Images of Animals
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Images of Animals examines the literature of behavioral science, revealing how works with the common aim of documenting animal lives, habits, and instincts describe "realities that are worlds apart." Whether the writer affirms the Cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable chasm between animals and humans or the Darwinian panorama of evolutionary continuity, the question of animal mind is ever present and problematic in behavioral thought. Comparing the naturalist writings of Charles Darwin, Jean Henri Fabre, and George and Elizabeth Peckham to works of classical ethology by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen and of contemporary sociobiology, Crist demonstrates how words matter. She does not attempt to defend any of these constructions as a faithful representation of animal existence, but to show how each internally coherent view molds the reader's understanding of animals. Booknews From anthropomorphism to zoomorphism, Crist (interdisciplinary studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute) analyzes the language never neutral she assertsused to portray animal behavior in the behavioral science literature: from Darwin's stance of evolutionary continuity to ethologist Samuel Barnett's disavowal of studying anything other than observable behavior in "realities that are worlds apart." Lightly illustrated. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Significance of Language in Portraying Animals11Darwin's Anthropomorphism112Lifeworld and Subjectivity: Naturalists' Portraits of Animals513The Ethological Constitution of Animals as Natural Objects884Genes and Their Animals: The Language of Sociobiology1235Words as Icons: Comparative Images of Courtship1666Unraveling the Distinction Between Action and Behavior202Notes223Bibliography231Index242
