Professor Julien Dugnoille

I am anthropologist (DPhil Oxford) of human-animal interactions. For nearly a decade, much of my work has been dedicated to examining the place of dogs and cats in South Korean urban society and culture, a particularly complex and sensitive research topic that touches on mutliple social injustices (animal, gender and racial injustice), cultural relativism and imperialism, the use of animals in national identity rhetoric, the legitimacy of food taboos, speciesism, the question of violence within the debates between welfarist and abolitionist approaches to human-animal interactions, racialisation, and ontological perfusion in urban marketplaces.

My second book is a monograph, Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities, based on extensive fieldwork in the greater Seoul area, published with Purdue University Press in 2021.

Abstract
Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities shows that though dogs and cats are consumed in the millions each year, they are recipients of both cruelty and care in a very unique way compared to other animal species in South Korean society. The anti-imperialist and postcolonial stances associated with the consumption of dogs and cats in South Korea are oversimplistic. Stereotypes by societies that do not eat these animals overshadow the various ways in which South Korean citizens interact with them, including companionship. In fact, many dogs and cats go from companion to livestock, and from livestock to companion, demonstrating that the relationships with these creatures are not only complex, but also fluid. The trajectories of the lives of dogs and cats are never linear. In that sense, individual dogs and cats in South Korea are itinerant animals navigating an exchange system based on culture, economics, and politics. With nuance and cultural understanding, Dugnoille tells the complicated stories of these animals in South Korea, as well as the humans who commoditize and singularize them.

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My third book is a volume edited with Elizabeth Vander Meer where we, alongside other scholars of human-animal interactions (Bisenieks, Linton, Meijer, Pouillard and Ward), explore resistance and transformation in animal commodifcation. This book was published with Brill in 2022: Animals matter: Resistance and transformation in animal commodifcation

Abstract

In this book, we reclaim the term “resistance” by exploring how animals can “resist” their commodification through blocking and allowing human intervention in their lives. In the cases explored in this volume, animals lead humans to rethink their relationship to animals by either blocking and/or allowing human commodification. In some cases, this results in greater control exercised on the animals, while in others, animals’ resistance also poses a series of complex moral questions to human commodifiers, sometimes to the point of transforming humans into active members of resistance movements on behalf of animals.

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My first book was published in French and addresses my early work on desire and anonymity in the work of Rilke, Blanchot and Nietzsche. This book was published with L'Harmattan.

Abstract

La poésie est une espèce d'évasion. On peut ajouter à cette affirmation d'Artaud que l'expérience poétique engage celui qui s'y consacre à un abandon radical, celui de son propre moi. La création devient l'ennemie, un obstacle douloureux à la réalisation de soi, et pousse le créateur à préparer l'avènement de sa propre mort, une fois son oeuvre devenue indépendante.

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MAJOR PUBLICATIONS (SELECTED)

• Dugnoille, J., Keck, F., and Seo-Plu, M. (forthcoming). Two dogs with one stone: Urban markets and the dog meat trade in South Korea during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social Anthropology.
• Dugnoille, J. 2023, Blurring boundaries: The significance of horse and bull iconography in Occitan and Provençal cemeteries. Anthrozoös. DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2023.2192576
• Dugnoille, J. and Vander Meer, E. 2022. Animals matter: Resistance and transformation in animal commodification. Leiden: Brill.
• Dugnoille, J. 2021. Dogs and cats in South Korea: Itinerant commodities. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.
• Dugnoille, J. 2019. ‘I heard a dog cry’: More-than-human interrelatedness, ethnicity and zootherapy in South Korean civil society discourse about dog meat consumption. Ethnography, SAGE Publications.
• Dugnoille, J. 2018. To eat or not to eat: Symbolic value of dog meat and human-dog companionship in contemporary South Korea. Food, Culture and Society, 21(2).
• Dugnoille, J. 2005. Le désir d'anonymat chez Blanchot, Rilke et Nietzsche. Paris: L'harmattan.

Biography:

After finishing my BA in Philosophy at the Sorbonne (and working in the theatre industry on the side), I studied for an MA in ethnology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). I then moved to Oxford to get first an MSc in Visual Anthropology and then a DPhil in Anthropology. During my studies at Oxford, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago under a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Korea Foundation Fellow. I joined Exeter in 2015 as a Lecturer in Anthropology.

Research supervision:

Research expertise: Human-animal interactons, South Korea, 'wetmarkets', urban anthropology, dogs, cats, companion animals, 'pets', meat, slaughter, animal death, cemeteries, commodification, resistance, intersectionality, France, Critical Animal Studies

Regional expertise: East Asia (especially South Korea), France, the UK

I welcome enquiries from prospective MA, MPhil and PhD students. Some of my students work on slaughterhouse visibility in the UK, Ireland and Denmark, the commodification of lions in French and Belgian circuses, the phenomenology of disgust in a Londonian butchery, the inclusion of nonhuman animals in a concept of peace, neo-paganism, etc.