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3. Two as One
- Syracuse University Press
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38 Photographic portraits of cats entertained people a century ago. Many were light, whimsical images that might have elicited a smile one second and been forgotten the next. These cats were objects to admire for their beauty or cuteness or to laugh at as silly caricatures of humans. Yet not all portraits , as we saw, rendered cats as mere objects. Some reflected deeper sentiment for imaged cats as friends and respected individuals. Although often humanized, these cats appeared as subjects having thoughts and feelings, their own personalities and life experiences, and relationships with humans. Because these photographs are stand-alone portraits of cats, we cannot see how people might have behaved toward these animals or what kind of human–animal relationship they would have created and documented on film to remember and share. But we fortunately also found hundreds of images of people interacting with their cats, many depicting what appear to be very close relationships with them, sometimes remarkably so. We see glimpses of what seem to be intimately rewarding moments: people presenting themselves as being familiar with their cats, behaving warmly toward them, and reaping emotional benefits from these personal connections. How did photographs depict these close relationships between people and their cats? In the arena of public life, individuals who are in each other’s presence reveal their mutual attachment for others to see and understand by displaying what Erving Goffman referred to as “with markers” or “tie signs” (1971, 65,). They touch, smile, gaze, and interact with each other (Guerrero and Floyd 2006) to create an impression of being connected and anchored together. These signs are important for the everyday functioning of the social order 3 Two as One 3.1. Serenity. Two as One 39 because they provide simple tools for strangers to classify others and for intimates to remind one another of how they want to be regarded. People and their pets also display ties that show onlookers that they have a relationship of some significance . Many pet owners feel their animals are far from being mere objects, seeing them as having distinctive personalities based on unique personal characteristics and whatever else can be attributed to them (Sanders 1990). Owners in turn use this definition of the other to orient themselves toward their animal friends (Bulcroft, Helling, and Albert 1986; Hearne 1987), which affects how they act toward their pets and even how they view themselves . The animals become extensions of their identities (Belk 1996), a unit in their minds. The owner enters public places and situations as a twosome with his or her pet and devises plans of action that require some degree of cooperation for both of them to adjust their behavior according to these shared understandings (Sanders 1999). This intimate connection and the mutual orientation and control it implies are played out and expected (sometimes even legally required, as in the case of “leash laws”) when owners and their pets appear together in public settings. Using leashes, having a mutual gaze, making physical contact (e.g., petting, nuzzling), calling the animal by name, and enacting a variety of other interspecies tie signs publicly demonstrate that the animal and owner constitute a couple. Human–animal tie signs can also be detected in early-twentieth-century photographs of people with cats. Whether these signs were deliberately posed or unintentionally displayed, cats are clearly pictured as paired with humans rather than as characters incidental to the scenes caught on film and appear to provide comfort and joy to the humans in the photograph. Although these images are static and two dimensional, capturing this friendship and the intimacy it entails was a dynamic process involving those depicted and those viewing them a century ago, a process that can also be seen today. Owners , cats, photographers, and viewers all conspired unwittingly to create and see an emotional dialogue or communication about close relationships between species in the images. People assumed certain poses with their cats, perhaps coached to do so by their photographers and sometimes aided by cooperating cats, to tell a story about being together. In turn, contemporaries or others decades later viewed these completed images by drawing on personal and cultural knowledge to make sense of the poses. We take two approaches to these photographic stories. As presentations of self, they display how people wanted to remember their cat relationships and how they wanted others to see them, too. From a dramaturgical perspective, the pictured human and cat appear as a unit tied together...