Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Cambridge)
Learning From The Herd?: Ethics and Intercorporeality in Equine-Assisted Therapy
Horses are being harnessed for a new sort of work, as therapists’ assistants. Within equine-assisted therapy programs, the nature of horses – as herd and prey animals - is thought to make them particularly apt for therapeutic interaction, because of their extreme responsivity and inherent sociality. But in this talk, I’ll resist essentialising equine nature, and instead I'll consider the moral and political affordances offered by the concepts of ‘herd’ and ‘prey’. I’ll show that it isn’t horses that make people ‘better’, but the moral environment within which these human-horse encounters take place. This is important, because it is not only those who run equine-assisted therapy programmes, but anthropologists too, who imagine there is moral force in what we might call ‘intercorporeality’ – the idea that subjectivity exists in embodied responsiveness with others. I’ll show that it is important to retain a distinction between the intercorporeal forms of ethical life on the one hand, and varied ethical values ascribed to ideas akin to intercorporeality, on the other.
Lecture theatre A, Arts School is located here: https://map.cam.ac.uk/Lecture+Theatre+A#52.203448,0.119533,17