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Shanklin, writing a review of the available literature in 1985, argued the area offered up great potential for anthropological inquiry, but anthropologists must depart from their opposing commitments to either utilitarian views of human-animal relationships, such as that exemplified by Marvin Harris (1974) or to the symbolic approaches taken by theoreticians like Mary Douglas (1957, 1973, 1990). While Levi-Strauss’ (1963) approach to understanding animal-human relationships could not be adequately described as part of the symbolic approach, it also encapsulated the tension of dualism in the animal-human area of anthropological inquiry—animals could be either good to think with or good to eat.
The tension between the sustenance and the symbol approaches seemed to have been resolved in part by the attention that anthropologists paid to power and disempowerment, as well as historical, cultural, and other changes that characterise the postmodern world. Many of the old binaries that anthropologists observed have become increasingly difficult to maintain in the contemporary world, where many boundaries that once seemed durable have crumpled and/or have been crossed. Martin (1995) argued that interest in animal-human relationships is generated and sustained largely by the varieties of boundary crossing that happen in the contemporary world, such as that between machines and people and between society and nature, as well as between humans and animals. Such intersections involve conceptual movement and, very often, involve motion too; certain human expansions into places brought people and animals into close proximity, and certain other expansions, such as technology and ideas, brought people into symbiotic relationships with simple and complex machines. Significant among the conceptual movements was that which had dispensed with the priorly assumed universality of culture and nature divides, which would work in all societies to separate humans from animals. This strict and rigid division was revealed by anthropological pursuits not to be so universal (Rival, 1996; Howell, 1996) and to be wholly subject to nuanced rearrangement in a moving and changing world (Descola, 1994; Descola & Palsson, 1996; Noske, 1997).