Tamar Mckee

Biography

Tamar V.S. McKee is a cultural anthropologist specializing in how human-animal relationships critically shape communities grappling with development, ecotourism, sports industry, natural resource extraction, and cultural survival. She specializes in understanding change and stasis as they manifest in art, artifact, everyday relations, and historical moments of rupture and recuperation. Inspired by postcolonial and posthumanist perspectives, McKee is fundamentally interested in questions about what it means – and costs – to be human and humane in the Anthropocene. Her research specialties have included the persistence, persecution, and politics of Tibetan cultural identity as evidenced through globalized contemporary art movements and indigenous horse festivals and, most recently, how the famed horse culture of Bluegrass Kentucky is morally, ethically, and economically produced and challenged by the emerging practice of rescuing Thoroughbred ex-racehorses – particularly as it occurs in relation to human incarceration, animal rights movements, and globally faltering economic times.

Research Interest

Anthropology