Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships

By Richard W. Bulliet

Book Overview

Richard W. Bulliet engagingly recounts the dynamic relationship between humans and animals from prehistory to the present. Bulliet explores four stages in the history of the human-animal relationship-separation, predomesticity, domesticity, and postdomesticity. He begins with the question of when and why humans began to consider themselves distinct from other species and concludes with the use of species as raw materials for various animal-product industries. Bulliet discusses the impact of social and technological developments and changing philosophical, religious, and aesthetic viewpoints and closes with a probing look at our current era of postdomesticity, in which many people remain dependent on animal products, though they have no involvement with producing animals. By considering the shifting roles of domesticated animals in human society, as well as their place in the social imagination, Bulliet reveals the different ways various cultures have reinforced, symbolized, and rationalized their relations with animals.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231130767
• ISBN13: 9780231130769
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great gift for a senior citizen.

Four reasons occur to me for suggesting Professor Bulliet's book for the seniors on your gift list: 1) You will find a rich vocabulary for crossword puzzle solvers. 2) Witty writing with twists and poetic prose. 3) History, real and inferred, as told by a guy who has studied history for over fifty years and recalls what he reads. He also integrates what he has studied, one event with another across time and space. Hence: Remote Associations and clever speculation. 4) References to other literature abound which will enhance your own reading list as well as that of your favorite senior citizen. Example: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel by Haruki Murakama. So buy this book now, Gentle Reader, and you'll have time to read it yourself before you gift wrap it.

A remarkable text from academia's renaissance man

I have had the good fortune to take Richard Bulliet's class at Columbia University on the past, present and future of human-animal relations. Suffice it to say that Bulliet is the truest of academic renaissance individuals - I have taken classes of his on medieval Iranian history and "America and the Muslim World," and found each more entertaining than the next. Bulliet has broken new ground here and provided us with a text that is accessible far and wide, a book that on its surface may appear to appeal only to a niche of Peter Singer-ites and, perhaps, that professor's intellectual sparring partners, but in fact offers lessons and eye-opening narratives on topics many of us have never stopped to consider. "Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers" is the perfect book for anyone who is intellectually curious, and I heartily recommend it, especially to those who rarely stop to consider our relations with the "lesser species."