Introduction

Alice's epiphany cuts to the heart of Foucault's approach to the inter-relationship between knowledge and power, or between discourse and practice, which author use in this chapter to examine the construction of hegemonic humannonhuman interactions in contemporary Western societies. This chapter describes the inter-relation of: How discourses conceptualize other animals as particular kinds of entities; how other animals are physically positioned in different spaces and subjected to specific practices. It focuses how children are socialized into reproducing these discourses and practices, and thereby how they come to shape our experience of ourselves as human', as people grow up in the contemporary West. The chapter emphasises problematizing majority human discourses and practices about other animals. It sketches out majority discourses and practices that largely govern the interface between human and nonhuman animals in contemporary Western societies. The chapter elaborates a sociological key to reading the map, based on Michel Foucault's writings on power-knowledge and Max Weber's typology of social action.