Learning from the Herd?

What role do animals play in humans’ ethical lives? Recognizing a powerful contemporary draw around the idea that animals can (or should) shape human ethical lives, this article investigates the affordances that animals can offer for human ethics through applying Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “intercorporeality.” With an ethnographic focus on equine-assisted learning programs for young people in the United Kingdom, I will show that horses can afford intercorporeal forms of relatedness that enable young people to try out new ways of ethically relating to themselves and to others. But, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s politicized rendering of materiality and perception, I will emphasize that the affordances that animals offer are historically constituted: what they can bring to the table depends on how the table is laid. This theoretical approach enables a critical questioning of the way herd sociality is held as a contrast and antidote to human society in equine-assisted learning. This article also recognizes a growing interdisciplinary interest in the ethico-political potential of intercorporeality and considers how that concept can best be operationalized for critical and comparative ethnography. I use the concept for descriptive rather than prescriptive purposes and in a broad rather than qualified form.