Canis africanis : : a dog history of Southern Africa / / edited by Lance van Sittert and Sandra Swart.

• Superior document: Human-animal studies, v. 5
• TeilnehmendeR: Van Sittert, Lance.; Swart, Sandra Scott.
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Human-animal studies ; v. 5.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal’s ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way “to think about human society”. The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradation through greyhound gambling, to anxieties over social status reflected through breed classifications, to social rebellion through resistance to the dog tax imposed by colonial authorities. With its focus on dogs in human history, this project is part of what has been termed the ‘animal turn’ in the social sciences, which investigates the spaces which animals inhabit in human society and the way in which animal and human lives interconnect.

Table of Contents

Preliminary material / Van Sittert and Swart -- Canis familiaris: A dog history of Southern Africa -- Africanis: The pre-colonial dog of Africa / Tim Maggs and Judith Sealy -- A short paper about a dog / Susie Newton-King -- What the dogs knew: Intelligence and morality in the Cape Colony / Elizabeth Green Musselman -- Dogs and the public sphere: The ordering of social space in early nineteenth-century Cape Town / Kirsten Mckenzie -- Class and canicide in little Bess: The 1893 Port Elizabeth rabies epidemic / Lance Van Sittert -- Dogs, poison and the meaning of colonial intervention in the Transkei,South Africa / Jacob Tropp -- Fido: Dog tales of colonialism in Namibia / Robert J. Gordon -- Police dogs and state rationality in early twentieth-century South Africa / Keith Shear -- ‘Gone to the dogs’: The Cultural Politics Of gambling— The rise and fall of british greyhound racing on the Witwatersrand, 1932–1949 / Albert Grundlingh -- Social subjects: Representations of dogs in South African fiction in english / Wendy Woodward -- The canine metaphor in the visual arts / Meredith Palumbo -- Dogs and dogma: A discussion of the socio-political construction of southern african dog ‘breeds’ as a window onto social history / Sandra Swart -- Index / Van Sittert and Swart.