Animal Interface: The Generosity of Domestication (original) (raw)
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Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-species Relationships, 2018
In the past few decades, we have seen crisis after crisis in the world of agriculture and animal farming, leading us more than ever to question the nature and meaning of the links that unite us with domestic plants and animals. Mad-cow disease, bird flu, scandals around the maltreatment of animals in industrial farming and slaughterhouses, widespread worries concerning pesticides, endocrine disruptors, GMOs: the very conditions in which we produce our food and manage live raise questions and doubts.
THE THREE FACES OF DOMESTICATION
Walking among Ancient Trees: Studies in Honour of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki on the 45th Anniversary of their Research Collaboration, 2022
Russell, Nerissa. 2022. "The three faces of domestication." In Walking among Ancient Trees: Studies in Honour of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki on the 45th Anniversary of their Research Collaboration, edited by Michał Grygiel and Peter J. Obst, 671-681. Łódź: Fundacja Badań Archeologicznych Imienia Profesora Konrada Jażdżewskiego. Animal domestication has proven to be a complex topic, difficult to define and with many competing ideas regarding its origins. Some of the difficulty arises from its dual bio-cultural properties, involving both human-animal social relationships and genetic and phenotypic changes to the animals. Scholars have focused on different aspects of the domestication relationship, emphasizing variously physical or behavioral changes in the animals, control mechanisms used by humans, and the conversion of animals to property. Here I propose another way of classifying models of domestication: according to the species that acts as the explicit or implicit type specimen of the domestic animal. For simplicity's sake, I will limit myself to the three taxa that have inspired the most modeling: the dog, the sheep (here taken to stand for sheep and goats), and cattle. Further, I will suggest that while many scholars have generalized their model of domestication from their favorite species to all animals, it is more useful to recognize that there are at least three distinct routes to domestication. While there are some similarities among these various paths, particularly in the biological and social consequences for both humans and animals, many features are distinctive, especially the motivations for domestication.
The wild side of animal domestication
This paper examines not the process but the concept of nonhuman animal domestication. Domestication involves both biological and cultural components. Creating a category of domestic animals means constructing and crossing the boundaries between human and animal, culture and nature. The concept of domestication thus structures the thinking both of researchers in the present and of domesticators and herders in the past. Some have argued for abandoning the notion of domestication in favor of a continuum of human-nonhuman animal relationships. Although many human-animal relationships cannot be neatly pigeonholed as wild or domestic, this paper contends that the concept of domestication retains its utility.There is a critical distinction between animals as a resource and animals as property. Domestication itself had profound consequences for the societies and worldview of the domesticators and their descendents. In addition to the material effects of animal wealth, domestic animals provide both a rich source of metaphor and a model of domination that can be extended to humans.
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Progress in Human Geography, 1997
Against a backdrop of growing interest in animal geographies and the genetic engineering of species, this article critically examines the process of animal domestication. To date, the social selection and breeding of animals have received little deconstructive effort from human scientists. The article begins by reviewing earlier schools of geographic thought on domestication, including the work of Carl Sauer, for whom domestication was a transhistorical process of evolution's unfolding. In working away from that perspective, I historicize animal domestication within a narrative politics of ideas about human uniqueness, savagery and civilization through which the process was conceived and conducted from at least classical times. The article thus develops a cultural critique of technologies that have been fundamental to the transformation of landscapes. Integral to the story are concepts of ‘domus’ and ‘agrios’, the ‘bringing in’ of ‘the wild’, and associated notions of containmen...