Foam-rubber animals filled Ortekay Square in Istanbul, Turkey last year, in a public art project inspired by the feral dogs & cats, gulls, & dolphins who share the city.

Last night I felt a glimmer of insight into the nascent, boundary-straining field of zooethnography.   It came as a relief, as I had arrived in Sweden’s old university town of Uppsala for a conference on it four days earlier.  After staying in bed sick for the second of the conference’s two days, I feared I’d lost my chance to clue in.

Thankfully, conference organizer Jacob Bull and one presenter, Eva Hayward, each took time later in the week to help chase away my lingering confusion.

Both of them are members of the “HumAnimal” group at Uppsala University’s Center for Gender Research–a group which over the past year has embraced the term and field of zooethnography, and begun to define its challenges.

As I understand it, zooethnography is the study of how animals shape human-animal encounters.  Like traditional ethnographers, zooethnographers study these encounters in light of the cultural environments in which they occur–like a particular research lab, city park, or farm.

On Monday Hayward presented one such study, Migrations of Light: Whale songs and Photographs, in which she built an understanding of how humpback whales affected a group of human researchers in Maine, through photographs of the whale’s flukes.

In sense-soaked language that barely felt like prose, Hayward explained how the whales impressed their movement, weight, texture, ebullience, sociality, and even their songs into the senses of the researchers, through the physical medium of archived photographs.

I struggled with the impression that Hayward saw these whales as somehow concerned with the outcome of their fluke portraits, though she took care to disavow that notion.

Thankfully, the fog burned away in later conversations.  Zooethnographic research does not assume that animals are quietly manipulating our relationships (though cat guardians might be willing to go that far), but simply that they are active participants–not passive instruments–in their interactions with humans.  And as active participants, their bodies, movements, feelings, and ways of understanding the world all help to co-create the “more-than-human” cultures they live in with us.

Imagine how different the culture might be of a cat park, compared to a dog park, even if the same group of humans were at its sidelines.  (Hm, Google reveals that an abundance of satire journalists have already tried to imagine such a culture.)

Few of us would probably question the idea that animals affect us.  Our companion animals change the form and content of our lives in every way, causing comfort, frustration, smells, new ideas, and walks down the street.  The darting motions of mice or spiders elicit terror in some people.  And the experience of eating meat depends upon the physiological, hormonal, and social experiences of the animal who became that meat.

But, just as human laws have been slow to refine the legal status of animals as property (more on that next week!), research methods have likewise been slow to include animals’direct contributions to culture.

Species differences in communication make it no small feat to understand how multispecies cultures should be studied, and Bull is careful to say that HumAnimal is not presenting zooethnography as a new methodology, but as an invitation:

“To take what Derrida refers to as The Animal Question, to methodology. To say that if we’re going to take other animals seriously, then we must also question how we are taking them seriously, and what are the significances and impacts of speaking for them, speaking with them, speaking nearby to animals.”

The HumAnimal group is currently working on a kind of declaration for zooethnography which addresses, among other problems, the need to handle constructively the twin human habits of anthropocentrism (viewing the world through a human-centered lens) and anthropomorphism (attributing seemingly “human” characteristics to non-humans).

To follow the continued unfolding of this group’s questions and research, I recommend visiting this page on their web site.

Both men have devoted their adult lives to non-humans, yet they fall on opposite sides of a controversy over how we should relate to wild animals.  They are subjects of a new documentary by filmmaker Mike Webber, who spent a year exploring the wild subculture of Americans who keep wild exotic animals as pets.

Terry Brumfield of Piketon, OH, who was in a fatal train accident this September, with one of the lions he raised from infancy. Photo courtesy of Michael Webber.

Twenty-one states including Ohio have no prohibitions on keeping wild animals in private homes.  But the rest have at least partial bans, and there are people everywhere who strongly believe that wild animals should be left in the wild.  As a result, the nation-wide community of people who buy, sell, and own wild exotic animals does not welcome outside scrutiny.

I asked Webber a few questions about his experience of making The Elephant in the Living Room, which opens at The Rave in Westchester this Friday.

Officer Tim Harrison of Oakwood, whose career as an animal advocate began in a Tipp City veterinary clinic. Photo courtesy of Michael Webber.

FT: In your video interview with IFFBoston you said you were often urged by cities and states not to make the movie.  Can you say more about this?  What was your understanding of the motives/interests behind these requests?  How did you respond?

When you see this movie, I feel like we are watching a film that was never supposed to be made, involving people whose stories were never supposed to be told.

Photo courtesy of Michael Webber.

Onstage were tenor saxophonist Edwin Bayard, drummer Melvin Broach, trumpeter Mike Wade, guitarist Wilbert Longmire, and standing bassist Eddie Brookshire. Enjoy the sketches, and keep your ears peeled for their next show.

Mike Wade on trumpet at The Redmoor, 3.26.09

Eddie Brookshire on bass at The Redmoor, 3.26.09

I joined some Hindu friends on Sunday for a trip to the Hindu Temple of Greater Cincinnati, at the end of a rural road in Union Township. They began their worship service seated cross-legged atop ornate rugs beneath plain, soaring ceilings, chanting call-and-response songs before a row of 10 or 15 painted, bejeweled, Paul Bunyan-sized god sculptures.

Three of them were familiar to me: Ganesh the elephant god, Hanuman the monkey god, and Buddha. It surprised me to learn that some Hindus count the Buddha among their gods, whereas the Buddhists I know regard him as a human who, through meditation, succeeded in shedding the delusions that plague all humans.

The chanting ended before I could sketch Hanuman’s cheeky face–or Ganesh’s fourth hand. I look forward to revisiting.

It stumps me to think what the non-human elements of these gods might mean to Hindus–or what monkeys and elephants might mean in their culture, given their resemblances to gods.

Light to shed on this, anyone?

"Red and Fed" by Charley Harper

Pat Wynne opened The Coffee Shop on Madison in 2007, and decorated its walls with the 40+ prints he has collected by the Cincinnati-based painter, illustrator, and poster artist, since the early 80′s. To a Harper fan this permanent (though rotating) exhibit may be the best thing to happen since the Contemporary Art Center’s Harper retrospective closed in 2007, months after the artist died at age 84.

Many of of his pieces first register as flat patterns of color and line, until connections among them give rise to animals. From the relationships among animals, narratives emerge—of deception, waiting, tenderness, bewilderment, and predation. Finally, from Harper’s juxtapositions of lines, colors, bodies, and stories, whimsical puns sally forth.

The paintings revel in visual puns, which Harper regarded as “the whisks that stir the creative broth.”

"Raccoonnaissance" by Charley Harper

In “Raccoonnaissance” a flat pattern of brown circles and yellow dots pulses against a dark background. The paired dots, it turns out, belong to masks. Fifteen raccoons watch from behind a pile of logs, as a skunk helps himself to a plate of dog food. Their eyes resemble the circular bits of kibble that hold their attention, and a threadlike crescent moon behind them mirrors the curve of the raised tail that keeps them at a distance.

Harper observed wild animals and studied Audubon books to find the simplest and most accurate ways of describing animals, an approach he called “minimal realism.”

His work sidesteps the use of familiar symbols—scalloped paws, lemon-shaped eyes, or rodential buck-teeth—through which we often identify drawn animals. Rather than stamping individual characters out of a known pattern, he leads viewers to seek individuals within unfamiliar patterns of animals. If a flock of

"Pier Group" by Charley Harper

birds all look the same to us, we may not know how to look closely enough; Harper, who does, guides us.

In “Pier Group” a row of six pelicans stands shoulder-to-shoulder atop six mooring posts. They look identical, except one post stands at a greater distance from the rest, forcing that pelican to dangle her unmoored foot into a gap. “Even on the pier, peer pressure appears,” wrote Harper in a caption for the painting.

Harper liked to explore parallels between human and animal experiences. In a self-interview* he explains how he confronted anthropomorphism, the attribution of human qualities to non-humans:

Very carefully. I walk a tightrope between animal and human behavior, looking for similarities between the two, being careful not to imply that they act from the same motives. Naturalists say they don’t—will we ever be sure? I see undeniable parallels in some areas of our lives—think of the mother-child relationship—that could scarcely have arisen from different sources. Such analogies can be instructive, amusing, even frightening, and they are poignant reminders of our inescapable kinship with all life forms.

"Love on a Limb" by Charley Harper

This balancing act is evident in his treatment of mammals. He found that the simple forms of fish and birds lent themselves most easily to his minimalism—“Fish practically draw themselves,” he said. Mammals emerge more quickly from his patterns, perhaps because of their complex limbiness and familiar faces. But Harper does not let us overestimate their familiarity. While always leading viewers to imagine his subjects’ thoughts and sensations, he points out the limits of face-based guesswork, through funny contrasts between his subjects’ expressions and their circumstances.

In “Love on a Limb” two intertwined monkeys sit on a jungle branch, mirror images of each other, two halves of a long, ribbony heart. But they eye one another askance and tight-lipped, evoking attitudes of wary tension. The disconnect between what we read in their faces and bodies suggests that monkey and human expressions may not quite correspond.

In “Convivial Pursuit” three cheetah cubs tumble through the loop of their

"Convivial Pursuit" by Charley Harper

mother’s tail, sporting tidy feline frowns. Among other things, they are a reminder that cats, from the front, frown—no matter how much fun they’re having.

And in “Claws,” a warty, beach-combing bulldog faces off with a crab. His snorting underbite, wrinkled brow, and stout shoulders recall the alarm that I felt, as a child, when I first met a bulldog. This one also recalls the lesson I learned, by my third or fourth bulldog, that reading the expression behind their perma-scowls required extra work.

Harper’s perspective on animals is uncommonly animal-focused. His subjects are not decorative elements drained of an inner life; nor are they caricatures, objects of

"Claws," by Charley Harper

condescension, models of virtue, or zoological specimens. His paintings show a curiosity for whole animals—for ones who think, feel, and relate to each other.

As a result, no subject matter is at odds with the humor and harmony of his style. Birds out of formation bespeak unique inner worlds; a cardinal’s corn kernel mess has an exhilarated order of its own; chewed leaves evoke the passage of an interesting bug.

Harper celebrates the beauty of his subjects as they are—in grace, clumsiness, bloodthirst, and kindness—and invites us to do the same.

* * *

"Buzz off, You Turkey" by Charley Harper

* In Beguiled by the Wild, The Art of Charley Harper: Flower Valley Press, 1994.

Images are borrowed from various blogs and online print vendors, including www.charleyharper.com and www.charleyharperartstudio.com.

Update, 4/20/10: Mr. Wynne has sold his coffee shop to The BonBonerie Bakery, and the space (at 2030 Madison Rd.) is now a café.  An extensive collection of cat teapots has taken the place of the Harper collection.