Prekäre Verwandtschaft: Tier- und Kindergeschichte(n) um 1900
Children and animals are still closely related in our society today, which extends to kinship. Around 1900, the latter became a theme in children's literature, which was still in its infancy, but also in child psychology. At the same time, not only was our modern understanding of kinship constituted around the construction of the nuclear family, but childhood was also newly established with the creation of its own spaces and their furnishing with children's books, stuffed animals, rocking horses and pets. Using exemplary studies of children's and animal stories around 1900, the project asks: What role do these new relationships between children and animals play in the formation and thematisation of kinship? In what ways do animals, animal stories and children's books create real and imaginary relationships in very different ways or function as substitutes for them?
Stephan Zandt studied cultural studies and comparative cultural and religious studies (European ethnology, cultural and social anthropology, comparative religious studies) in Berlin and Marburg. From 2013 to 2021, he was a research assistant at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2019, he completed his doctorate with a thesis on the cultivation of taste and the transformation history of culinary sensuality. His research interests include - always with a view to the contacts between Western and non-Western cultures: the cultural history and anthropology of the sensual, especially the culinary as well as the tactile touches between skin and fur, cultural studies aesthetics as well as human animal studies. He is currently working on a postdoctoral project on human-animal kinship in children's stories around 1900.
„Zwischen ‚Malampianismus‘ und ‚Neverland‘. Deckenhöhlen und der Kampf um die Intimitätsräume der Kindheit“, in: Laura Busse-Klingler, Andreas Gehrlach, Waldemar Isaak (Hg.): Selbstbehältnisse, Berlin (im Erscheinen); Die Kultivierung des Geschmacks. Eine Transformationsgeschichte der kulinarischen Sinnlichkeit, Berlin 2019; gem. mit Iris Därmann (Hg.): Andere Ökologien. Transformationen von Mensch und Tier, München 2017.
Die kindliche Psyche „schafft im Zeichen des Verkehrs“, heißt es in Sigmund Freuds Fallbericht über die Pferdephobien des kleinen Hans, die er auf den Straßen Wiens entwickelte. Der Vortrag begibt sich auf die Fahrspur des stockenden Wiener Verkehrs und nimmt ihn zum Anlass, um über den sozialen Verkehr von Kindern mit Tieren nachzudenken.