The Global Pigeon

“Colin Jerolmack’s book is a wonderful celebration of the ways some people interact with pigeons.”– “Times Higher Education”

“I gladly assert that this innovative monograph belongs to the small and excellent body of work that carries urban ethnography into the twenty first century, and this is no small feat at all.”– “City & Community”

“This book makes very enjoyable reading due to its well-balanced combination of vivid ethnographic prose and jargon-free theoretical interpretation. It is highly recommended for lecturers and students in anthropology interested in urban ethnography, human-animal relations, and cultures of masculinity.”– “Social Anthropology”

“This is a scholarly but highly accessible account of some of the ways in which human beings interact with pigeons. Jerolmack draws on an impressive breadth of ethnographic research conducted across several years and three continents, and constructs a sustained theoretical argument calling for the integration of studies of human-animal interaction into the sociological canon, and polemicising convincingly with anthropocentric as well as natureromanticising accounts of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.”– “European Journal of Sociology”

“This is the most important book yet written about human and animal interaction. It is full of surprising discoveries. Colin Jerolmack shows why the topic is important: it reveals what it is like to be human.”–Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

“The Global Pigeon combines detailed and sustained observation of the kind ordinarily focused on one research site with a global reach and fieldwork done in a variety of places, all over the world. The overall result is an intellectually satisfying book that helps us see complexity where we wouldn’t have otherwise, and gives us interesting reading about a world of interaction that goes on around us all the time.”
–Howard S. Becker “author of Writing for Social Scientists”

“The Global Pigeon effortlessly straddles the literature on urban community and environmental sociology, as well as speaking to debates about identity and identity-formation and the literature about race, ethnicity, and inequality. Its ability to bridge different literatures will, I think, make it extremely widely read and probably widely imitated.”
–Iddo Tavory “New School for Social Research”