Feathered Entanglements: Human-Bird Relations in the Anthropocene - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 077487001X ISBN 13: 9780774870016

Publisher: University of British Columbia Press, 2025

Synopsis

As they migrated across great distances, ancient humans may have used birdsong and bird sightings to find food and water in unseen territory. Today, attending to birds helps scientists track not only avian migration but also environmental change. Birds remain our sentinels.

Feathered Entanglements offers a rich tapestry of human-bird relations across the Indo-Pacific. In this era of uncontrolled industrialization, we have grown increasingly disconnected from the natural world. The ways in which birds feature in the daily life, symbolic systems, and material culture of humans, from pigeon keeping on the rooftops of Amman to the rituals of Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, can teach us how to live with other species amid the challenges of the Anthropocene.

In a time of intensifying ecological crisis, we need, more than ever, to protect and appreciate non-human lives. Feathered Entanglements embraces the connection between humans, birds, and our shared world.

About this title

About the Author

Scott E. Simon is a professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa and began studying human-bird relations as a visiting professor at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. Among his publications are four ethnographies of Taiwan: Sweet and Sour: Life-Worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs; Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture; Sadyaq Balae! L'autochtonie formosane dans tous ses états; and Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa.

Frédéric Laugrand is a professor at Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium and director of its Laboratoire d'anthropologie prospective (LAAP). He is the author and editor of numerous books, most recently co-authoring, with Antoine Laugrand, Des voies de l'ombre: Quand les chauves-souris sèment le trouble; with Cunera Buijs and Kim Van Dam, Picturing Places, People, and Practices in the Arctic: Anthropological Perspectives on Representation; and, with Jarich G. Oosten, Inuit, Oblate Missionaries, and Grey Nuns in the Keewatin, 1865–1965.

Contributors: Aiko Cappe, Étienne Dalemans, Gregory Forth, Andrew G. Gosler, Perrine Lachenal, Antoine Laugrand,  John Leavitt, Yi-tze Lee, Gliseria Magapin, Atsushi Nobayashi, Syarul Sakaliou, Colin Schildhauer, Lionel Simon, Jazil Tamang, and Shuhei Uda.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 077487001X
• ISBN 13: 9780774870016
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348
• Editor: Simon Scott E., Laugrand Frédéric