Ambivalence is one of the central themes running through the literature focused on human relationships with nonhuman animals. This ambivalence hinges on the dominant dichotomy in our culture which casts animals as either objects to be used or beings to be interacted with. As objects, animals are killed for sport, eaten as food, bought and sold as consumer goods, and used as equipment in scientific experiments. As individual beings, animals are loved, provided with medical care, interacted with as friends, and incorporated into the home as members of the family. To a considerable degree this object/being dichotomy is a key theme running through the articles in this special issue of Society and Animals.

Given that the authors of the included papers are active in the field of consumer research or sociologists concerned with marketing and leisure activities, one might reasonably expect to find discussions that cast animals predominantly as consumer products, the focal point of ancillary consumption, or accoutrements to leisure activities. This would likely be the case were the authors conventional consumer researchers or typically positivistic sociologists. While such consumer behavior related terms such as "product involvement" and "dispossession" are used at times, these papers demonstrate the relatively recent (in the case of consumer research) and ongoingly oppositional (in the case of sociology) emphasis on interpretive analyses grounded in intimate involvement with the people and phenomena of interest.

The "interpretive revolution" began in consumer research around the mid-1980s with the publication of several seminal papers dealing with semiotics (Holbrook & Grayson, 1986; Mick, 1986), projective techniques (Rook, 1985), and anthropological methods (Hirschman, 1985). These qualitative approaches to data-gathering and interpretation had rarely been utilized in the field prior to that time, because consumer researchers had relied primarily upon laboratory experiments and large-scale surveys to generate data and test hypotheses.

The entry of interpretivism brought with it not only novel methodologies, but initiated a general questioning of the positivistic tenets underlying the discipline and the topics upon which consumer researchers chose to focus their attention. Prior to the mid-1980s, consumer researchers had plied their trade by focusing primarily upon topics having strategic value to marketers. For example, extensive investigations were undertaken to consumers' responses to the advertising, pricing, packaging, and distribution of products. These studies were conducted with the intention of assisting marketers to formulate more effective strategies for attracting consumers. Interpretivists challenged this pro-marketing orientation by introducing values more consistent with those found in conventional academic sociology or anthropology. That is, they emphasized that researchers should conduct inquiries that help to achieve understanding and improvement of the human condition rather than assist business in its efforts to manipulate consumers. Thus, not only methodology but also political philosophy often distinguish interpretive consumer researchers from their positivist colleagues (Bristor & Fischer, 1993; Hirschman, 1993).

The decade of the 1980s also produced a paradigmatic challenge to traditional consumer research conceptions regarding the nature of consumption. Arising as it had as a stepchild of marketing, consumer research had initially focused on the tangible goods being sold in the marketplace. This was modified during the 1970s to incorporate the marketing of services such as air travel and restaurant meals, as well. However, in 1982 two articles (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982) challenged this product-oriented focus and argued instead for directing attention primarily upon the consumer's experience of consumption. Termed the "experiential approach," this paradigm has been substantially broadened over the last decade and a half to now include both existentialist and phenomenological orientations to consumption (Thompson, Locander & Pollio, 1989; 1994). These revisions and extensions of the study of consumption are reflected in the papers included in this collection.

All of the papers here share a basic premise; social reality is composed of cultural "webs of meaning" (Geertz, 1973) which are creatively shared, shaped, and represented. Since this lived interpersonal reality is the foundation upon which everyday actions are grounded, an adequate understanding of human behavior must begin, therefore, with an exploration of how people define the situations, selves, and others that compose the social worlds they inhabit. This goal, in turn, is best achieved through some form of direct experience with the situated emotions, activities, relationships, and concerns people encounter as they live their lives.

The most immediate source of this type of data is the disciplined and analytic examination of one's own personal experience. As their primary data source, Gillespie, Leffler, and Lerner use an "auto- ethnographic" approach (Hayano, 1979) to investigate the ways in which continuously being with dogs as committed participants in dog sports shapes one's interactions within and experience of public settings. Similarly, Holbrook employs an introspective approach as the source of insight into the daily experience of "consuming" intimate experience with a companion cat.

Direct ethnographic involvement with the members of a social group as they go about their lives in their "home territories" is another traditional means whereby researchers may acquire rich information about the activities and perspectives of others. As a regular participant in the situation, the investigator shares in the experiences and definitions of the actors in the field. The discussions of cockfighters by Darden and Worden, relationships with companion animals by Belk, and dog sports by Gillespie, Leffler, and Lerner are partially grounded on information gained through this approach.

While yet another step removed from the immediate lived realities of social actors, flexible depth interview conversations and focused essays also provide excellent means of acquiring insight into people's orientations, experiences, and activities. Belk, and Stephens and Hill use such accounts (Scott & Lyman, 1968) to guide their understandings of, respectively, pet metaphors and the owner's experience surrounding loss of a companion animal.

While these techniques differ in the immediacy of their connection to the direct experiencing of the phenomenon of concern, they share the advantage of providing rich, emotionally focused, qualitative data. Conventional social scientific methods such as requiring that people do things in the peculiar situation of an experimental setting or asking strangers to respond to structured questions in person or on the phone have the advantage of being convenient for the investigator while providing bits of information that are easy to manipulate statistically. However, these approaches fail to offer much insight into the complex process whereby people make sense of their experience and construct their actions. The moving, funny, empathetic, and immediately recognizable discussions included in this collection bear witness to the advantages of building our understanding of human relationships with animals on the rich and messy foundation of qualitative data.

Further, the interpretive approach that orients studies such as those contained in this special issue provide a foundation for seeing animals and our interactions with them in a more humane light. Instead of casting animals as objects that behave rather than act and who are manipulated to produce scientific data, qualitative investigations of human-animal interactions portray animals as individual beings. As such, animals are partners with us in the intimate and involving relationships that constitute everyday social life.

In "Metaphoric Relationships with Pets" Belk continues the exploration of the relationship between what people have and how they are defined by themselves and others, initiated in his seminal article "Possessions and the Extended Self" (Belk, 1988). Here he acknowledges the dichotomous social definitions surrounding animals (object vs. being, wild vs. tame, nature vs. culture, possession vs. loved-one) while focusing on the dominant metaphors people employ in thinking of and talking about companion animals. Belk understands the self as a social construction that is grounded in the responses of the "others" people encounter as they move from interaction to interaction. Possessions (including companion animals) both express and extend the social self.

Animals add to and enhance our skills, expand situations in which we can achieve status, heighten our feelings of pride, and so forth. As possessions, animals augment positive self definitions. According to Belk they are disempowered as "pets" and from that status are dressed up, neutered, subjected to "mastery," and otherwise placed in the position of enhancing the relative feelings of worth and control cherished by their human associates.

Companion animals, alternatively or at the same time, are anthropomorphized and defined as friends and family members. In this social position they are named, confided in, lavished with affection, and incorporated into familial rituals. In the long run, Belk speculates, this oppositional definition of companion animals adds more to their appeal than it detracts from our interactions and relationships with them. The ambivalences we encounter in our social experience of animals hinge on the conflicts we feel with our own animal natures. It is this animality, about which our nonhuman companions regularly remind us, that lends some measure of interest to lives constrained by culture.

Holbrook's uniquely personal and amusingly insightful account of his experiences with his cat Rocky may seem rather eccentric in a collection of serious social scientific analyses of the consumptive elements of human interactions with animals. While there are stylistically related discussions in the animal- human interaction literature (most notably Shapiro's [1990, in press]) phenomenologically focused descriptions of his interactions with his dog), such intensely personalistic journal articles as Holbrook's are rare.

To some degree it is appropriate to see this piece within the context of the critique of traditional styles of doing and presenting qualitative research prompted by the rise of postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives in the social sciences (Clough, 1991; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). While the postmodern critique has generated considerable controversy in some circles (Dawson & Prus 1995; Sanders, 1995), one of its basic points is that traditional modes of sociological presentation are burdened by a stultifying tone in which the "author-ity" of the writer is maintained by her or his purposive assumption of an objective stance. The solution, the postmodern critic suggests, is to more directly situate the writer in the work and enhance the playful, creative, literary elements of the text. In heeding this call, Holbrook offers an entertaining and illuminating narrative account (Richardson, 1995) of the experience of learning to live with the nonhuman other.

As an established consumer researcher, Holbrook maintains that an understanding of consumer behavior can be achieved through attending to one's daily experience living with a cat. He uses observations of Rocky at play and during his interactions with the human members of his family to highlight consumption-related issues such as the purchase of allergy medication, the acquisition of toys and instruction books, and the seeking of veterinary services. This, in turn, leads to insights into Rocky's personality, likes and dislikes, ability to manipulate others for his own ends, and involvement in mutually constructed ritual interactions. The family's consumption of cat-focused experiences and products is shaped significantly by the fact that Rocky is an individual with considerable social skills.

"Safe in Unsafe Places..." by Gillespie, Leffler, and Lerner revolves around the casting of dogs as "hobby objects." As such, they are key players in the world of leisure separated from the everyday, necessary, pecuniary world of work. In a discussion based largely on their personal experiences, the authors demonstrate how committed involvement in the "passionate avocation" of dog sports shapes the time commitments, social identities, self definitions, evaluations of physical settings, and social interactions of devotees. Being in the company of dogs transforms their evaluations of safety and danger inherent in physical settings and social encounters. Sometimes normally "safe" situations are problematized by the presence of their dogs. Alternatively, their canine travelling companions enhance feelings of power and control in situations where, as women in public, they would typically feel threatened. This delightful narrative illustrates the key point that, as culturally defined objects and relationally defined beings, dogs act to both facilitate desired forms of social exchange and deflect unwanted public encounters.

In "The Dispossession of Animal Companions...," Stephens and Hill use an interesting body of textual data to offer testimony to the significance of intimate relationships with animals and the emotional impact of their loss. Examination of epitaphs in a pet cemetery lead the authors to identify three interrelated categories of intimacy - Love and Friendship, Joy in Life versus Sorrow in Death, and Pets as Family Members. Written accounts by pet owners supplement these themes by providing information about the sorrow of unexpected death and the rituals involved in interring the body and bidding goodbye to the departed animal. The discussion demonstrates and enriches one of the key points made by Belk in his paper. Companion animals act as extensions of their caretakers' social selves and, consequently, their demise is experienced as a painful loss of self. The practical implication of their findings is that pet cemeteries, veterinary clinics, and other organizations that have something to do with companion animal death could do much to ease the sorrow owners encounter around the experience of pet loss by providing information and emotional support.

The final paper, "Marketing Deviance: The Selling of Gamefowl," by Darden and Worden focuses on a form of animal-human relationship that many readers of this journal are likely to find rather distasteful. The authors examine the marketing of cockfighting paraphernalia - the most important item being the birds themselves - and the selling of interest in the "sport" to potential or new participants. Conventional models of marketing are, they maintain, of limited utility in charting the course of this particular marketing process because of the deviant character of the core activity. The fact that in most locations cockfighting is regarded as, at least, a "folk crime" and those involved run the risk of being the focus of some type of formal social reaction precipitates problems for "cockers." They must acquire the necessary materials, raise and train the birds, pass along subcultural knowledge, and engage in the focal activity while attempting to avoid social and legal sanction. While the deviant nature of cockfighting generates problems for participants, the authors observe that it also offers the essential rewards derived from involvement in a socially disvalued activity. The potential for negative response enhances the cohesion of the cockfighting fraternity and those who are avidly involved in this unique "taste public" (Gans, 1974) have grounds for seeing themselves as specially knowledgeable and as "outlaws" in the eyes of members of conventional society.

While cockers are considerably different in their orientations to and relationships with their animals from the other people discussed in the papers in this collection (they do not love the birds and rarely give them names, for example), they do have one important similarity. The social identities and self definitions of cockers, like those of the pet owners described in the other pieces, are intimately bound up in their relationships with their animals. The overarching point in all of these discussions is that through a richly evidenced and creatively interpretive examination of peoples' associations with animals - be they regarded as possessions or companions - we may gain considerable insight into how living together with nonhuman others shapes our emotional experiences and understandings of who we are.

Notes

1. Correspondence should be sent to Clinton R. Sanders, Department of Sociology, Box U-68, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269.

2. Here we are using the flexible definition of "family" proposed by Gubrium and Holstein (1990). "Family provides a reference point that is commonly shared and tacitly agreed upon, against which other relationships and behaviors are interpreted" (p. 139).

3. The article by Darden and Worden, unlike the other discussions included here, tends to present the animals of interest - fighting cocks - predominantly as objects rather than beings. This is because the perspective of those who use these animals as key items in "sport" and routinely confront problems of acquiring, evaluating, and competing with them is the dominant focus of the paper.

4. Peneff's (1988) observational study provides persuasive evidence that, even when involved in a highly structured data collection endeavor, survey interviewers employ the flexibility and social skills typically thought to be characteristic of interpretive ethnographic work. He maintains that the interviewers' data gathering task would be impossible were they to adhere rigidly to the formal, bureaucratic requirements of the survey administrators.

5. For more detailed arguments in this vein, see Lofland, 1976; Prus, 1996; Young, 1981.

6. The concept of anthropomorphism has generated considerable contemporary debate. For a perspective on the opposing positions in this controversy see Fisher, 1990 and Kennedy, 1992.

7. For related discussions of cockfighters as "deviants," the rationales they construct to legitimate their disvalued sporting interests, and their attempts to ease the formal social reaction directed against them, see Hawley (1993), McCaghy and Neal (1994), and Orihuela and Solano (1995). The classic discussion is, of course, the analysis of the Balinese cockfight offered by Clifford Geertz (1993, pp. 412-453).

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