The Global Pigeon

About this book

The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance – if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the “pigeon wars” waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa.

Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and London’s Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls “the social experience of animals”, Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.
 

Contents

Introduction: Experiencing the City through the Quintessential Urban Bird

Part 1: The Pedestrian Pigeon
1 Feeding the Pigeons: Sidewalk Sociability in Greenwich Village
2 “Do Not Feed the Pigeons”: Cultural Heritage and the Politics of Place in Venice and London

Part 2: The Totemic Pigeon
3 New York’s Rooftop Pigeon Flyers: Crafting Nature and Anchoring the Self
4 The Turkish Pigeon Caretakers of Berlin: Primordial Ties in a Migrant Community
5 Joey’s Brooklyn Pet Shop: Cosmopolitan Ties in a Changing Urban Landscape

Part 3: Deep Play
6 The Bronx Homing Pigeon Club: Nature, Nurture, and the Enchantment of “the Poor Man’s Horse Racing”
7 South Africa’s Million Dollar Pigeon Race: Rationalizing and Globalizing “the Pigeon Game”
8 Conclusion: Changing Ecologies

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Biography

Colin Jerolmack is an assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU, where he also teaches courses on human-animal relations. An urban sociologist by training, he started writing about pigeons after one defecated on him and he realized that the pigeon is the quintessential city bird – but one that many people love to hate. After learning about the working-class male subculture of pigeon racing in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Jerolmack decided to embark on a three-year, three-continent ethnographic study of how our complex and contradictory relations with this animal shape our sense of who we are, our social relations, and our experience of the city.