An Ethnography of Pet Psychics

Abstract

My thesis is a joint thesis between the creative writing department and the anthropology department. For my creative writing thesis, I wrote a novel called The Girl Who Listened to Animals, the story of a schizophrenic girl who believes she possesses the ability to communicate with animals. Specifically, the main character believes she is the translator across animal species and thus faces pressure to abandon her conspecifics and aid an interspecies revolution against humans. In her view, this is a centuries-old war—only, humans have not noticed because they have been winning. To inform this work, my ethnography is a study of career-history self-accounts and beliefs about human/animal relationships among people who call themselves pet psychics or animal whisperers. In a world where an increasingly separatist view between urbanity/civilization and nature is held by the general public, I hope that this ethnography can illuminate the ways in which the lines between humans and other animals are constantly shifting and socially constructed. This ethnography also complicates the notion that animals are merely a symbol of or a vehicle for meaning and human-to-human interaction.