“I can tell he is in a good mood.” Embodied aspects of information in human-animal relationship

Abstract

In a multispecies family, both humans and animals learn how to live together through embodied experiences and beyond the verbal transmission of information. This paper, based on a pilot study about information that makes meaning in multispecies families, aims to highlight embodied aspects of information that shape human-animal shared daily activities. Drawing on posthumanism and hermeneutic phenomenology; four multispecies families participated in semi-structured interviews about their family and video tours of their households. A combination of inductive and deductive coding was applied to the verbal and non-verbal data collected. The codes included a range of different senses, functions of the body, feelings from inside the body, the body’s appearance, etc. The results show how information moves across animal and human bodies. The categories of body as a thing, moving body, acting body, and sensing body shape different ways of experiencing, expressing and enacting information among human and nonhuman participants. Shared embodied information enables animals and humans to read the meaning of their intentions and actions and create intersubjective understanding and meaning in their relationship.