Single Review on past events

In her presentation on “Animal Culture” Aline Steinbrecher gave an insight in her research field of animal history and the central debates on “animal agency”.

“Until the 1980s thinking about history has never been thinking about animals, but from the 1980s on it was clear (at least in the Anglo-Saxon research area) that animals deserve a larger place in history”, stated Aline Steinbrecher. “Since 2000 there have been many historical works on animals around the world and across most historical periods. “

A challenging key question in this field is whether animals are actors or objects in history. “The question to what extent animals are historical actors is still seen as quite revolutionary”, explains Aline Steinbrecher. “Because introducing animals as actors and not just as objects into historical work broadens and deepens not only what we might know about the past, it also challenges some assumptions as to what the focus of history as a discipline might be. The assumption that animals have agency or interagency, leads to many methodological challenges. They are connected to the epistemological question of how we know about animals in history.”

Theoretical questions Aline Steinbrecher is mainly interested in are: Have dogs culture in the sense of agency which affects historical processes and are dogs themselves subject to historical processes? Where could culture be found in a pre-modern pet and where do exchange processes of culture take place with these animals? To answer these questions a look into the concrete living-together of man and dog in the early modern cities is essential.

It is not surprising that the historian has chosen the dog as research field. “Dogs are humanity’s most intimate partners. They have adjusted their own evolutionary course throughout human history and influenced the evolutionary course of human history.”

Furthermore the ubiquity of dogs in the urban living environments of the past is reflected in numerous historical sources. The archaeological and historical archives as well as art and literature are drawn through by tracks and trails of dogs. But all these sources, at least those the historians work with, are human-generated. Animals do not communicate visually or linguistically in ways that historians can understand and read. They do not leave behind explanations of their motives in diaries or articles in newspapers. Historians cannot gain direct access to animal subjectivities nor motivations. But nevertheless it’s possible to catch a glimpse of canine agency which goes beyond the representation of them.

“One crucial factor of dog agency was the enormous quantitative presence of canins in urban environments”, says Aline Steinbrecher. The efforts of municipal authorities to prevent inhabitants from keeping domestic animals were largely ineffective: packs of dogs were an ubiquitous presence in the cities of the early 19th century. In early 19th-century Vienna, for instance, single houses often counted 30 or even 40 dogs.

In her habilitation Aline Steinbrecher studies the dog-human or human-dog relationship over two hundred years, in particular from 1650 to 1850. She will not only show how narrow dogs and the bourgeoisie were interwoven, but also illustrate that the relationship between the keeper and his pet was interactive as well as reciprocal and has been shaped by humans as well as by dogs. Dogs inscribed themselves in the behaviour patterns of their owners and shaped their everyday life.

Symptomatically for this is the history of the walk. Going for a promenade became one of the favourite leisure practices during the 18th century. At the same time dog keeping became a sine qua non of bourgeois culture. “The walk is one example out of many which shows us, that dogs have agency which affects historical processes. Further the regulations about dog keeping illustrate that dogs themselves were subjects to historical processes. This subjectivity is not only composed of the role of the dog as intimate partner but also as source of irritation”, explained Aline Steinbrecher.