Anthropomorphism: The Challenge of Representing Animals

• In Event: 40462 - Section on Animals and Society Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Animals and Meaning

Abstract

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman animals or objects, has a long history of contestation.  This chapter explores the major, consistent critiques of its usage including: 1) the socialization of children, 2) anthropomorphism’s slippery slope to anthropocentrism, 3) the inaccurate education on nonhuman animals, 4) our disconnection of them from the natural environments in which they live, 5) the finding that the assumed prosocial learning from nonhuman animal-based storytelling might not be the most helpful method to teach those skills and beliefs, and 6) the effect anthropomorphism can have on human health.  Additionally, this chapter highlights challenges to those critiques including scholarship claiming anthropomorphism can indeed positively affect prosocial behaviors, such as compassion, in humans.  Lastly, this chapter offers new questions and research areas receiving growing attention as further ways to push the debate around anthromorphism with a discussion on narrative empathy and the question of what constitutes "natural" in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Jenny R. Vermilya, University of Colorado Denver