Feline Cultures: Cats Create Their History

Feline Cultures challenges the reader's perception of animals by presenting innovative accounts of their lives, breaking the model of human exceptionalism and observing the animals' perspective. It establishes that cats have their own cultures and adaptations, their own history, and their own plasticity of behavior. Baratay pays attention to their perceptions, sensations, emotions, sensitivity, character, bodily expressiveness, and interactions with the environment, other animals, and humans.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 277 pages
Publication date: 01 July 2024
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Feline Cultures is a groundbreaking work that extends the unique track of animal studies pioneered by Éric Baratay. Drawing on testimonies from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, Baratay challenges the model of human exceptionalism and creates innovative accounts of these animals' lives. He observes the animals' perspective to document how individual cats have carried out their lives, revealing their plasticity of behavior and their own cultures and adaptations. Through tight portraits, Baratay reveals the dynamic construction of what we can call cultures, far from the eternal portrait of the cat that has become commonplace. For each of the domestic cats whose existence can be reconstructed from his sources, Baratay pays attention to their perceptions of the world, sensations and emotions, sensitivity and character, bodily expressiveness, and interactions with the environment, other animals, and humans. Ethology becomes, under Baratay's pen, an ethnology, shedding light on the rich and complex lives of cats.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820365145