Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than any other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals that could potentially explain why self- (...) class='Hi'>domestication occurred in H. sapiens, whether by selecting in favor of cooperation and tolerance or by selecting against aggressiveness. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens rather than to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of self-domestication. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to coordinate in executing physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process. (shrink)

In a beautiful recent essay, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains the reasons for his departure from evangelical Christianity, the religious culture in which he was brought up. Sinnot-Armstrong contrasts the interpretive methods used by good philosophers and fundamentalist believers: Good philosophers face objections and uncertainties. They follow where arguments lead, even when their conclusions are surprising and disturbing. Intellectual honesty is also required of scholars who interpret philosophical texts. If I had distorted Kant’s view to make him reach a conclusion (...) that I preferred, then my philosophy professor would have failed me. The contrast with religious reasoning is stark. My Christian friends seemed happy to hide serious problems in the Bible and in their arguments. They preferred comfort to intellectual honesty. I couldn’t. To what extent can we, historians of philosophy, claim the virtue of intellectual honesty? Speaking frankly, I do not find the practice criticized by Sinnot-Armstrong’s philosophy professor rare or unusual at all. We very frequently distort the views of past philosophers in order to reach the conclusions we prefer. We just call it “Charitable Interpretation.” In this essay, I discuss and criticize the logic behind so-called charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous and is not at all restricted to a particular philosophical strand or ideology. Analytic philosophers and post-modernists, Marxists, liberals, secularists, and fundamentalists, we all engage in the very same domestication project. Even more disturbing than the sheer ideological pervasiveness of this phenomenon is the fact that, on many occasions, superb philosophers and historians take part in this fairly childish endeavor. In the first part of this essay, I discuss the general logic of charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy, mostly by addressing discussions in metaphysics and epistemology. In the second part, I focus on the somewhat less noticed use of charitable interpretations in the study of political philosophy, and point out the quintessential role ideology plays in these discussions. In both parts, I concentrate mostly on the interpretation of Spinoza’s thought. I do so not because I have special fondness for Spinoza (“guilty as charged,” I admit), but because Spinoza is such a beast (and may I add, an enchanting beast) and attracts a disproportionate share of the domestication efforts from historians and philosophers of all creeds and persuasions. In the third and final part of the paper, I will begin to outline an alternative methodology, which suggests that past philosophers can be most relevant to our current philosophical discussion, to the extent that they provide us with well-motivated challenges to our common-sense beliefs. Such challenges have the invaluable virtue of being able to undermine our most fundamental and secure beliefs, and force us to engage with the most fundamental questions. What more can we expect from good philosophy? (shrink)

In the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow ( Passer domesticus) was introduced to the United States, quickly spreading across the country. For a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the observation of sparrow behavior was something of an urban pastime. Traits such as intelligence, reason, persistence, and craftsmanship were conferred onto sparrows by American urbanites. This paper argues that sparrow intelligence was often conflated with domestication: the ability of the birds to adapt to living alongside (...) humans. Praise for the ingenuity of sparrows generally revolved around their nest building, particularly when such structures overcame the challenges posed by urban infrastructure and technology. Sparrows were far less praiseworthy when they caused electricity outages or contaminated water supplies. The sparrow in the United States demonstrates how the relationship between these anecdotes and their implications for animal minds was mediated by the technology and infrastructure of cities. Admirers of sparrows were not measuring the birds’ mental capacity, but rather their ability to adapt to human habitations. Sparrows were only granted intelligence once they had demonstrated their ability to become domesticated. (shrink)

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 ignited a public storm he neither wanted nor enjoyed. Having offered his book as a contribution to science, Darwin discovered to his dismay that it was received as an affront by many scientists and as a sacrilege by clergy and Christian citizens. To answer the criticism that his theory was a theory only, and a wild one at that, he published two volumes in 1868 to demonstrate that evolution was (...) obvious to anyone who cared to look at a bull in a pasture or a dog on a hearth. In response to those who insisted that species were distinct since creation, Darwin pointed to breeders of pigs and pigeons. In reply to those who protested that human intervention is one thing and natural selection another, he argued, "If organic beings had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, man could have done nothing." To counter those who scorned his descriptions of species in exotic places, he submitted local evidence of cabbages and cauliflower. Based on a wide array of sources, from ancient pictographs to Polish roosters, from skins and from skeletons, from scientific journals and breeding manuals, Darwin assembled a mass of proof--and a hypothesis about species reversion that risked his reputation anew. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a two-volume compilation of his thorough and intensive research and the revolutionary conclusions that resulted. The first portion of his work is dedicated to a meticulous analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the role that both natural and forced changes in this environment have had. Darwin then turns to a richly detailed discussion of the roles of inheritance and crossing in the development of species. A wealth of illustrations further support and enhance his findings. This fascinating, invaluable, and courageous undertaking eventually formed the foundation for our current understanding of evolution. "In science as in politics the victors tend to write the history books. As a result, the record of the past is edited, intentionally or unintentionally, so that it focuses mainly on the precursors of contemporary orthodoxy. Such a focus may accurately represent the genealogy of modern ideas, but it almost inevitably misrepresents the historical experience of their progenitors... Even the powerful, persuasive, and ultimately triumphant theory of evolution by natural selection required not only defense, but repeated buttressing and revision. Variation showed Darwin hard at work on this rearguard action, using the materials he had at hand... His information was gleaned from the observations of fanciers, breeders, and amateur naturalists, as well as from the treatises of those on the cutting edge of zoology and botany. As hindsight narrows the historical spotlight, it imposes its own sense of hierarchy on the preoccupations of the past. But Darwin was interested in all of these topics, valued all of these sources, and belonged, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of these communities."--from the Introduction. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of joint journeys as a metaphor to analyze how smart speakers become embedded in everyday domestic life and to trace the reciprocal, linguistically-mediated processes of domestication. While the domestication framework is well established in media studies, AI-based, networked technologies like smart speakers challenge its underlying assumptions by connecting private households to global infrastructures, thereby blurring boundaries between the public and the private. Drawing on video and audio recordings from German households, the article explores (...) how conversational linguistic practices contribute to the domestication of smart speakers. Using methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the study traces how smart speakers become integrated into everyday life, not just materially and functionally but also discursively, through practices relating to placement decisions, adaptation to sequential structures, personalization features, and reactions to malfunction. The article shows that mutual accommodation takes place: while users adapt their language to interface constraints, devices also get ‘personalized’ towards their users. The metaphor of joint journeys emphasizes that the co-evolution of users and devices is an ongoing, non-linear expedition shaped by language, socio-material environments, and infrastructural logics. These observations make it clear that it is through practices and language that AI technologies become integrated into everyday culture, which also raises questions about the broader datafied ecosystems to which interactions with them contribute. (shrink)

I present a general theory for the initial domestication of plants and animals that is based on niche construction theory and incorporates several behavioral ecological concepts, including central-place provisioning, resource catchment, resource ownership and defensibility, and traditional ecological knowledge. This theory provides an alternative to, and replacement for, current explanations, including diet breadth models of optimal foraging theory, that are based on an outmoded concept of asymmetrical adaptation and that attempt to explain domestication as an adaptive response to (...) resource imbalance resulting from either environmental decline or human population growth. The small-scale human societies that first domesticated plants and animals share a number of basic interrelated attributes that when considered as an integrated and coherent set of behaviors provide the context for explaining initial domestication not as an adaptive response to an adverse environmental shift or to human population growth or packing but rather as the result of deliberate human enhancement of resource-rich environments in situations where evidence of resource imbalance is absent. (shrink)

We propose that human self-domestication favored the emergence of a less aggressive phenotype in our species, more precisely phenotype prone to replace (reactive) physical aggression with verbal aggression. In turn, the (gradual) transition to verbal aggression and to more sophisticated forms of verbal behavior favored self-domestication, with the two processes engaged in a reinforcing feedback loop, considering that verbal behavior entails not only less violence and better survival, but also more opportunities to interact longer and socialize with more (...) conspecifics, ultimately enabling the emergence of more complex forms of language. Whereas in the case of self-domestication sexual selection has been proposed to work against physical aggression traits, in the case of verbal insult the selection has been proposed to work in favor of verbal aggression. The tension between these two seemingly opposing forces gets resolved/alleviated by a tendency to replace physical aggression with verbal aggression, and with verbal behavior more generally. This also helps solve the paradox of the Self Domestication Hypothesis regarding aggression, more precisely why aggression in humans has been reduced only when it comes to reactive aggression, but not when it comes to proactive aggression, the latter exhibiting an increase with the advent of modern language. We postulate that this feedback loop was particularly important during the time period before 50 kya, arguably between 200 kya and 50 kya, when humans were not fully modern, neither in terms of their skull/brain morphology and their behavior/culture, nor in terms of their self-domestication. The novelty of our approach lies (i) in giving an active role to early forms of language in interacting with self-domestication processes; (ii) in providing specific linguistic details and functions of this early stage of grammar (including insult and humor); (iii) in supplying neurobiological, ontogenetic, and clinical evidence of a link between (reactive) aggression and (reactive) verbal behavior; (iv) in identifying a variety of proxies of the earlier stages in evolution among cognitive disorders; and (v) in identifying specific points of contact and mutual reinforcement between these two processes (self-domestication and early language evolution), including reduction in physical aggression and stress/tension, as well as sexual selection. (shrink)

How much bacterial evolution occurs in our intestines and which factors control it are currently burning questions. The formation of new ecotypes, some of which capable of coexisting for long periods of time, is highly likely in our guts. Horizontal gene transfer driven by temperate phages that can perform lysogeny is also widespread in mammalian intestines. Yet, the roles of mutation and especially lysogeny as key drivers of gut bacterial adaptation remain poorly understood. The mammalian gut contains hundreds of bacterial (...) species, each with many strains and ecotypes, whose abundance varies along the lifetime of a host. A continuous high input of mutations and horizontal gene transfer events mediated by temperate phages drives that diversity. Future experiments to study the interaction between mutations that cause adaptation in microbiomes and lysogenic events with different costs and benefits will be key to understand the dynamic microbiomes of mammals. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/Zjqsiyb5Pk0. (shrink)

This paper examines existing frameworks for understanding domestication and proposes a domestication landscape framework. Driven by the selection pressures of captivity and/or mutualism within a domesticator-dominated environment, domestication is the generations-long multidirectional process through which a domesticate accumulates new genetic and behavioral traits, potentially causing reproductive isolation between wild and domestic forms of the domesticate organism. Rather than understanding domestication as fixed states in a wild/domestic binary, domestication can be best understood as a dynamic multidimensional (...) process of growing and declining domesticator influence on a domesticate’s genes and behavior. The categories, of wild, feral, tame, and domestic exist as blurry regions within a two-dimensional landscape that species will traverse at variable speeds. An organism’s path will vary depending on its environment and the particular domestication relationship at play. Domestication occurs through two potential pathways, either through captivity or through mutualism, though both may no longer be required once a domesticate’s dependence on the domesticator becomes clearly established. For the purposes of domestication, captivity requires intentional containment and resource dependence or reproductive control. When driven by mutualism, the domestication process does not require intent and, thereby, can occur with non-human domesticators. Alongside the coordinative consensus principle, the domestication landscape model can help achieve more functional pluralism between disciplines within domestication studies when organisms’ levels of genetic and behavioral influence are provided. Finally, this model suggests that while dingoes may have at one point been domesticated, it may be appropriate to view them as wild and perhaps even native organisms. (shrink)

Friedricho Nietzschės politinė filosofija, persmelkta aristokratinio radikalizmo, kelia iššūkį šiuolaikinėms vertybėms, tačiau dažnai sušvelninama ar depolitizuojama. Šiame tekste analizuoju dvi taktikas, kuriomis tai atliekama Nietzschės tyrinėjimuose. Analizuoju mitą apie Elisabethʼės Förster-Nietzsche tariamą tekstų klastojimą, parodydamas, jog tai faktiškai nepagrįsta projekcija, ir Walterio Kaufmanno apolitinę Nietzschės interpretaciją kaip reikšmingai ribotą. Parodau, kad, nepaisant Nietzschės antiantisemitizmo ir kritikos vokiečių kultūrai, jo aristokratinis radikalizmas pateisina hierarchinę, brutalią politiką. Tvirtinu, jog tiek Elisabeth’ės mitas, tiek Kaufmanno interpretacija gali būti suprasti kaip specifinė interpretacijos forma, kaip (...) domestikacija. Argumentuoju, jog šios domestikacijos formos prieštarauja Nietzschės filosofijai esmiškam „šiurkščių tiesų“ siekiui. Galiausiai, teigiu, jog domestikacija yra reikšmingas trukdis siekiant rekonstruoti Nietzschės politinę mintį. (shrink)

The Process of Coming and Going in this World is a four-channel, site-specific installation by artist Ruth Burke. The work incorporates its audience, including nonhuman collaborators. While dependent on time and place, it has been preserved in audio recordings and photographs. In this interview between the artist and art historian Jessica Landau, they discuss the installation’s use of sound, time, and place to evoke interspecies relationships based on collaboration and co-constituted domestication. While using the installation and subsequent sound recording (...) of it as a starting point, the conversation looks at the ways our relationships with animals on farms involve notions of time and place, companionship, and coevolution. (shrink)

Due to domestication, dogs differ from wolves in the way they respond to their environment, including to humans. Selection for tameness and the associated changes to the autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulation have been proposed as the primary mechanisms of domestication. To test this idea, we compared two low-arousal states in equally raised and kept wolves and dogs: resting, a state close to being asleep, and inactive wakefulness, which together take up an important part in the time budgets (...) of wolves and dogs. We measured arousal via cardiac output in three conditions: alone, with a familiar human partner, or with pack members (i.e., conspecifics). Specifically, we compared heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) of six wolves and seven dogs. As patterns of resting can vary adaptively, even between closely related species, we predicted that dogs would be generally more aroused than wolves, because living with humans may come with less predictable contexts than living with conspecifics; hence, dogs would need to be responsive at all times. Furthermore, we predicted that due to the effects of domestication, emotional social support by familiar people would reduce arousal more in dogs than in equally human-socialized wolves, leading to more relaxed dogs than wolves when away from the pack. Overall, we found a clear effect of the interactions between species (i.e., wolf versus dog), arousal state (i.e., resting or awake inactive) and test conditions, on both HR and HRV. Wolves and dogs were more aroused when alone (i.e., higher HR and lower HRV) than when in the presence of conspecifics or a familiar human partner. Dogs were more relaxed than wolves when at rest and close to a familiar human but this difference disappeared when awake. In conclusion, instead of the expected distinct overall differences between wolves and dogs in ANS regulation, we rather found subtle context-specific responses, suggesting that such details are important in understanding the domestication process. (shrink)

The horse was essential to past human societies but became a recreational animal during the twentieth century as the world became increasingly mechanized. As the author reviews here, recent studies of ancient genomes have revisited the understanding of horse domestication, from the very early stages to the most modern developments. They have uncovered several extinct lineages roaming the far ends of Eurasia some 4000 years ago. They have shown that the domestic horse has been significantly reshaped during the last (...) millennium and experienced a sharp decline in genetic diversity within the last two centuries. At a time when no truly wild horses exist any longer, this calls for enhanced conservation in all endangered populations. These include the Przewalski's horse native to Mongolia, and the many local breeds side‐lined by the modern agenda, but yet representing the living heritage of over five millennia of horse breeding. (shrink)

In recent years, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has grown both in popularity and economic importance. I argue that this success is primarily the result of domestication to the dominant culture of biomedicine and is readily observable in images and metaphors of the body used both in CAM and biomedical discourse. It is suggested that this shared imagery points to a new phase in the relationship between the body and society. The domestication of CAM is further illustrated through (...) processes of dissemination and professionalization. The article concludes by discussing the domestication of CAM as a reflection of an epistemological shift in biomedicine alongside its continued hegemony. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, it provides a view of why the standard liberal-democratic political theory is unfit for the Anthropocene. Then, it defends two claims: that the fittest politics for the Anthropocene is to be fully non-anthropocentric and that the best model of a non-anthropocentric political theory is to be grounded in the notion of ‘ecological citizenship’, which can be easily extended to non-human living beings and even to non-living objects, such as ecosystems. The latter claim is defended (...) by endorsing and enlarging Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s views of animal citizenship rights and by putting forward a view of the Anthropocene as an age of massive domestication of non-human nature. (shrink)

Are domestication and justice compatible? This chapter utilises reflections from the authors’ relationship with two magpies as a springboard for thinking about the wrongs of domestication. The chapter argues that reflection on liminal animals’ agential capacities and powers shines a light on the structural injustice inherent to relationships between humans and domesticated animals. In short, the practices and processes of domestication inevitably expose animals to unnecessary risk of harm and unjustifiably curtail their abilities for self-determination. The chapter (...) ends by considering and rejecting the claim that domesticated animals are better off than liminal animals since we can cater for their every need. (shrink)

Are domestication and justice compatible? This chapter utilises reflections from the authors’ relationship with two magpies as a springboard for thinking about the wrongs of domestication. The chapter argues that reflection on liminal animals’ agential capacities and powers shines a light on the structural injustice inherent to relationships between humans and domesticated animals. In short, the practices and processes of domestication inevitably expose animals to unnecessary risk of harm and unjustifiably curtail their abilities for self-determination. The chapter (...) ends by considering and rejecting the claim that domesticated animals are better off than liminal animals since we can cater for their every need. (shrink)

Taxonomies about the natural world reflect or reinforce ways of thinking about the world structure. Almost a century ago, Nikolai Vavilov emphasized the importance of domestication gradients as a taxonomy to encompass agrobiodiversity within centers of origin of agriculture, such as the Mesoamerican one. To date, domestication gradients in Latin America prevail with different cultivated plant species that exist as semiwild or semidomesticated forms, subject to diverse management systems by peasant (campesino) communities. Agroecology and Ethnobotany have highlighted the (...) socio-cultural relevance of arvense plants (plants associated to tillage). This category encompasses useful plants for peasant economies and indigenous cultures as well as weeds whose control involves other types of peasant management practices. Evolutionary biology recognizes the key role played by domestication and management gradients in crop plant evolution. Nevertheless, the term weed (“maleza” in Spanish) is widespread in the scientific literature published in English and it refers to all plants that have not been intentionally cultivated. In the present work we review the scientific literature and reflect on the concepts that underlie terms such as “semi-wild”, “weed” or “tolerated plant”. We propose that a conceptual flattening and concealment occurs when, through language, scientific literature in English reduces the current domestication stages and the plants under diverse management systems to mere “weeds”. We also explore how this categorization could be a case of epistemic injustice within agriculture, one that is aligned with agro-industrial production models. In this context, we posit the question, does the use of the term “weed” in scientific literature and the agro-industrial model of speech, as a broad category that homogenizes nuances of management and valuation, contribute to oppressing perspectives and perpetuates epistemic injustices. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, (...) triggered by the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

In the following I show that Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skill rests on a misguided interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s work on understanding in Being and Time. Dreyfus separates understanding according to the analytic philosophical concept pair, so called ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge-that’, that corresponds for him to the pragmatist differentiation between skillful acting and theoretical conceptual thinking. Contrary to that, Heidegger argues that only one form of understanding exists that is neither captured by ‘know-how’, ‘knowledge-that’ or a combination of both. Instead (...) of presupposing two radically different ways to engage with the world, one practical-agential, the other theoretical-conceptual, Heidegger shows that all genuine forms of comportments rest on the same form of understanding that exhibits the highest degree of intelligibility when we deal with the world ordinarily. The Heideggerian account therefore comes without the many dichotomies so often criticized in the literature on skill and understanding, and offers a radically different view of world disclosure and of what we do when we ‘theorize’. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an enormous growth in the interest archaeologists, historians, and geneticists have in the horse–human relationship. As recently as twenty-thirty years ago, one could list...

The central question of this chapter is whether keeping animals in captivity is morally justified. Captivity could be considered inherently wrong when animals are perceived to have an interest in liberty. I argue that this is the case to a certain extent, provided that we use a less stringent notion of autonomy than we do for humans. Next, I address two possible general moral justifications for keeping animals in captivity: (1) it is in the interest of humans to keep animals (...) in captivity and (2) it is in the interest of the animals themselves. Whether these justifications are successful is to a large extent an empirical matter. In general, however, we could say that either animals of a specific species do not have sufficient adaptive capacity to be able to deal with conditions of captivity—in which case harm to the animals’ welfare occurs—or they do have this capacity, but this means that their genetic make-up changes over the generations, and they ultimately become domesticated. This aspect of domestication raises a whole new set of questions regarding the justifiability of animal domestication. I argue that the questions raised by animal domestication cannot be completely dealt with within traditional animal ethical approaches, that take individual animals as the sole unit of moral concern. Objections that people voice regarding animal captivity and in particular regarding the often resulting domestication and interfering with an animal’s genetic make-up, are more properly directed at the species-level. (shrink)

In contrast to scholarship that has emphasized a European exoticization of China in the early modern period, this essay focuses on the “domestication” of Chinese material culture through an examination of the Dutch reception and reproduction of Chinese porcelain. The term “domestication” is used here to explain the evolving identification of blue-and-white ceramics as a Dutch, rather than a Chinese, national product. Tracing almost 300 years of history, the essay argues that the quotidian domestic language with which Chinese (...) porcelain was first described in Dutch texts, was replaced in the eighteenth century with concerns about the corrupting influences of porcelain, as it was displayed and imitated (in delftware) and exported to female consumers in eighteenth-century England. Following a period of neglect and decline, delftware was rediscovered by Dutch entrepreneurs and American tourists in the nineteenth century, who returned these blue-and-white wares to a benign domestic space. American writers, responding in part to the resurgence and promotion of the Dutch delftware industry, presented Dutch femininity and domesticity as a model of stability and harmony. None of these interpretations would have been possible, however, had the viability of delftware as a specifically “Dutch” material relied on only the physical properties of the earthenware body; instead, this essay argues, their interpretations depend upon the representational possibilities of the vessels’ painted surfaces, upon particular combinations of blue and white, to form an image of “Dutchness.”. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In their efforts to apportion blame and channel retaliatory action in the post September 11 world, scholars and pundits alike have used a series of rhetorical techniques to great effect, manufacturing an image of Islam, the proverbial Other, that is highly conducive to the needs of liberal democracies but hardly a reflection of any one of the many 'authentic' Islams. This has largely been achieved by ignoring the many differences within the Islamic movement and asserting that social identities are based (...) on a stable, uniform kernel that moves unchanged throughout history and across the globe. This inevitably results in caricatures that have many uses; in portraits of dissenting groups it tends towards demonization. In this wide-ranging essay--which considers a variety of discursive sites, from contemporary film and art to the War on Terror--a scholar of religion asks the reader to consider how the classifications we use to name and thereby negotiate our social worlds--foremost among them the classification religion itself--are implicitly political and are being wielded in the public arena to carry out generally undisclosed/under analyzed social work. (shrink)

Social media are a key terrain for constructing and contesting contemporary vegan identities. While previous research has explored representations of veganism in print media, online spaces remain under-examined. We analyse how contemporary veganism is assembled by 16 vegan digital food influencers (vDFIs) on Instagram and the ways in which an emergent neoliberal-self-lifestyle assemblage connects into, and challenges, the other contemporary vegan assemblages, which we identify as radical activism and environmental policy. Through an analysis of the visual and textual representations of (...) veganism by these vDFIs, we argue that the (visual) narratives of these vDFIs are domesticating the places and practices of veganism, towards a depoliticised food practice grounded in the private ‘here-and-now’ and focused on individualised self-care. Their eye-catching images serve to capture attention and generate momentum around their interpretations of veganism. Such representations of what we term ‘domesticated veganism’ work to disconnect from broader issues of justice, animal liberation, climate change and environmental crises foregrounded by other vegan assemblages, which are suppressed in favour of health, comfort, accessibility and ease. Nonetheless, lines of flight triggered by corporate engagements or vDFIs emphasize that all assemblages are ephemeral, with their constant state of becoming requiring repeated performance and practice. The emergent effects of these vDFI narratives constitutes representations of veganism as easy, ordinary, healthy and gentle through their focus on health, family, and delicious, eye-catching recipes. We conceptualise this as gentle care, separated from an externalised drive for justice, which characterises our domesticated vegan assemblage as ‘(in)activist’, in which practices with ostensibly activist outcomes have limited engagement with the issues and politics within which they are seemingly nested. (shrink)

With the publication of chatGPT in December 2022, a new era of artificial dialogue systems and chatbots has emerged. Many established thinkers and figures have published their stance on the development of this technology, not rarely combined with stark language about its transformative potential and potential risks. New terminologies have found entrance to public and philosophical discourse, new regulatory frameworks have been introduced, from small to large scale, and an entire economy has shifted: many apps have sprung into existence using (...) chatGPT and other LLMs as a basis for their services, large corporations take the risks of releasing unfinished language models to undercut the competition. In the meantime, many more stakeholders have entered the economic, regulatory, and social discourses on how to deal with this emerging technology. Taking the latest developments in the field into consideration this completely revised and updated second edition now includes new chapters on the tech-ethics of Large Language Models and LLMs as relational technology. The author considers the consequences of chatbots on human-human relationships, providing analysis on robot rights, human-centered design, and the social tension between robophobes and robophiles. Hendrik Kempt, PhD, is Postdoctoral scholar at the Applied Ethics Group at RWTH Aachen University. He has obtained his PhD from Aachen with works on the ethical concerns of using AI for medical diagnostics and has published several monographs on philosophical challenges regarding emerging technology, including "Synthetic Friends - A Philosophy of Human-Machine Friendship" (2022) and "(Un-)Explainable Technology" (2024), both with Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the author of a number of articles on related topics and the co-editor of "RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy" (2019). (shrink)

- How can anthropology improve our understanding of the interrelationship between nature and culture? - What can anthropology contribute to practical debates which depend on particular definitions of nature, such as that concerning sustainable development? Humankind has evolved over several million years by living in and utilizing 'nature' and by assimilating it into 'culture'. Indeed, the technological and cultural advancement of the species has been widely acknowledged to rest upon human domination and control of nature. Yet, by the 1960s, the (...) idea of culture in confrontation with nature was being challenged by science, philosophy and the environmental movement. Anthropology is increasingly concerned with such issues as they become more urgent for humankind as a whole. This important book reviews the current state of the concepts of 'nature' we use, both as scientific devices and ideological constructs, and is organised around three themes: - nature as a cultural construction; - the cultural management of the environment; and - relations between plants, animals and humans. (shrink)

This study examines the mobile phone practices of rural left-behind children whose one or both parents migrate to cities for better earnings and the impact of such practices on migrant families in China. The study has used ethnographic approach by conducting participant observations and interviews of 21 LBC, residing in Guangren village, south China's Guangxi Autonomous Region. The study uses domestication theory to analyze these LBC's adoption of mobile phones in their daily routines and spaces in and out of (...) their households. The key findings are as follows: the LBC used mobile phones primarily to engage with their distant parent; through collaborative efforts, they tried to enhance familial connections; and they overcome the separation issue by co-participating in ongoing events, thus making the domestication of mobile phone a distant solving of real-world problems faced by migrant parent and their LBC. The study concludes that LBC's innovative uses of mobile phones empowered them by building shared virtual space with their migrant parent, via which they handled the separation issue. In such shared virtual spaces, LBC's families have developed rich expressions of familial connections in various forms based on the limited perpetuate connectedness. (shrink)

An intermediate space seems to be constituted by the "spiritual but not religious", which we will consider from the angle of its implications in the field of health. We study experiences of the "wildly sacred," particularly at the frontiers of death: near-death experiences, terminal lucidity and necrophany. Presented in spontaneous forms or induced in experimental devices, these experiences are the subject of a new scientific domestication that questions the mobility of the frontiers of this intermediate space.

At a certain point in his in In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek suggests that, particularly with respect to Martin Heidegger's relationship with Nazism, Heidegger took "the right step." Not only does such a proposition provide a means to explain the direction Heidegger took in 1933 as it has been infamously pinpointed in his Rector's Address as the newly-inaugurated president of Freiburg, but it also becomes a means to explore Heidegger's turn towards Nietzsche by Winter 1936/1937 in a series (...) of lectures and seminar delivered up to Winter 1944/1945. This turn presents a direction that, as Žižek describes, points to a "domestication of Nietzsche," which arises as Heidegger begins to distance himself from his active involvement with National Socialism. What his turn towards Nietzsche demonstrates, if employing Žižek's proposition, is Heidegger's desire to move in a "right direction.". (shrink)

Interest in the study of domesticated plants increased near the end of the 18th century, mainly because of their economic potential. In the 19th century, there was a new focus on the historical understanding of species, their origin, changes in their distribution, and their evolutionary history. Charles Darwin developed an extended interpretation of species domestication, considering variations, reproduction, inheritance, and modification as standard processes between wild and domesticated organisms. In this context, one relatively neglected aspect was the geographical distribution (...) of domesticated species. Alphonse de Candolle addressed and developed in detail the question of the geographical origin of cultivated plants. Since 1836 Alphonse de Candolle had been studying the topic and obtained evidence that contributed to understanding aspects such as the center of origin, dispersion, competition, selection, and time of domestication. Although Darwin himself admitted that _Géographie botanique raisonnée_ (de Candolle, Alphonse,de. Géographie botanique raisonnée; ou, exposition des faits principaux et des lois concernant la distribution géographique des plantes de l’epoque actuelle, 2ème tome. Paris: Masson.) was of great help to him in the development of his evolutionary theory, the importance of de Candolle’s contribution is seldom recognized. Our purpose is to detail the dialogue between Alphonse de Candolle and Darwin on the geography of domesticated plants, to understand some of the most critical discussions that contributed to the reinterpretation of domestication under the Darwinian proposal of modified descent. (shrink)

Animal stereotypes are used to describe, circumscribe and label people. They also serve to negotiate what counts as familiar and what is expelled as foreign. This article explores the composition of animal stereotypes and examines why they continue to influence the way humans understand themselves. Referring to dehumanising language in contemporary political discourse, anthropological theories of mimicry and representation as well as ethnological observations of human–animal relations, this article argues that if animals are regarded as intelligent and compassionate rather than (...) irrational or violent, the debasing intent of animal stereotypes fails. While a deeper understanding of the mutual dependence of humans, non-humans and their environment is of academic and social interest alike, the projection of images of oneself onto animal others only highlights certain features, whilst leaving others in the dark. (shrink)

SUMMARYSir John Harington's 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto's Orlando Furioso has been much maligned for its free translation, digressive notes, and the translator's obtrusive presence. This essay addresses the question of Harington's accommodation of his audience using Paul Ricoeur's notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ to consider how Harington invites English readers to engage with the Italian poem. Harington's exegetical notes and paratextual aids serve as a privileged site or ‘third text’ between the source and target texts to adapt Ariosto for English (...) readers. The translator's anglicising strategies are grounded in contemporary Elizabethan reading practices, while also emulating the exegetical apparatus that accompanied the Italian reception of Ariosto's poem. Domestication strategies Harington employs include the anticipation of his audience's cultural biases, an emphasis on historical events of interest to English readers, and the inclusion of personal details that create cultural bridges between the reader, the translator, and the Italian author. (shrink)

Through a critique of the rhetorical configurations of identity theft, this article contributes to the emerging body of theory contending with the social effects of digital information technologies (DIT). It demonstrates how the politics of fear manipulate technosocial matrices in order to derive consent for radical changes such as the domestication of the Web and the instrumentalization of identity. Specifically, this critique attends to these tasks by performing a rhetorical reading of three recent television commercials that were heavily circulated (...) by the international financial conglomerate, Citigroup Incorporated. Based on this reading, which is heavily indebted to Foucaldian theories of power and discipline, a distinction is drawn between identity theft as it is configured in juridico-political discourse and the cultural phenomenon of identity theft, which functions as a technosocial myth. (shrink)

The phenotypic variation found in domesticated plants and animals is striking, so much so that Darwin used it to illustrate the power of selection to effect change. Recent developments in genomics technologies are leading to dramatic progress in elucidating the genetic changes that occur during domestication. The Genetics Society Autumn Meeting on the genetics of domestication took place in November 2004 at the Royal Society in London, and was organised by Helen Sang (Roslin Institute, UK) and Jonathan Jones (...) (John Innes Centre, UK). The meeting brought together many of the leading researchers on livestock and crop domestication and provided a timely and exciting account of recent progress in the field. BioEssays 27:574–576, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)