Plenty of people keep birds as pets and insist that birds are every bit as responsive as mammalian pets. Wiley describes at length the folk traditions she evolved with her rattlesnakes. Zoologists have confessed to me pet relationships with amphibia and insects. Surely humans cannot have a folk relationship with an inanimate object. But the reality of this social scene is located in more than just the mind of the human.
Solitary play offers no special problem.
Certainly I hope we can set aside some cultural assumptions about the boundaries between human and non-human animals and entertain a larger domain for folklore. Most importantly, I intend this exercise to draw attention to an epistemological error that Bateson thought was bad for our science and bad for our lives. Bateson warned us to give up conceptions of the autonomous, intentional self and to begin to think entirely in terms of systems. Whatever else it is, folklore is a feature of systems, and we ought not let our human hubris make us forgetful of this fact. University of California Davis, California References Cited Abrahams, R. D. 1981.