animal turn

I just read a paper by the Geographer Philip Howell of Cambridge about race, space, and prostitution in colonial Hong Kong ("Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong," Urban History, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 229-248) and then I browsed his website for further information.

Interesting stuff found. He is working on a fascinating project: Social Relations between Humans and Other Animals in Victorian Britain. As a contribution to the 'animal turn', this project looks at the social relation between humans and other animals (humans, we, are animals after all). He says "the 'animal turn' is of significance because by analysing these geographies of human-animal relations, the social relations between human beings themselves can be illuminated, particularly with relation to the nature of the modern social order." The focus of the project is the development of practices of pet keeping. "Pet keeping," Howell argues, "becomes a paradigmatic urban practice, inseparable from the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and emblematic of their values."

It reminds me of a comical urban map of Shanghai in the 1930s showing the whereabouts of famous movie stars and celebrities (perhaps by a tabloid magazine?), in which one of the female movie stars is shown to be keeping a dog in her household, which seems to embody the popular Cantonese saying: living in a western-style mansion and keeping a western dog. How the ideas of pet keeping in cosmopolitan Shanghai had evolved appear to be an interesting area to explore.