A vivid first-person study of a notorious equine ritual-from the perspective of the wild horses who are its targets Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these "beasts" together and shave their manes and tails. Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite, producing a profound revelation about the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination. John Hartigan Jr. constructs an engrossing, day-by-day narrative chronicling the complex, nuanced social lives of wild horses and the impact of their traumatic ritual shearing every summer. His story generates intimate, individual portraits of these creatures while analyzing the social practices-like grazing and grooming-that are the building blocks of equine society. Shaving the Beasts culminates in a searing portrayal of the inspiring resilience these creatures display as they endure and recover from rapa das bestas. Turning away from "thick" description to "thin," Hartigan moves toward a more observational form of study, focusing on behaviors over interpretations. This vivid approach provides new and important contributions to the study of animal behavior. Ultimately, he comes away with profound, penetrating insights into multispecies interactions and a strong alternative to humancentric ethnographic practices.

Aesop’s Anthropology is a guide for thinking through the perplexing predicaments and encounters that arise as the line between human and nonhuman shifts in modern life. Recognizing that culture is not unique to humans, John Hartigan Jr. asks what we can learn about culture from other species. He pursues a variety of philosophical and scientific ideas about what it means to be social using cultural dynamics to rethink what we assume makes humans special and different from other forms of life. Through an interlinked series of brief essays, Hartigan explores how we can think differently about being human. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

We are in a transitional moment in our national conversation on race. "Despite optimistic predictions that Barack Obama's election would signal the end of race as an issue in America, the race-related news stories just keep coming. Race remains a political and polarizing issue, and the sprawling, unwieldy, and often maddening means we have developed to discuss and evaluate what counts as "racial" can be frustrating. In What Can You Say?, John Hartigan Jr. examines a watershed year of news stories, taking these events as a way to understand American culture and challenge our existing notions of what is racial-or not. The book follows race stories that have made news headlines-including Don Imus's remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team, protests in Jena, Louisiana, and Barack Obama's presidential campaign-to trace the shifting contours of mainstream U.S. public discussions of race as they incorporate new voices, words, and images. Focused on the underlying dynamics of American culture that shape this conversation, this book aims to make us more fluent in assessing the stories we consume about race. Advancing our conversation on race hinges on recognizing and challenging the cultural conventions governing the ways we speak about and recognize race. In drawing attention to this curious cultural artifact, our national conversation on race, Hartigan ultimately offers a way to to understand race in the totality of American culture, as a constantly evolving debate. As this book demonstrates, the conversation is far from over.

A vivid first-person study of a notorious equine ritual-from the perspective of the wild horses who are its targets Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these "beasts" together and shave their manes and tails. Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite, producing a profound revelation about the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination. John Hartigan Jr. constructs an engrossing, day-by-day narrative chronicling the complex, nuanced social lives of wild horses and the impact of their traumatic ritual shearing every summer. His story generates intimate, individual portraits of these creatures while analyzing the social practices-like grazing and grooming-that are the building blocks of equine society. Shaving the Beasts culminates in a searing portrayal of the inspiring resilience these creatures display as they endure and recover from rapa das bestas. Turning away from "thick" description to "thin," Hartigan moves toward a more observational form of study, focusing on behaviors over interpretations. This vivid approach provides new and important contributions to the study of animal behavior. Ultimately, he comes away with profound, penetrating insights into multispecies interactions and a strong alternative to humancentric ethnographic practices.

Across the globe, an expanding circle of care is encompassing a growing number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, profoundly revising the line between humans and nonhumans. Care of the Species examines infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication.  John Hartigan Jr. uses ethnography to access the expertise of botanists and others engaged with cultivating biodiversity, providing various entry points for understanding plants in the world around us. He begins by tracing the historical emergence of race through practices of care on nonhumans, showing how this history informs current thinking about conservation. With geneticists working on maize, Hartigan deploys Foucault’s concept of care of the self to analyze how domesticated species are augmented by an afterlife of data. In the botanical gardens of Spain, Care of the Species explores seed banks, herbariums, and living collections, depicting the range of ways people interact with botanical knowledge. This culminates in Hartigan’s effort to engage plants as ethnographic subjects through a series of imaginative “interview� techniques. Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, developing a cultural perspective on evolutionary dynamics while using ethnography to theorize species. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,� this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.

Across the globe, an expanding circle of care is encompassing a growing number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, profoundly revising the line between humans and nonhumans. Care of the Species examines infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication.  John Hartigan Jr. uses ethnography to access the expertise of botanists and others engaged with cultivating biodiversity, providing various entry points for understanding plants in the world around us. He begins by tracing the historical emergence of race through practices of care on nonhumans, showing how this history informs current thinking about conservation. With geneticists working on maize, Hartigan deploys Foucault’s concept of care of the self to analyze how domesticated species are augmented by an afterlife of data. In the botanical gardens of Spain, Care of the Species explores seed banks, herbariums, and living collections, depicting the range of ways people interact with botanical knowledge. This culminates in Hartigan’s effort to engage plants as ethnographic subjects through a series of imaginative “interview� techniques. Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, developing a cultural perspective on evolutionary dynamics while using ethnography to theorize species. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,� this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.