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Current objectives of human-animal studies : why the story of Harriet the tortoise should be retold
(2022)
In her article, "Current Objectives of Human-Animal Studies: Why the Story of Harriet the Tortoise Should Be Retold," Mieke Roscher responds to Haraway's call to action in "When Species Meet" in order to propose a political history of animals. To develop this new historiographical approach, she turns to concepts of agency and human-animal interaction as the most widely discussed paths to making visible the involvement of animals in "our" shared history. Built on the story of Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise and a decisive historical figure living in the Galápagos Islands during Darwin's visit in 1835, who died as recently as 2006, Roscher shows how praxiography, material culture, and spatial approaches could be connected to tell different stories to the ones currently being told by traditional historiography. Tortoises and turtles in particular have already influenced historical thinking, not least because they have come to symbolize the extinction discourse as well as debates on climatic change and the Anthropocene. Hence, Roscher introduces a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and relations (and agency as a relation), practices and materialities, spaces and places, and offers a way to retell Harriet's life story - and the life stories of many other animals - in the future.
Interkulturelle Kommunikation, interkulturelle Kompetenz und (soziale) Interaktion sind längst zu Schlagworten geworden, mit denen moderne Gesellschaften zentrale praktische Herausforderungen und wichtige Aspekte ihres Selbstverständnisses auf den Begriff zu bringen versuchen. Der Terminus interkulturelle Kommunikation steht dabei oft auch für Verständigungsschwierigkeiten, die in ganz verschiedenen Lebensbereichen und Berufsfeldern kontinuierlich zunehmen (vgl. Straub / Weidemann, 2007, S. 1). Kulturelle Differenzen gelten in dieser Hinsicht als beinahe unerschöpfliche Quelle von potentiellen Problemen der kommunikativen Verständigung. Im folgenden Beitrag werden vor allem Spezifika der interkulturellen Kommunikation im Allgemeinen und die soziale Interaktion der Akteure (Interaktionspartner) in der Kommunikation im Besonderen behandelt. Das Thema fokussiert in diesem Zusammenhang die Faktoren, die in der gegenseitigen Interaktion zwischen miteinander kommunizierenden Akteuren auftreten können bzw., welche Fragen in diesem Zusammenhang im Zentrum des Interesses stehen und was eher an der Peripherie (nebensächlich) ist.
Th¬e main principle of holism – "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" – can be traced back to ancient philosophical studies. Although the term itself was coined by Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926, the earliest formulations can already be found in Taoism, in the philosophy of Lao Tzu, as well as in Aristotle's 'Metaphysics'. However, a complete and profound sense of the principle has only been revealed in such theories as Gestalt psychology (Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer and others), the general systems theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy), and the theory of complexity (synergetics) as formulated by the Moscow school of synergetics (Sergey Pavlovich Kurdyumov), to name just a few. ¬inking in this direction, from the whole to the parts (subsystems), is quite unusual for classical science which, in its course of analysis, usually moves from distinct parts to the whole. In synergetics, according to Hermann Haken, order parameters determine how parts (subsystems) of complex systems behave. A select few order parameters, as Haken says, encompass the complex behavior of diverse parts and, therefore, lead to enormously reducing the complexity in a description of a given system.