Introduction

摘要

As science and environmental studies increasingly challenge us to rethink the nature/culture binary, they also place increased pressure on the traditionally defined institutional category of "the humanities." It seems as though we have arrived at an "animal moment."1 While the animals have always been with us, and we with them and we as one among them, over the course of the last few years several journals have published special issues on animals, including Mosaic, New Formations, Parallax, and TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. Contemporary criticism seems to be confirming the oft-quoted Levi-Strauss phrase that "animals are good to think with."2 The question becomes this: What are the methods and parameters of such thought and are the animal invited to the table? If so, are they there as companions with whom we break bread, or are they flesh that is eaten, or do they work within some other modality of, perhaps, wildness? The animal poses for us a range of ontological and epistemological questions that is in part why so much is being written about them.