Aesop's Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach

Excellent little book of essays examining culture across species lines. Covering everything from gut bacteria to gardens to ants & to the charismatic social mammals, and moving across levels and layers of theory from the work of nigh-forgotten early sociologist Gabriel Tarde to Deleuze and of course to the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, it shows new ways and lines of thought that a biological consideration of culture, and a cultural consideration of biology, can be arrived at.

Through the use of fable as heuristic, which Hartigan deftly demonstrates has been part of social science since its beginnings, and an informed and responsible consideration of the currents of sociobiology, while using domestication and cultivation as conceptual points of departure, we can begin to expand our understanding of culture into new areas. Areas, as Hartigan also shows, where culture has resided, quietly, this whole time: in species outside of the order of primate.