Domestication has captured the imagination of anthropologists, archeologists and historians for more than a century, but what questions did it respond to? What sort of orderings did it generate? And what can we learn from domestication in the Arctic and elsewhere?
The CAS project ‘Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene’ challenges domesticaton as a foundational narrative of human civilization. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, our aim was to rethink hegemonic narratives about domestication and to explore domestication a set of ongoing practices involving mutual, co-dependent relations between humans and animals and humans and plants. Questioning the notion of the domus, engaging the idea of more-than human sociality, and challenging the distinctions between natural history and cultural history, we explored alternative models and narratives of relational practices that can sustain human life on our planet.