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
John Hartigan Jr. will host a virtual event with Tufts University s School of Arts and Sciences on Friday, March 12 for a discussion of his new book, SHAVING THE BEASTS.