Domestication Rewilded: A Framework in Eight Dimensions for Parsing Domestication Concepts Across Disciplines

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Most scholars now agree that domestication involves intertwined biological and socio-cultural factors, though tend to favour one or the other ‘side’ according to their disciplinary position. Such binary understandings of domestication, constrained by classic distinctions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, appear increasingly insufficient to get at the complex and multifaceted dynamics of domestication across different times, places, and species relationships. Bringing recent multispecies and more-than-human scholarship from the social sciences and humanities into dialogue with domestication theory, I develop a framework for parsing domestication concepts across disciplines. In this framework, domestication concepts can vary along eight dimensions: heredity, symmetry, intentionality, human involvement, multispecies involvement, scale, teleology, and universality. Rather than seek to find one concept to work for all cases, contexts, and disciplinary interests, this inclusive approach embraces the variety and offers a way to lightly structure the ‘palimpsest’ of definitions so the different concepts become comparable in the same terms. At the same time, the framework offers a systematic way to adjudicate which concepts are best suited for different applications. I illustrate how this framework can be useful, particularly for more marginal and/or under-theorised cases of domestication, through my empirical work on microbial domestication in contemporary fermentation practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52708