Category FAQs Search : Intensive Farming
Question: Object Agency of a Living/Non-Living Animal Entity: The Case of Horse/Horsemeat
Answer: The current paper immerses the literature on human-animal relations and cultural categorisations of food to discussions on the agency of living and non-living non-human entities. By so doing, it joins the stream of studies that question the conceptual boundaries between dualistic categories, such as objects and subjects, nature and culture, and production and consumption (Canniford & Bajde, 2016). In particular, the study aims to participate in deconstructing dualisms (Canniford & Shankar, 2016) by illuminating the convergences and contradictions in object agency both in the case of a non-human living horse and in the case of non-human non-living horsemeat. Thus, by adopting a post-human approach, which enables taking a leap beyond stable subject and object conceptualisations (Bettany & Daly, 2008; Bettany & Kerrane, 2011; Smith, 2016), the study sheds further light on the pole of non-human at the one extreme of the human – non-human dichotomy. As such, the study looks beyond binary subject-object positions within human-animal relations (Bettany & Daly, 2008; Haraway, 2007; Jyrinki, 2012; Peñaloza, 2008; Smith, 2016), and argues for focusing not only on human beings as choosing and experiencing agents, but also on the ways (non-)human beings and objects co-emerge as mutually implicative with each other (Bettany & Kerrane, 2011). Thereby, this study follows Kylkilahti, Syrjälä, Autio, Autio, and Kuismin (2015), who configure consumers and their animal companions as co-consuming units whose agency may be captured as co-existing and mutable in relation to emerging situations and conditions. For this task, a horse provides a unique entity for elaborating the particularities of non-human object agency that appears in a living and non-living being, as it is capable of occupying the positions of both a domestic animal and an edible food. In this sense, a horse, as a companion species in general, can be regarded as a boundary object that acts across multiple worlds and can be utilised to understand the multiplicity of assemblages (Bettany, 2016).
(Source: , 24 Sep 2021)
Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/S0885-211120160000018005