Encountering Anthropomorphism: Editorial

The term ‘anthropomorphism’ relates to a complex of interesting and mutually contradictory ideas, which this issue aims to explore. On the one hand, it is used to refer to something that resembles a human, and, on the other hand, it refers to our natural tendency to read human characteristics in the non-human object or animal. Bruno Latour complicates things further when he insists that ‘anthropos and morphos together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans’ (Latour 2009: 237). The articles in this issue address the subject of anthropomorphism in its multiplicity, with different conceptions of the term coexisting in the same volume, and we hope that the tensions between them will make the issue more than the sum of its parts. The purpose of this introduction, then, is not to argue for one conception of anthropomorphism over another, but to present a series of encounters with it and to tease out conceptual threads that connect the varying contributions.