ABSTRACT
If horses are never quite fully wild or tame, but are always becoming through a process of social agency, then what kinds of concepts help humans to make their (un)stable relations with horses meaningful? In this chapter, we consider how horses’ social agency has impacted what they mean to us and how they figure in our symbolic imaginations. In particular, we explore the archetypal symbolic construction of horses as noble, and suggest that nobility functions to make the relationship between wild and tame comfortable. Through an exploration of mounted bullfighting in Southern Spain, we consider one equestrian activity where horses are required to perform what can be seen as hyper-cultural as well as hyper-natural behaviours, but ultimately at the behest of a human. Nobility can thus refer to the ways in which humans and horses are both exceptional agents, but who can also find themselves subordinated to human and equine others. The idea of the noble horse thus permits us to see equine agency – or at least to see it in a certain light. Noble horses are the production of unstable relations because our relations with horses can never be stable.
