L'animal et l'homme: De l'exploitation à la sauvegarde ed. by Anne-Marie Flambard-Héricher and François Blary (review)

This edited collection, which gathers papers around the theme of the exploitation and protection of both domestic and wild animals, is one of several collections of the proceedings of the 141st French National Congress of Historical and Scientific Societies (Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques) devoted to the theme "Animal and Man." In line with the Congress's multidisciplinary approach, this volume brings together contributions in history, archaeology, archaeozoology, sociology, anthropology, and geography, as well as fields including architecture, information and communication sciences, ethics, and (ethno)pharmacology. The associated diversity of heuristic and methodological issues is reinforced by the broad spectrum of themes, cultural areas, and periods investigated.

Thus, if the publication of the proceedings of the annual Congress reflects the current state of the art and research debates, as stated in its aims, this edited collection cannot escape the observation that research in human-animal studies is marked by a deep fragmentation. The exploitation-protection dialectic forms a salutary binding theme; however, the effect is diminished by the absence of introductory remarks for each part of the volume. Finally, though the field of animal history, and more broadly of human-animal studies, has been marked by a profound renewal of research questions for more than a decade, notably around the integration of animals as actors into academic narratives and the forms this integration may take, the book evokes these historiographical debates only marginally.

Although the book cannot reflect the current state of the art, it indirectly raises questions about the place and future of the field of animal history and human-animal studies: Is the human-animal issue sufficient to define or institutionally establish a field of research that would be interdisciplinary by nature? How can animal history dialogue with other research fields, and can the discipline exempt itself from addressing historiographical issues that have influenced adjacent fields such as environmental history (e.g., concerning the social impact of wildlife conservation policies) or the history of science (e.g., the revaluation of empirical knowledge) without running the risk of provincialism or isolation? Finally, could the prominence of controversies regarding the status and condition of animals in (French) academic and public discourse blur the boundaries between academic production and societal debates on the "animal issue," rather than enrich academic production and enhance its specificity and (societal) interest? The defense of the "indispensable nature of animal experimentation" (p. 291) by Jean Costentin and Hubert Vaudry, who write as practitioners and not as researchers in ethics, particularly highlights this issue.

Despite the heterogeneous character of the volume, the reader will find in it many interesting contributions, impossible to detail in full here. An important set of contributions focuses on the choices and constraints associated with the use of animals and animal products which, as demonstrated in several articles on medieval (Sarah Claire) and early modern (Opaline Robin and Benoît Clavel) cases, can only be understood in relation to the changing economic, social, and environmental specificities of the time, the study of which requires a localized and fine-tuned approach. Other contributions, in particular that of Mathieu Béghin on intensive pig farming in Amiens during the Middle Ages, reframe the intensification of livestock farming in the long-term and shed light on local to regional remapping of farming geographies resulting from increases in productivity. Catherine Chadefaud and Philippe Madeline both draw attention to the interest of approaching such socio-spatial redistribution through the gestures, techniques, and structures of animal husbandry. In the third part of the book, on the dialectic between protection and destruction, moving from Nicolas Baron's contribution on rabies in cattle, which sheds light on the protective role of vaccines, to Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère's article on the antivivisection and antivaccination activities of the activist Marie Huot (1846–1930) brings to light the tensions between...