Pigeon Stories : Review of Colin Jeromack's The Global Pigeon

• Like us, some  kinds of animals require passports to enable movements  across national borders. Passports tell all  kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in  myriad ways. But what is a passport — human or nonhuman? What kind of symbolic,  legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work  do they “do”?  The article departs  from autoethnographical notes in a European context, and discusses these  questions in dialogue with animal studies literature and actor network theory.So, what kinds of stories do passports tell? In the article,  the authors consider first what role  passports serve, and then analyze their function, in various forms of  surveillance — around disease and global bio-security, around mobility/travel,  and around identities. Finally, some issues raised about technologies of identification,  and what these say about identity and belonging, particularly with respect to  human-animal relationships, are discussed. For all that these passports  signify human-animal separation, they also signify the shared, mobile  enmeshment of humans and animals in citizenship as well as social life.

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