Dilemmatic human-animal boundaries in Britain and Romania: Post-materialist and materialist dehumanization

Theories of dehumanization generally assume a single clear-cut, value-free and non-dilemmatic boundary between the categories 'human' and 'animal'. The present study highlights the relevance of dilemmas involved in drawing that boundary. In six focus groups carried out in Romania and Britain, 42 participants were challenged to think about dilemmas pertaining to animal and human life. Four themes were identified: rational autonomy, sentience, speciesism and maintaining materialist and post-materialist values. Sentience made animals resemble humans, while humans' rational autonomy made them distinctive. Speciesism underlay the human participants' prioritization of their own interests over those of animals, and a conservative consensus that the existing social system could not change supported this speciesism when it was challenged. Romanian participants appealed to Romania's lack of modernity and British participants to Britain's modernity to justify such conservatism. The findings suggest that the human-animal boundary is not essentialized; rather it seems that such boundary is constructed in a dilemmatic and post hoc way. Implications for theories of dehumanization are discussed.

The practice of book illustration: Three examples by Norah Borges

This article focuses on three different examples of book illustration carried out by Norah Borges in the 1930s and 1940s (Canciones de mar y tierra by Concha Méndez, Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre). Its purpose is twofold: to show how illustrations can shape our reading of texts and to examine how the artist's work can be assimilated to a current of neorromanticismo in Spanish letters dating back to the pre-Civil War period. Her work might serve as an illustration of what Ramón Gómez de la Serna termed the cursi bueno, a marginalized reaction to the dehumanization of art that speaks of sentiment, domesticity and, in women's case, of repressed longing.