Gala Argent
Broadly, my work concerns how humans can be explored as interacting with nonhuman animals within their environments and lives, in the past and present.
Anthropological and archaeological approaches which consider animals as beings with agential qualities are still rare. Yet there is a great deal of interest in including animals in fresh ways in anthropological and archaeological studies. This tracks to a growing recognition that while conventional models which give primacy to issues of functionality, exploitation, power, control and domination—whether within human-human or human-animal interactions—are interesting, they are not the only lens through which to view interspecies relationships and their outcomes. Furthermore, they are often at odds with the experiences of people who live with animals, myself included.
With these points in mind, I have focused my work upon the pro-social aspects of relationships through which humans and other social animals—primarily horses—come together, and upon how these intersubjective relationships might form co-created realities. In other words, I am interested not only in how animals have been utilized by past human societies, but also in if and how animals were incorporated into—and may have changed—past human landscapes, cosmologies, identities and ideologies.
In order to approach such interactions in the present and conceptualize them within the archaeological record, I argue, we need to understand the animals in question, themselves, and how they come together with each other and with humans. In doing this, I join the ranks of a growing number of researchers from widely disparate academic disciplines who are generating work in the genre of human-animal studies. My interdisciplinary approach applies theory and method from ethological, ethnological, phenomenological, sociological, psychological, and communication studies to the problem of theorizing human-animal communication and relationships.
From this framework we can begin to explore how smaller-scale interspecies interactions and relationships can be seen to contribute to larger-scale social structures—in the present and in the past.
Supervisors: Mark Pluciennik and Graeme Barker
Anthropological and archaeological approaches which consider animals as beings with agential qualities are still rare. Yet there is a great deal of interest in including animals in fresh ways in anthropological and archaeological studies. This tracks to a growing recognition that while conventional models which give primacy to issues of functionality, exploitation, power, control and domination—whether within human-human or human-animal interactions—are interesting, they are not the only lens through which to view interspecies relationships and their outcomes. Furthermore, they are often at odds with the experiences of people who live with animals, myself included.
With these points in mind, I have focused my work upon the pro-social aspects of relationships through which humans and other social animals—primarily horses—come together, and upon how these intersubjective relationships might form co-created realities. In other words, I am interested not only in how animals have been utilized by past human societies, but also in if and how animals were incorporated into—and may have changed—past human landscapes, cosmologies, identities and ideologies.
In order to approach such interactions in the present and conceptualize them within the archaeological record, I argue, we need to understand the animals in question, themselves, and how they come together with each other and with humans. In doing this, I join the ranks of a growing number of researchers from widely disparate academic disciplines who are generating work in the genre of human-animal studies. My interdisciplinary approach applies theory and method from ethological, ethnological, phenomenological, sociological, psychological, and communication studies to the problem of theorizing human-animal communication and relationships.
From this framework we can begin to explore how smaller-scale interspecies interactions and relationships can be seen to contribute to larger-scale social structures—in the present and in the past.
Supervisors: Mark Pluciennik and Graeme Barker
less
InterestsView All (113)
Uploads
Books by Gala Argent
Papers by Gala Argent
After grounding this approach in multidisciplinary theory, I bring into the discussion facets of horses, and of human-horse relationships, through both ethological studies of horses and an inside auto-ethnographic research strategy which uses my position within the context of those I shall term working riders: riders who live with and care for horses and possess the ability and knowledge to school them to be ridden. I touch on aspects of human-horse intersubjectivities and situate particular elements of the Pazyryk horse burials. I then attempt to phenomenologically recreate the actual killing of the Pazyryk horse from the perspective of the humans—and the horses—and suggest some mental and emotional processes that might have caused certain behaviors of both at the burial ceremony. Finally I reflect on the viability of creating relational archaeologies of human-animal interactions which allow for both essentialist and constructionist perspectives.
by analogizing the nature and possibilities of human-ridden horse intersubjectivities in the present with those of the past. As enlightened by people who live with horses, including the author, the process of learning to ride can be seen as an interspecies apprenticeship process, where both humans and horses pass along social knowledge as thoughtful actors with defined roles. From this perspective, the horse tattoos are presented as polysemic materializations of the
bonds between particular Pazyryk horses and people, of blended identities, and of cosmological values related to time, memory, and belonging. The article concludes that exploring smaller-scale
human-nonhuman animal interactions in the present allows for fresh interpretations of similar interactions in the past and provides a means for archaeology to move beyond the objectification of animals as sets of resources or symbols.
Thesis Chapters by Gala Argent
Prior archaeologies of horses in Iron Age Eurasia have approached them in a segmented fashion: in either cultural/economic, social/ideological or ritual/cosmological realms. Horses have been objectified as parts of “material culture” or the “environment,” significant only as commodities exploited for culinary or technological purposes, or as symbolic proxies for human attributes and meanings. Within these narratives, I argue, lie faulty anthropocentric meta-theoretical assumptions about both the nature of “culture” and the domination of horses by humans.
This thesis, then, challenges traditional archaeological and anthropological understand¬ings of animals as absent referents within human societies, unidirectionally acted upon by humans. I adopt an alternate “human-animal studies” approach, which considers animals as partners in the interspecifically co-created, embodied worlds they share with humans. In doing this, I argue that a consideration of horses, themselves, and how they come together with humans, is a necessary prerequisite to investigating societies within which they were or are embedded. Pulling from ethological and ethnographic materials, including my own position within the sub-culture of “working riders,” I present a model of human-horse inter¬actions—as phenomenologically lived—based upon academic models of human nonverbal and interpersonal communication.
From this more holistic perspective, based upon original field work at the Hermitage Museum, I reassess the Pazyryk human-horse burials. I suggest that horses were respected as individual subjects, and that human and horse roles, statuses, identities and ideology were blended, and mutually and contingently constituted as meaningful. I conclude with fresh interpretations that are quite different from previously asserted conceptions of the Pazyryk people as “fierce warriors,” and suggest that an archaeology of relationality which includes animals holds promise for future studies.
After grounding this approach in multidisciplinary theory, I bring into the discussion facets of horses, and of human-horse relationships, through both ethological studies of horses and an inside auto-ethnographic research strategy which uses my position within the context of those I shall term working riders: riders who live with and care for horses and possess the ability and knowledge to school them to be ridden. I touch on aspects of human-horse intersubjectivities and situate particular elements of the Pazyryk horse burials. I then attempt to phenomenologically recreate the actual killing of the Pazyryk horse from the perspective of the humans—and the horses—and suggest some mental and emotional processes that might have caused certain behaviors of both at the burial ceremony. Finally I reflect on the viability of creating relational archaeologies of human-animal interactions which allow for both essentialist and constructionist perspectives.
by analogizing the nature and possibilities of human-ridden horse intersubjectivities in the present with those of the past. As enlightened by people who live with horses, including the author, the process of learning to ride can be seen as an interspecies apprenticeship process, where both humans and horses pass along social knowledge as thoughtful actors with defined roles. From this perspective, the horse tattoos are presented as polysemic materializations of the
bonds between particular Pazyryk horses and people, of blended identities, and of cosmological values related to time, memory, and belonging. The article concludes that exploring smaller-scale
human-nonhuman animal interactions in the present allows for fresh interpretations of similar interactions in the past and provides a means for archaeology to move beyond the objectification of animals as sets of resources or symbols.
Prior archaeologies of horses in Iron Age Eurasia have approached them in a segmented fashion: in either cultural/economic, social/ideological or ritual/cosmological realms. Horses have been objectified as parts of “material culture” or the “environment,” significant only as commodities exploited for culinary or technological purposes, or as symbolic proxies for human attributes and meanings. Within these narratives, I argue, lie faulty anthropocentric meta-theoretical assumptions about both the nature of “culture” and the domination of horses by humans.
This thesis, then, challenges traditional archaeological and anthropological understand¬ings of animals as absent referents within human societies, unidirectionally acted upon by humans. I adopt an alternate “human-animal studies” approach, which considers animals as partners in the interspecifically co-created, embodied worlds they share with humans. In doing this, I argue that a consideration of horses, themselves, and how they come together with humans, is a necessary prerequisite to investigating societies within which they were or are embedded. Pulling from ethological and ethnographic materials, including my own position within the sub-culture of “working riders,” I present a model of human-horse inter¬actions—as phenomenologically lived—based upon academic models of human nonverbal and interpersonal communication.
From this more holistic perspective, based upon original field work at the Hermitage Museum, I reassess the Pazyryk human-horse burials. I suggest that horses were respected as individual subjects, and that human and horse roles, statuses, identities and ideology were blended, and mutually and contingently constituted as meaningful. I conclude with fresh interpretations that are quite different from previously asserted conceptions of the Pazyryk people as “fierce warriors,” and suggest that an archaeology of relationality which includes animals holds promise for future studies.