The Horse and Its Rider: Enacting the Actors of the Interaction

This bachelor thesis focuses on the horse-human relationship. It strives for answering the question how horse and human enact within this relationship and mutual interaction as the actors, which means active subjects that can participate in the relationship. The text tries to analyse how this relationship is influenced by other non-humans, such as the objects in the stable or the literature about horses. The text explores this through the lens of chosen theoretical and methodological concepts (the multispecies ethnography, Eduardo Kohn's anthropology of life or anthropology beyond the human, Donna Haraway's research of the non-humans and especially Bruno Latour's symmetrical anthropology and actor-network theory) that reach beyond the human and contain animals, objects and other non-humans. The research is based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the stable member. The analysis shows that the conditions of the horse-human relationship are mostly defined by the human. The human sets up the barriers within witch the horse can interfere partly (and probably unintentionally) in the mutual relationship by its reactions. The lifeless non-humans can substitute the human role of restricting the horse in this relationship. They can also reflect or reproduce certain notions or..