The ‘Animal Cause’ and the Social Sciences : from anthropocentrism to zoocentrism

International audienceHow do the social sciences and humanities deal with human-animal relationships? Between epistemic and political aims, animals have progressed on either side of the Atlantic as legitimate subjects of study and even as political subjects in their own right. This essay is an excerpt from S'engager pour les animaux, a book edited by Fabien Carié and Christophe Traïni and scheduled for publication in February 2019 in the Puf/Vie des idées collection. 'Obscurantism'. This was Jean-Pierre Digard's verdict on a large portion of recent social science and humanities (SSH) studies on human-animal relations. When asked by his colleagues to discuss whether anthropology had taken an 'animal turn', this domestication specialist explained that social changes in the representation of animals have had a direct impact on knowledge production in this regard. According to him, since the nineteenth century and the rise of animal protection, 'animalism' has grown by dint of progressively calling into question the idea that there is a radical boundary between humans and animals. From the 1970s onwards, intellectuals began producing normative theories on the human-animal relations and this then influenced the emergence of SSH research on the topic. In Digard's view, these theories called a second boundary into question: the boundary separatin