace movements across ‘normal’ scholarly networks, conventional comparisons and disciplinary boundaries in order to offer new conversations based on generative nonconformity. Similarly, studying animals over time includes focusing on the movements of these living beings worldwide and their role in different cultures GE9and economies. Animals are living beings in their own – agentic subjects of their own lives and histories – but also players in human histories as commodities, food, workers, trophies, sacred beings and objects for human pleasure, fashion, entertainment or knowledge production. They are agents capable of developing distinct forms of resilience when facing human power, even as they are entangled in conflicting situations between humans and the other animals.
This essay explores the co-constructed sensory experiences between two species over time, offering a deeper understanding both of the multi-sensory nature and different scales of inter-species intimacy. A five millennia long intimate sensory conversation between humans and horses was integral to hunting, domesticating, taming, training, sacrificing, harnessing and – eventually – riding the once-wild horses of the steppeland. Domesticating the horse may be seen as slow intimacy and taming as faster intimacy. Horses have evolved to be more empathetic to us than most animals, including most domesticated animals, because of the close reading of our intentionality they have needed to develop since domestication. The historian’s window into past sensory experiences is usually mediated by language. But, this essay asks, what if it does not have to be? It shows how a feminist interspecies historian learns by listening, watching, touching and being with the subject. Feminist thinking can help challenge stereotyping by thinking about the intimacy at the heart of horse-human relationships.
This paper raises the question of female-embodied subjectivity as impacting on transgendered and intersexed claims to subjectivity. Recent theoretical work, from Butler to Žižek, 'deconstructs' sexual difference, and in the process repeats the familiar gesture of erasing the specificities of female-embodied subjectivity. Recent feminist theory (especially Battersby, Grosz and Gatens, and central to Irigaray) attempts a delineation of female-embodied subjectivity, resisting the current anti-essentialist trend in gender theory. The foreclosing of debate around an ontology of female-embodiment performed by anti-essentialist dictums is answered by a 'new essentialism' in feminist theory. Between the concerns of the 'autonomous' female subject and claims to transgendered and intersexed subjectivity, female-embodiment remains suspended between reification (naïve essentialism) and cultural erasure. 'Fuzzy gender' (fuzzy logic applied to gender theory) offers a model for mobilising female-embodied subjectivity as a political and theoretical figure resistant to institutional embodiment. Through 'fuzzy gender' we comprehend binary sexual difference as an instance of the part mistaking itself for the whole, and negotiate the wake of the receding Aristotelian model of difference without collapsing into atomised relativity. In the end, 'fuzzy gender' argues for theoretical coalition between feminist, transgendered, and intersexed concerns, in the context of an unrepentantly masculine body-politic.
A continuing concern of many feminists and non-feminists alike has been to identify a distinctive feminist method of inquiry. This essay argues that this method question is misguided and should be abandoned. In doing so it takes up the distinctions between and relationships among methods, methodologies and epistemologies; proposes that the concern to identify sources of the power of feminist analyses motivates the method question; and suggests how to pursue this project.