Blogging situated emotions in human-horse relationships

In contemporary equestrian culture, individual human-horse relationships are often based on communication, knowing each other, and doing things together. Through shared experiences and activities in everyday life, the relationship can be seen as a process of becoming with the significant other, in which both human and horse are eventually transformed. In this article, I discuss Finnish horse owner's blogs, from 2009 to 2012, as narrative performances of situated human-horse relationships, as interpreted by the writer and expressed in a way that both reflects the material reality of the relationship and follows the culturally shared idea of living with a horse. I ask how emotions and experiences are shared between the human and the horse, and how challenges and conflicts are experienced and managed relative to their spatial context. According to the analysis of the blogs, human-horse relationships are performed as narratives of shared emotional and embodied experiences situated in places that carry specific meanings. The rules regulating both the emotions felt toward the horse and their display affect the ways in which the horse's actions and emotions are interpreted differently in each place. Thus, place comes to be part of how the relationship is constructed.