Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

Neoclassical theists reject the traditional divine attributes of impassibility and immutability, holding that God can be affected by the things he has created and is thus changeable. Some claim, for example, that God undergoes changes in emotional state, has desires that can be either satisfied or frustrated, grows in knowledge, and can suffer. I argue that this position rests on a simplistic distortion of perfect being theology grounded in highly contestable intuitions and conceptually sloppy usage of key terms (such as “emotion” and “knowledge”). By contrast, the first-cause theology of Thomism is grounded in a rigorously worked-out metaphysics that neoclassical writers typically engage with only superficially if at all. Nor is “neoclassical” theism really new, but in fact marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes.

In Chapter 7, “Upgrades in the Age of Generative AI,” we consider the hype around generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, and explain how the razzle-dazzle has captured the public’s imagination, even as the technology hasn’t come close to being artificial general intelligence—the goal companies like OpenAI aspire for. While tech giants race to develop generative AI products, we emphasize that they currently are sophisticated pattern-matching systems that simulate intelligence without truly understanding it. Analyzing both negative (political campaigns) and positive (the possibility of helping doctors communicate more empathetically over patient portals) examples, we offer recommendations for spotting uses of generative AI to avoid and how technological upgrades can be carefully and ethically integrated into communication systems to improve human welfare.

This chapter explores the emergence of an animal biopolitics at the start of the eighteenth century, when English and Italian governments instituted a new method for controlling rinderpest outbreaks in Europe: the state-sponsored killing of infected animals. This stamping out method transferred powers traditionally invested in farmers and cattle traders to government officials, forcing those same officials to justify their actions in ways that redefined the relationships between citizen and state. This redefinition troubled literary figures from a variety of political orientations, raising fears that this new power over animal populations might be brought to bear upon the growing human populations in Europe. Such fears are vividly expressed in major and minor works of eighteenth-century literature, from the Houyhnhnms’ proposal to exterminate the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the curious manner by which the anxieties of agricultural laborers are juxtaposed with images of human slaughter in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Because the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated in bat populations before crossing over to humans, its epidemiological history offers many opportunities to rethink our relationships with the nonhuman world. This history might remind us that humans and other animals are equally subject to microbial infection, and the diseases that affect nonhuman communities have clear analogs in and often cross over into human communities. But as this chapter argues, in a sharp contrast with the literature of earlier epizootics, the emerging cultural narratives of COVID-19 tend to reinforce the differences between the human and the nonhuman and the importance of keeping those two worlds physically and conceptually separate. With a few notable exceptions, COVID-inspired literature written during the pandemic tends to view the widespread lockdowns as beneficial to the animal world. Setting these narratives of ecosystem renewal alongside rarer literary works that reveal COVID’s devastating effects upon animals, the chapter shows why literary scholars invested in human–animal entanglements should consider COVID as an inter-species event and what difficulties we must overcome in telling that story.

This chapter explores studies in psychology and related disciplines on human–animal relationships. It examines anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and its opposite, anthropodenial – the refusal to acknowledge similarities between humans and animals. It also discusses the meat paradox: the psychological conflict between valuing animal welfare and consuming meat.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

This chapter addresses some of the scientific, philosophical and theological arguments brought to bear on the debates surrounding human–robot relationships. Noting that we define robots through our relationships with them, it shows how factors such as emotion and agency can indicate things such as a theory of mind that condition users to expect reciprocal relationships that model a sense of partnership. These factors are important in ‘lovotics’, or a trend in social robotics to produce robots that people want to develop relationships with. Such relationships, however, at least given current capabilities in robotics, will always fall short of conditioned expectations because robots, rather than being full partners, are largely reducible to the self or user. The chapter introduces the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism to demonstrate these critiques, and then moves on to consider alternative figurations of relationships – drawing in particular on articulations of relationality – that may enable us to rethink how we image and imagine robots.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

In human–robot interactions in legal proceedings, human responses to robot-generated evidence will present unique challenges to the accuracy of litigation as well as ancillary goals such as fairness and transparency, though it may also enhance accuracy in other respects. The most important feature of human–robot interactions is the human tendency to anthropomorphize robots, which can generate misleading impressions and be manipulated by designing robots to make them appear more trustworthy and believable. Although robot-generated evidence may also offer unique advantages, there are concerns about the degree to which the traditional methods of testing the accuracy of evidence, particularly cross-examination, will be effective. We explore these phenomena in the autonomous vehicles context, comparing the forums of litigation, alternative dispute resolution, and the National Transportation Safety Board. We suggest that the presence of expert decision-makers might help mitigate some of the problems with human–robot interactions, though other aspects of the procedures in each of the forums still raise concerns.

This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

Darwin’s theory, in its uniformitarianism, its materialism, and its elimination of all metaphysical explanations and any element of intelligent agency from the world’s biological phenomena has been taken as an important influence in the growth of the idea that all living creatures are automata – more or less “conscious machines.” Darwin himself, in a least four different aspects of his writing, belies this inference from his theories: the metaphorical work done by his dominant idea – natural selection; his anthropomorphism; his views on instinct; and his theory of sexual selection.

Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.