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 Displaying Death and Animating Life 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.

Acknowledgments

1          Introduction: Passionate Encounters with Animals in Everyday Life—Beyond the Mainstream

Part One    Theaters of the Dead: Humans and Nonhuman Animals
2          Postmortem Exhibitions: Taxidermied Animals and Plastinated Corpses in the Theaters of the Dead
3          Inside “Animal” and Outside “Culture”: The Limits to “Sameness” and Rhetorics of Salvation in von Hagens’s Animal Inside Out Body Worlds Exhibition

Part Two   Mourning and the Unmourned
4          On the Margins of Death: Pet Cemeteries and Mourning Practices
5          Grievable Lives and New Kinships: Pet Cemeteries and the Changing Geographies of Death
6          Animal Deaths and the Written Record of History: The Inflammatory Politics of Pet Obituaries in Newspapers
7          Requiem for Roadkill: Death, Denial, and Mourning on America’s Roads

Part Three  Animating Life: Cognition, Expressivity, and the Art Market
8          “Art” by Animals, Part 1: The Transnational Market for Art by (Nonprimate) Animals
9          “Art” by Animals, Part 2: When the Artist Is an Ape—Popular and Scientific Discourse and Paintings by Primates

10         Conclusion: “Every Bird a ‘Blueboy’” and Why It Matters for “Animal Studies”

Notes
Index