The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness [Paperback]

Donna Haraway (Author), Matthew Begelke (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0971757585 | ISBN-13: 978-0971757585 | Publication Date: April 1, 2003

The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department, UC-Santa Cruz.

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971757585
• ISBN-13: 978-0971757585
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dogs and Humans: The New Pack, January 21, 2006

By 

Timothy B. Hurst (Fort Collins, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Paperback)

The traditional contradictions found in relationships between human/nature, nature/machine, art/science, have no place in this work by Donna Haraway. In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Haraway spends a fair portion of the book in what seems to be a possible beginning of a future book; in honor of Foucault, she might name it "The Birth of the Kennel" (61). Haraway's distinctively postmodernist style gives voice to those groups who otherwise do not have any; she speaks mostly of dogs in the book but notes that the dog is really a metaphor, "Let the dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating progress or destruction, according to taste" (28). The relationships between human and dog are seen as creating a new history, one that breaks down the traditionally bifurcated social construction among the species.
Humans more and more are defining themselves, their activity, and their lifestyle with dogs (companion species) in mind. This may be truer in Western cultures, but there is a curious "emergent natureculture" emanating in modern society, one that sees human-pet relations as central to one's being. Dogs are not only welcomed at some houses, they are expected, because they participate in the social structure we have created, a pack of humans and dogs with clearly delineated rules of social interaction and an equally clear, although often challenged hierarchy. The animals and humans interact within curious sets of relationships. Dogs and humans are certainly not the same species, no matter how large we define species as, but Haraway's attempt at deconstructing relationships and reconstructing them in terms of intra-specie relations is both creative and difficult to conjure. While this book was a good read, it seems incomplete at times and could use some further fleshing out of the logic and themes.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Social Metaphysics of Humans-in-Relation, November 6, 2006

By 

Catuskoti (Honolulu, HI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Paperback)

The previous comment seems to me to miss the plot of Haraway's text. I don't mean to cause offense by saying this, but only to explain why I feel like I should write. The way I read this manifesto, Haraway is working to lay out a social metaphysics that takes relations with radical otherness as integral to and inseparable from any identity. Classical liberalist / modernist theory imagines humans as fundamentally discrete and fungible. This necessarily produces hostility to anything marked as other (e.g., women, dogs, nature, etc.). By drawing off her earlier cyborg theory, Whitehead's process metaphysics, and her own very intimate and concrete relationship with her beloved companion, Haraway is working to construct an intimate and concrete conceptual alternative. This is probably not a text that you would want to wander into without at least some previous (e.g., undergrad) introduction to 3rd wave feminist theory.

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, lively read!!!, January 3, 2007

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a journalist (Waukesha, WI) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Paperback)

This is a lovely, engaging short volume. It was just the right mix of theory and very pragmatic discussion to appeal to anyone from the reader who just plain loves dogs ... to those interested in better understanding contemporary scientific discourses.

Highly recommended.