重新认识人类与动物:西方新动物地理学研究进展

Rethinking Human-Animal Relationships: The Progress of Western Animal Geographies

选取并分析585篇与新动物地理学相关的西方文献,进一步梳理了理论起源及研究议题,发现:(1) 1995—2005年是新动物地理学的探索起步阶段,2005年至今则是蓬勃发展阶段;(2)英国是该研究领域的中心地区;(3)当前新动物地理学研究主要通过"以人类为中心"(动物空间)和"以动物为中心"(兽性地方)两大线索展开,前者重点关注于人类世界,研究话题涉及人类社会不平等、作为人类社会生产要素的动物和人类对动物的生命管治,后者则在新的认识论与方法论的基础上,发展形成了其主要议题,包括动物主体性和能动性、动物伦理再思考以及人类动物和谐共存的实践探索。

Animals, as the key member of the Nature, have been making history with our humans together.Along with the ‘animal turn’ in social science, western human geographers began to ‘bring the animals back’ in 1995, which have made animals become more focused in this discipline since then. Animal Geographies have provided lots of new perspectives for understanding the relationships between man and land, nature and society, human and animal. We select totally of 585 papers about Animal Geographies, which are published in the Core Collection of Web of Science from 1995 onwards, as the analytic case to introduce the basic and current research topics of Animal Geographies into China. Through the analysis of the theoretical origin and research topics of Animal Geographies, we found that there are 2 main periods of animal geographies’ development: the embryonic stage in 1995-2005 and the vigorous stage 2005 onwards. What’s more, UK is the center of Animal Geographies research. Current research in Animal Geographies can be classified into 2 parts based on their theoretical perspectives—‘animals space’ and ‘beastly place’ . The former focuses more on human society and covers the issues of human inequality, animals as capital and biopower and biopolitics. Based on the new ontology and methodology, the core topics of ‘animal places’ include animals’ subjectivity and agency, new animal ethics and the practice of human-animal companion. To sum up, Animal Geographies have become a popular research cluster in western Human Geography, covering the fields of economy, politics, culture, ethics and ecology. The research methods of Animal Geographies tend to combine the methodologies in both natural sciences and social sciences. On this basis, we call for Chinese human geographers to pay more attention to animals and human-animal relations, making more contributes for international Animal Geographies.