This thesis is an exploration of the humanimal entanglements between humans and pigeons in the urban setting. It traces human-pigeon histories from pigeons’ domestication forward to the contemporary conceptions of pigeons as a pest animal. Pigeons are made visible in all of their cultural, socio-political, and symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, exposing their deep entanglements with humans across space and time. Using a combination of multi-species ethnography through ‘flaneur’ walks in Uppsala, Sweden and conceptual frameworks drawn from post-humanism, philosophy, and animal studies, pigeon-human relationships are problematized. The pigeon's ability to interrogate dualistic paradigms of nature/culture, wild/domestic, and human/animal are explored. It is argued that pigeons are active in the co-constitution of the urban space alongside humans, and are participating in reciprocal humanimal relations - they are not simply objects to be acted upon but have their own agency. From pigeons we can learn valuable stories about ourselves, and the more-than-human world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-505093 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Hoekman, Anna |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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