Working Group on Animals in the Law & Humanities - Elan Abrell

Event Description

Join us for a discussion of Professor Elan Abrell’s “Cannibalism, Law, and the Human-Animal Divide.”

Speaker: Professor Elan Abrell (Science & Technology Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University)

Title: Cannibalism, Law, and the Human-Animal Divide

Abstract: If non-human animals can be consumed as meat, why aren’t humans meat too? Motivated by this ontological quandary and the near-universal taboo against cannibalism (along with the simultaneous cultural revulsion and fascination it elicits), this talk draws on anthropology, legal history, and critical animal studies to examine how the socio-legal prohibition against eating human flesh functions as a boundary-making practice that helps shape how we define — and legally produce — the categories of human and animal.

Bio: Elan Abrell is an assistant professor Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. He is also the coordinator of Wesleyan’s Animal Studies minor. He received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School at the University of California, and his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Previously, Dr. Abrell was a Farmed Animal Law & Policy Fellow at the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, and a visiting assistant professor of Anthropology and Animal Studies at New York University. His work has appeared in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, and his book Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (2021, University of Minnesota Press) – an ethnography of animal sanctuaries throughout the U.S. – won the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

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https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/85048242803

Meeting ID: 850 4824 2803

Passcode: 349215