The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds

Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law

by Thom van Dooren

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Birds, Nature, Anthropology, Biology, Environment

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2019

Reviews

[Claudia Campeanu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just loved this book. It sits somewhere in the space between environmental ethics, anthropology, and ethology. It is written delicately, with honesty, empathy and intelligence and it gave me hope for a world in which sharing the world with these wonderful birds won't be such an absurd and impossible dream. I read it in a strange moment (this is what attracted me to it), when some people in my neighborhood organized to ask the municipality to budget for a project that would find efficient ways to kick the roosting colony of crows out of the nearby park. The normalized + greenwashed hatred of hundreds of people made me lose faith in my fellow humans and gave me nightmares, literally. This book gave me much comfort and hope and helped me better understand these people and also my own (unarticulated) feelings. I read the other reviews and I don't understand why people don't read the book description and a review or two before spending 20 euros on a book. Yes, if you are expecting a National Geographic type of article on crows, you will get disappointed. Otherwise, with a bit of curiosity and probably a bit of background in philosophy or anthropology, you will get a lot out of this book. (I didn't find it hard to read, and English is not even my native language.)

[kmarch · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are looking into the complex world of crows and crow behavior, this book is a good enough place to start. However, this book is extremely wordy and hard to read. The author puts too many complex words in where there is no need for them. It muddied his argument because I was too focused on trying to understand what all the words meant. There is also too much repetition--this book could have been extremely condensed. Each chapter is a repeated question, offering no real opinion or insight from a clear researcher of these crows who could have offered some valuable personal input. It became hard for me to read very quickly and extremely boring to come back to. While it's not horrible, there are other books about crows that have better arguments, better structures, and are better written.

[Albert Faber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magificent exploration of what it means to live (and die) in the shared worlds of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene may be characterized in many ways, not the least as a world where species intimately meet, interact and share their spaces with humans. In many places this multispecies interaction is between crows and humans. Van Dooren travels the world to explore these interactions for this thoroughly sincere and empathic anthropological study (or 'field philosophy' as he calls it) into a multispecies ethics.

A multispecies ethics is one that takes seriously the fact that all life, including human life, occurs within fundamental and constitutive relationships with other kinds of being, living or not. Van Dooren centers his exploration on the concept of 'worlding well', i.e. an ethics that becomes the work of crafting flourishing worlds, that take account of histories as well as imagined futures,

Van Dooren examines the shared worlds of crows and humans through five key concept: community, inheritance, hospitality, recognition and hope. Each is a mode of worlding 'a space of possibility for understanding and enacting worlds'. Van Dooren manages to ground these abstract concept in the vivid reality of his meetings with both humans and crows, which makes this a deep and very enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Encore another delightful field philosophy, multispecies ethnography book by van Dooren, this time about crows -see previously snails and albatros. I found it to be as well-written as the others, perhaps not as compelling yet surely complete, as it can't be doubted the compromise the author has taken to tell us extinction stories around the world. This ethnography is enriched by his philosophical insights on the matter, taking Bird Rose and Haraway as standards, and this time using too some of Despret and Morizot -which I particularly appreciated. In the end, I think that the most philosophical one was the first I read, Flight ways, so go ahead with that one if you're interested in extinction theory; the more narrow in spacetime terms is, for sure, the one about snails and Hawai'i, tremendously interesting. This one is, perhaps, the weaker to me, but still worth a read and easy understandable. I'm sure his oeuvre will bring many other people to work in the extinction studies in the very near future, bringing hope to this thick, never-ending killer present.

[Krysta Halye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially picked this book up since I have enjoyed reading about crows lately. And like the author, I feel like crows are watching me, but it is probably that they are noticing me notice them.

This book is primarily about crow ecology but also about the role people have played in the local extinction of crows (and other animals) in certain parts of the world. It talks about ways that people are trying to live with or without these crows.

The last section is about hope for the future for everyone despite its uncertainty because of climate change.

[Marycha 🪐 · Rating 5 out of 5]

May be a bit of a tough read (english isn’t my native language) but the most interesting book i’ve read in my life, by far.