Anthropomorphized Nonhuman Animals in Mass Media and Their Influence on Human Attitudes Toward Wildlife

Anthropomorphic figures of nonhuman animals are omnipresent in various forms of mass media (e.g., movies, books, and advertising). The depiction of companion and wild animals, including nonhuman primates (e.g., chimpanzees), as possessing human characteristics or behaviors can influence these animals’ desirability as companions. Ultimately, this can distort general public perception of what constitutes “normal” wild behavior, as well as the conservation status of these animals. Therefore, anthropomorphic animal representations can contribute to the spread of misleading messages that may have highly unpredictable effects. In the present review, we have highlighted various articles from the academic literature which focus on anthropomorphised animals, noting the main thematic issues. We suggest that further studies on this topic are needed to deepen such a complex and not yet clarified topic.

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution

This book argues that shifting attitudes to nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century Britain affected the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights. It examines a tension in 1790s radicalism between the anthropocentrism of the concept of the ‘rights of man’, and the challenge to human exceptionalism entailed by attempts to extend benevolent consideration to nonhuman animals. The development of a naturalistic and sympathetic literature of animal subjectivity is traced with particular attention to the innovatory representation of nonhuman animal perspectives within children’s literature. The study explores the complex relationship between animal representation and claims for human rights through an investigation of writing by and about four overlapping human groups—children, women, slaves, and the lower classes—whose social subordination was grounded in their cultural construction as less than fully human. Emancipatory movements of political reform, abolition, and feminism, and the animal representations produced within those movements, were affected by the varying forms of animalization applied to each oppressed group. A final chapter considers the legacy of 1790s animal rights discourses in the early-nineteenth-century campaign for anti-cruelty legislation. The book’s many literary animals include the ass, ambiguous emblem of sympathetic animal writing; the great ape or ‘orang-outang’, central to racist discourse; and the pig, adopted by 1790s radicals to signify their rebellion. Writers considered include Sterne, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Clare, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, Mary Robinson, Equiano, Sancho, Cugoano, Clarkson, Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Erskine, and John Lawrence.

Luxurious caskets of the Przeworsk culture

Among the wooden caskets with metal locks (a characteristic element of the furniture of graves of women in barbaricum) there is a distinguished group of finds with outstanding decoration made of large sheets of bronze covered with rich set of various punched motifs, fixed with vast amount of decorative, dome headed bronze nails. These caskets, similar in style, are known exclusively from the Przeworsk culture area (cemeteries in Opatów, Chmielów Piaskowy, Zamiechów, Kraków-Płaszów, and from the Tisa group cemetery in Badon “Doaşte”, in Romania). Fragments of bronze plates with similar motifs are known from a few other sites. They are dated to phase B2/C1 – C1 and can be treated as a very homogenous group, maybe even works of one craftsmen or workshop. The described ornamented caskets were found in graves with rich, however not outstanding, furniture. They can be treated as an attempt to imitate of wooden boxes with bronze decorative mounts known from the Roman Empire, however the motifs are deeply rooted in the local “barbarian” tradition. The ornamented caskets could have been a sign of special social status. Most interesting and really mysterious are figures on the plates from Kraków Płaszów presenting stylised complete human and animal representations.

Mammals in the iconography of the Temple of Queen Hatszepsut: introduction to the project

The project “Mammals in the iconography of the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut”, initiated by the author in the 2011/2012 season, encompasses a detailed documentation of the animals depicted in various parts of Hatshepsut’s temple in Deir el-Bahari as a prerequisite for in-depth research. The study follows a multi-disciplinary approach within faunal analysis, and is complemented with technological observations on the execution of relief representations from the temple. At this stage of the project, a general taxonomic identification of the animal representations is nearly complete and a further detailed study of each taxon has been undertaken. Both complete animals (mainly mammals for now) and animal raw materials were studied in addition to the contexts and scenes in which they appear.

Party Animals of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Political Cartoon Representations of the Republican and Democratic Parties

This analysis of political cartoon coverage of the 2016 presidential primaries found considerable attention given to the political parties themselves, as well as issues, and controversies the parties were facing. In political cartoons, the Republican and Democratic parties were usually reflected in animal representations of the elephant and donkey. A qualitative textual analysis of cartoon images from U.S. newspapers found a number of themes emerged in 2016 with regard to the party animals: Both parties were portrayed expressing reluctance or hesitancy in their party’s nominee, the Republican Party in particular was represented as helpless to stop the political success that Donald Trump saw in the primaries, and the Democratic Party was portrayed as divided between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. These themes found in political cartoon images suggest how the two dominant political parties operate in electoral politics today.

The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture

The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese bronze age to China's encounters with the counter-reformational Catholic Church, and down to the present day. Throughout these chapters is described a world whose creatures one must know in the Chinese way if one is to know the Chinese world.