Decentering History: Animals, Politics, and Religions

Decentering and decolonizing our understanding of human-animal relations is a central theme explored in the three books discussed in this essay. Each of these works examines the roles and representations of animals in sacrificial and hunting rituals across various religious traditions, revealing recurring themes in the discourse on human-animal relationships. In many religious contexts, animals were often othered by humans, with an assumed hierarchy that placed humans above them. However, the human-animal binary rooted in Eurasian religious traditions has frequently evolved, shaped by shifting dynamics of human dominance over animals. In premodern Europe and Asia, there were continual confrontations, competitions, and negotiations between established religions and local cultic practices regarding how animals were treated and represented-such as between Christianity and local cults in Europe, or between Buddhism and indigenous religions in Asia.