When Species Meet (Volume 3) (Posthumanities) Paperback – Illustrated, November 26, 2007

The book is fantastic

Donna J. Haraway's _When Species Meet_ is a great resource for anyone interested in animal/human relations in the context of posthumanism. Haraway has always been an astute observer of social/political/natural interactions, and this book follows in the same tradition. No ideology is safe from her questioning mind as she explores the science and ethics behind industrial food animal farming, the use of animals in biomedical research, and pedigreed animal breeding.

Reading the last chapter, and when I encountered the phrase of Haraway, "I had found my nourishing community at last," my heart pit-a-patted. And I was reminded my own community, how delightful it is to eat with them. Reading Haraway, I learn too much, with never settled stomach. Touching it is.

Haraway is so great. This book really helped me see my relations with animals through systems.

In "When Species Meet", Donna J. Haraway asks two questions, “(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (pg. 3). She examines the interaction between humans and other species, predominantly focusing on domestic species such as dogs for their historically close relationship to humanity. She works to undo concepts of human exceptionalism, “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies. Thus, to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great Divide from all the others and so afraid of – and in bloody love with – what goes bump in the night” (pg. 11). Her work intersects not only with posthumanism, but also with discourses of race and gender, especially in the exceptionalism blended with eugenics that is the concept of purebreds.Haraway writes, “<i>Canis lupis familiaris</i>, indeed; the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks. Further, the uncanny is where value becomes flesh again, in spite of all the dematerializations and objectifications inherent in market valuation” (pg. 45). This examination of the uncanny recalls the concept of the uncanny valley, something not-quite-human, yet almost so. With the manner in which humans, and Haraway in particular, anthropomorphize their dogs, these subjects are both familiar and novel simultaneously the more we think about our interactions with them. Discussing the role of healthcare in “humanizing” animals, Haraway writes, “Dogs in capitalist technoculture have acquired the ‘right to health,’ and the economic (as well as legal) implications are legion” (pg. 49). As consumers in a marketplace increasingly catering to their unique needs, the pet-parent concept so popular in the blogosphere no longer accurately describes the role of animals in the economy. Dogs, especially, are not just subjects/patients, but also commodities in a Marxist system (pg. 52).Discussing the role of humanity in the world, Haraway suggests “that it is a misstep to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to live outside killing” (pg. 79). While she is not trying to reduce the world to the view of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s <i>In Memoriam A.H.H.</i>, she does encourage empathy in the laboratory setting. After all, “the puppies had to become patients if they were to become technologies and models” (pg. 59). Even this concept of certain animals as having a unique place in society is relatively recent. Haraway writes, “In the United States, dogs became ‘companion animals’ both in contrast and in addition to ‘pets’ and ‘working and sporting dogs’ around the late 1970s in the context of social scientific investigations into the relations of animals such as dogs to human health and well-being” (pg. 134). This idea, however, still privileges humanity.In one of her strongest conclusions, Haraway writes, “Ways of living and dying matter” (pg. 88). The traditional humans-only method does not do justice to the reality of the world. Like Azetbur, the Klingon Ambassador in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" (1991, dir. Nicholas Meyer) critiqued the United Federation of Planets, an anthropocentric view is “little better than a <i>Homo sapiens</i> only club.” Interestingly, Haraway finds the most prescient comparisons to these cross-species encounters in the realm of science fiction. She concludes, “Animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with. Human and nonhuman animals are companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (pg. 301).

great book

"When Species Meet" was cited by Pope Francis in the apostolic exhortation "Laudate Deum: To All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis", published Oct. 4, 2023:66. God has united us to all his creatures. Nonetheless, the technocratic paradigm can isolate us from the world that surrounds us and deceive us by making us forget that the entire world is a “contact zone”. (Footnote 41: Cf. D. J. HARAWAY, When Species Meet, Minneapolis, 2008, pp. 205-249.)

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