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J Agric Environ Ethics (2008) 21:609611
DOI 10.1007/s10806-008-9108-7
Published online: 8 July 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
Donna Haraway is a path-breaking feminist philosopher of science, perhaps best known for her essay The Cyborg Manifesto. She has written about a wide range of topics within the broad eld of science studies, including primatology, technology, and science ction. Her two most recent books delve into the relations between humans and non-human animals, especially dogs. In 2003 she published The Companion Species Manifesto, a concise reection on two questions: how might an ethics and politics committed to the ourishing of signicant otherness be learned from taking doghuman relationships seriously, and how might stories about doghuman worlds nally convince brain-damaged US Americans, and maybe other less historically challenged people, that history matters in naturecultures? (Haraway 2003). She expands this project in her newest book, When Species Meet, keeping at its heart stories about doghuman worlds, interwoven with reections on other creatures, gender, disability, agriculture, science, globalization, Marx, and love, among other topics. At its best, When Species Meet is Donna Haraway at her best, which is about as good as it gets.
That said, not every part of the book comes together equally well. Chapters on chickens and on National Geographics crittercam, in particular, struck me as sometimes abstract and technical, falling short of the eclectic yet focused theoretical reection in which Haraway specializes. In a different way, the discussions of the intricacies of purebred dogland, specically Australian shepherd-land, occasionally bogged down in too much detail for non-afcionados. The brilliance of the books best chapters, however, more than make up for the occasional unevenness.
Haraways guiding questions are rst, Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?, and second, How is becoming with a practice of becoming worldly? (p. 3). The notion of becoming with runs throughout the book. A major part of Haraways project here, as in much of her previous work, is to rethink humanness. She argues that being human is inextricably tied to becoming with...