What is Barbara J. King reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve.

Her entry begins:

I’ve just finished reading two grief memoirs. In The Guardians: Elegy For a Friend, Sarah Manguso conveys, in a narrative of fragments and patches, the searing loss of her friend Harris. It was so sudden: Harris walked out (was allowed to walk out) of a psychiatric hospital and later that day jumped in front of a train. Sometimes, the fragments and patches flow along; occasionally one stops my heart. Manguso tells of the habit she fell into after Harris’s death: “I pictured my parents dead, my husband, my best friends, my relatives, everyone I knew, one by one. I started grieving good and early, so that when...[read on]

About How Animals Grieve, from the publisher:

From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends.

King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss.

The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

Barbara J. King is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary and author of Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.

The Page 69 Test: Evolving God.

My Book, The Movie: Evolving God.

Writers Read: Barbara J. King (July 2007).

Writers Read: Barbara J. King.

--Marshal Zeringue