In Shaving the Beasts, Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, Hartigan, a multispecies anthropologist, expands the boundaries of traditional ethnography by studying the behavior of wild horses subjected to a centuries-old tradition in Spain known as rapa das bestas, or “shaving the beasts.” Hartigan's focus on horses as ethnographic subjects reflects a growing interest in animal-centric ethnographic research.
In the mountains of Galicia, Spain, Hartigan introduces some foundational principles of horse ethology and identifies individual horses and horse bands in order to study their social interactions. Hartigan's fieldwork demonstrates that horses are social animals with a complex and sophisticated means of communicating. Hartigan witnesses gestures, interactions, and a “panoply of microaggressions and affiliations” in the field that establish rules, social boundaries, and rank to create stability and avoid conflict (pp. 154–155). Significantly, he finds that mares are much more involved in maintaining the social order, notwithstanding the traditional focus...
