Seeking contact: British horsemanship and stances toward knowing and being known by (Animal) others

Abstract

What is it like to know and be known by other creatures? And when do people place ethical importance on knowing or being known by other creatures in particular ways? This article brings ethnography of British equestrianism into dialogue with anthropological inquiries into the cultural variability of intersubjective understanding. I will show that riders’ desire for authentic mutual understanding with horses is part of their critical relationship with the concept of representation. At the same time, riders’ efforts to improve their perceptual “feel” in fact reinvigorate their requirement for a representational model of mind and a skepticism about their senses. To do justice to the distinctive experience of other-mindedness that this brings about, I will argue that comparisons between the knowability of minds in different cultural contexts are best forged in terms of varied stances toward intersubjectivity, rather than in terms of varied ethical expressions of underlying universal intersubjective states.