Pragmatist Animal Geographies : Mensch-Wolf-Transaktionen in der schweizerischen Calanda-Region

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In recent years, more and more studies in animal geographies have emphasized the need for an ontological reconfiguration of traditional dualistic perspectives on human-animal relations. Therefore, our paper investigates the potential of a transactional perspective, based on classical philosophical pragmatism, to develop a deeper and non-dualistic understanding of encounters and relations between humans and non-humans. In doing that, we outline a transactional concept for analysing human-animal relations, discuss its methodological consequences and test its empirical fruitfulness by investigating the return of wolves in the Swiss Calanda region. The empirical evidence shows that the transaction concept is particularly fruitful for analyzing processes in a more-than-human world, which are characterized by complex and dynamic changes and feedback effects.