Leslie Irvine
BOOKS
If You Tame Me: Understanding our Connection with Animals. 2004. Temple University Press.
Read a review from the Rocky Mountain News
Read a review from American Journal of Sociology
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The title comes from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Midway through the beloved story, the Prince arrives on Earth after visiting several other planets. Feeling desperately lonely, he meets a fox, whom he invites to come and play. But the fox says that he cannot play because he is not tame. The Prince asks what this means, the fox tells him, and then explains how to go about taming him. He also tells the Prince that taming will change what they mean to each other. "If you tame me," the fox explains, "we'll need each other." Although there will be thousands of other foxes and other princes in the world, to each other, they will be like no others. Few of us who live with dogs and cats have had to tame them in the literal sense, but we can nevertheless understand the fox's wisdom. In the course of living together, humans and animals come to need each other. Although we may live with many different animals over the years, each one is unique to us. They are not just machines. We feel special connections with certain animals. Yet most of us are wary of how far we can take this without committing the "cardinal sin" of anthropomorphizing. This book offers a way to understand animal selfhood that remains true to animals' experiences. The data come from ethnographic research in a humane society and at a community dog park, from interviews with dog and cat guardians and people adopting animals at “The Shelter,” and from auto-ethnographic analysis of my own experience with animals. Adapting a model developed to understand the experience of preverbal human infants, the book establishes the framework of a core self for animals that does not depend on language. It shows how animal selfhood becomes apparent to us during interaction. It offers convincing evidence that, although animals do not have the capacity for language, they nevertheless have a sense that they exist apart from other creatures and that they value their own lives.
Codependent Forevermore: The Invention of Self in a Twelve Step Group.1999. University of Chicago Press (click link to connect to publisher’s website).
Codependent Forevermore explores the creation of identity in a group setting. It is an ethnography of the group Codependents Anonymous, but I like to think of it as a study of how disrupted lives are made livable again. I examine how people are drawn to the group, and how they use the group's discourse to make sense of failed relationships. By learning how to account for events in their lives, people learn to tell new stories of themselves and, gradually, become the stories they tell. The book received favorable reviews in publications such as The London Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Sociology.
