The Others: How Animals Made Us Human [Paperback]

Paul Shepard (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1559634340 | ISBN-13: 978-1559634342 | Publication Date: March 1, 1997 | Edition: 1

Paul Shepard has been one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology for more than forty years. His thought-provoking ideas on the role of animals in human thought, dreams, personal identity, and other psychological and religious contexts have been presented in a series of seminal writings, including "Thinking Animals," "The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game," and now "The Others," his most eloquent book to date."The Others" is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.Shepard considers animals as others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paul Shepard was an ecologist with a Yale Ph.D. who spent more than 40 years studying human evolution. With The Others: How Animals Made Us Human Shepard, who died in 1996, wrote a masterful book about the relationship we've always had with animals. The idea behind the book, that humans have always depended on animals, and that the dependence has greatly affected what we are, seems simple at first. But Shepard combined prodigious scholarship with eloquent writing to produce a very entertaining and informative look at that special relationship. Among the topics covered in The Others are the role animals have played in myth and folklore, the uses to which humans have put animals, and even the role of animals in the cartoons of Gary Larson.

From Publishers Weekly

In this provocative, illuminating volume, Shepard examines the role of animals in human history from the Pleistocene to the present. He argues that anthropomorphism binds our connection to the rest of the natural world. Noting that narratives in which animals are protagonists occur in all kinds of societies and in different forms at all stages of life, Shepard (Thinking Animals) analyzes fairy tales (child), folktales (juvenile) and myths (adult), concluding that the last is the most revealing source of information about how people relate to the nonhuman world. He reviews the sources of biblical natural history and parable, and he discusses the "nightmare of domestication." Shepard argues that the benefits to other species of being domestic are fictitious; they are merely slaves. Additional topics include animals in language, the cult of the cow and the rise of pastoralism, augury and the biblical zoo. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Island Press; 1 edition (March 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559634340
• ISBN-13: 978-1559634342
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #846,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shepard shreds all, November 17, 2007

By 

Anarcho-Savagist (Milwaukee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Paperback)

This is one of Shepard's most complete, potent and piercing works. The descriptions of "dense" from other reviewers is a lesson in a culture of boredom that sweeps modernity to the core. In a subject that needs to be articulated so well to affectively challenge the entire foundation of domestication/civilization, you best be prepared to read and absorb so the same rudimentary, arrogant ideologies don't keep appearing time after time, even into levels of academia.

Chapters like "Hounding Nature: The Nightmares of Domestication" cut straight through the bone on our exclusive love for dogs and horses as "man's best friend".

Easily one of the most important philosophers for the future of humanity, who was way "ahead" and "behind" his time.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful commentary on how Animals influence us, December 17, 1999

By 

diomedea "dio-sam" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Paperback)

Paul Shepherd was a great thinker, and I regret that I only became aware of his work very recently. His thesis throughout most of his work is that civilization as we know it is the true enemy of human beings. We have insulated ourselves from nature and from our teachers the animals. I do not always agree with his point of view, but he presents his ideas in such a way as to allow you to grasp and test them, and certainly not to shove them down your throat or tell you that this is the absolute truth. He really gets you to think.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shepard's THE OTHERS is wonderful, December 27, 2009

By 

Phil Osopher (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Paperback)

A brilliant book. Immensely learned, wide-ranging, daring in style, challenging in conception, Herculean in vocabulary. Shepard's in-your-face style is both urgent and circumspect. Understanding what human beings are must begin with a careful study of this grand book about what animals mean to our species.