While the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to global light the zoonotic risks in Asian markets where animals are sold alive, ideas about material proximity between humans and animals have taken a specific meaning in South Korea, where the tradition of eating dog meat has been instrumental in the national construction. In this article, we describe how the regulation of urban markets in three municipalities launched in the past decades has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing to the margins of South Korean cities the slaughter of live animals in cages. On the basis of interviews conducted with dog retailers, we explore the opposite view of dog trading as taking part to a metabolic and symbolic order, both as recyclers of waste and as carriers of virtues of resistance. We finally follow the arguments of animal activists and veterinarians, who develop views on shared feelings and affects between humans and dogs based on kinship relations and narratives of co-evolution. We thus show that taking the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate the modernisation of urban markets leaves out two alternative views on human-animal relations that also exist in contemporary South Korean society.
Polyphonies temporelles des humains et des tortues: une approche anthropologique du massifdes Albères (Catalogne). Cet article analyse la coproduction des temporalités entre les humains et les tortues depuis une perspective anthropologique, en prenant comme étude de cas la dernière population autochtone de tortues d'Hermann (Testudo hermanni Gmelin, 1789) de la péninsule Ibérique, située dans le massif des Albères (Catalogne). À partir du concept de « mythe du temps» (Barreau 2000), nous étudions comment les tortues ont historiquement fonctionné comme symboles de l'origine du temps et, actuellement, comme indicateurs de sa fin dans un contexte marqué par la crise écologique et la notion d'urgence face à l'extinction. Cette recherche combine un travail ethnographique avec une analyse historique pour montrer comment les pratiques humaines – depuis la domestication et le commerce jusqu'à la conservation – ont façonné les horizons temporels des tortues, tandis que leurs rythmes de vie et leur longévité influencent les imaginaires humains sur le devenir. Nous soutenons que la coordination entre temporalités humaines et non-humaines constitue un cadre critique pour penser des futurs partagés au-delà de l'anthropocentrisme. La principale contribution de l'article est d'établir un lien entre l'anthropologie du temps et l'anthropologie multi-espèces, en proposant que l'interaction entre les espèces ne produit pas seulement des significations culturelles, mais aussi des manières d'expérimenter le temps dans des situations de crise. Ainsi, la relation entre les humains et les tortues dans l'Albera devient une occasion de réfléchir à la manière dont la coordination entre les espèces pourrait donner naissance à une notion d'avenir différente des visions catastrophistes.
The red deer (Cervus elaphus Linnaeus, 1758) during Antiquity in France: the work of its wood and the consumption of its flesh from some examples. Although Gallo-Roman craftsmen rarely worked with deer antlers they were nevertheless familiar with its various properties –length, strength and and elasticity superior to that of bone– as well as its symbolic value which was embodied in objects carved from the base of the antler, commonly known as “deer bantler medallions”. The latter have been the subject of numerous studies, but it seemed important to review their spatial distribution by updating their inventory, to situate this material within the Gallo-Roman craft of hard materials of animal origin, and to emphasize the strong symbolism of the deer antler. Moreover, deer meat was only eaten occasionally, as shown by the scarcity of these bones among the faunal finds, indicating that hunting was not very nourishing. It is nevertheless possible to reconstruct the stages involved in cutting up its carcass, based on traces found on the bone remains. It was sometimes hunted in game parks, outbuildings of large villae, whose existence mentioned in ancient texts and possibly illustrated by archaeozoology.
This thematic collection of seven articles published in volumes 60 (2) and 61 (1) of Anthropozoologica follows the workshop on "Human-Deer (Cervus) Relations in their material and symbolic expressions". Organized as part of a seminar by UMR 7209 of the CNRS and MNHN (then titled Archaeozoology, Archaeobotany: Societies, Practices, and Environments-AASPE), this event took place in Paris on October 10, 2022. Under the patronage of Fran & ccedil;ois Poplin (Honorary Director of the UMR), this seminar focused on the rich field of connections that shape the construction and evolution of human societies and their interactions with their animal and plant environments. These were examined through their often foundational roles -both materially, socio-economically, and symbolically- as well as in the realm of popular or scholarly knowledge. Through this lens, it is possible to address broad or more specific issues such as food, medicine, crafts, the transformation and production of equipment, forms of acquisition (hunting, fishing, gathering, livestock raising, agriculture and horticulture...), types of social organization (concept of territory, collective or individual action, sedentary vs. nomadic lifestyles...), or the integration of these elements into mythologies and cosmogony, and finally the development of cultural and ritual practices and their intertwining with other practices.
