Folklore and the Animal Turn

Abstract:This essay introduces a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research (55–2) dedicated to folklore studies and the "animal turn," a movement among scholars from various disciplines to explore the shifting boundary between human and nonhuman animals and its ethical implications. Building on the pioneering work of folklorist Jay Mechling, the authors use a folkloristic approach to examine the human-animal relationship from the point of view of informal ontologies and knowledge systems as well as the scientific, naturalistic perspective most familiar to scholars. Their aim is to enlarge the purview of folklore studies, taking advantage of its unique position to explore vernacular cosmologies, ontologies, and human-nonhuman relationship models, going as far as expanding the application of notions such as "culture" and "tradition" to the behavior of nonhuman animals. In doing so, it is their hope to encourage folklorists to contribute to the theoretical and scholarly literature on posthumanism and the animal turn.