Following Human-Cattle Assemblage Itineraries: A Non-anthropocentric Perspective on Past Human-Animal Interactions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Conventional zooarchaeological approaches to the human-animal relationship often offer an anthropocentric perspective where animals mainly serve to fulfill human needs, whether material or symbolic. To address this issue, I propose a decentered model that I applied to the study of the introduction of cattle in the early postcolumbian Americas. This theoretical model inspired aims at offering a new perspective on how both humans and cattle reciprocally affected each other’s lives and social settings. To do so, I am using the theoretical metaphor of the itinerary (Joyce and Gillespie 2015). This metaphor follows the cows’ life history as they go through and shape different social fields (Bourdieu 2013), social arenas that bring together animal and human actors. This metaphor is a unique opportunity to analyze different social contexts and processes, such as cow ranching and butchering, by placing them in a single coherent narrative that examines the same nexuses of interaction among people and cattle across time and space in the circum-Caribbean. In this itinerary, the attention is drawn to the human-cattle assemblage, a non-essentialist ontological ensemble where both parties are constantly in flux, gathering new actors and spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36133.0