rapa das bestas, villagers herd these “beasts” together and shave their manes and tails.
Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite, producing a profound revelation about the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination.
"Deftly pushing against three-quarters of a century of ethnographic tradition, John Hartigan Jr. creates an earnest multispecies anthropology rich with methodological and theoretical promise. He decenters the human, entangles ethological and ethnographic method and first-person narrative, and invites us to imagine a truly multispecies social theory. The horses remain the focus amid the enticing and challenging assertions about how we could (should) be ‘doing’ anthropology with other-than-humans in the Anthropocene." —Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University