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This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestel's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo- sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna Haraway. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant post-Enlightenment Western view of animals has seen them as some kind of machine, objects of no true moral significance, which it is permissible to subject to a range of treatments that would never be tolerated if practised on humans. In reality, defenders of animals, rather than being sentimentalists or somehow insufficiently attached to their own species, are far more in accord with scientific evidence and with the best interests of humanity itself. Animals are fundamentally makers and interpreters of meaning. The rejection of anthropomorphism and anecdote, and the illusion of the invisible observer, are the weapons of an ethnocentric positivism that should be rejected in favour of a strong heuristic position regarding the emotions, consciousness and abilities of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The convergence between ethology and ethnography has significantly transformed studies of animal subjectivity and culture. The future of both fields lies in a cultural zoology that treats animals as subjects partaking in culture. Nonetheless, significant resistance to such an approach exists on each side of the dis- ciplinary divide. Biologists and social scientists content themselves with definitions of culture that prevent them from taking heed of crucial dimensions of it. Beyond that, the very organiz- ation of scholarly knowledge in university disci- plines is predicated upon an absolute split between humans and other animals, with ethol- ogy charged with understanding non-human animal behavior and the social sciences directed almost exclusively to human cultures. The most promising approaches of the present and future rely on a mixture of methods and definitions that challenges and expands the disciplines involved as well as the very understanding of animal life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article suggests that the phylogenic basis for contemporary Western artistic practices lies in a social practice of the distinctive features found in the species, as seen in certain birds and mammals. Using the cases of birdsong, ape-paintings, knot-tying in certain orangutans and the intriguing stone-handling of some monkeys, the article shows that the question of non-human artistic practices is not only largely unexplored, but that contemporary ethology and psychology are still incapable of really tackling the problem. More generally, some of the problems encountered stem from the fact that one conception of the social sciences was constructed in opposition to the animal, leaving the study of the latter to biology. In this perspective, the study of artistic activity in non-human animals is a true challenge for the social sciences of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]