Growing plants and raising animals: an anthropological perspective on domestication

Abstract

According to the received categories of archaeological and anthropological thought, there are basically just two ways of procuring a livelihood from the natural environment, conventionally denoted by the terms collection and production . My aim in this chapter is to review this distinction, and ultimately to dissolve it. I proceed in three steps. First, I trace something of its history, showing how it is embedded in a grand narrative of the human transcendence of nature, in which the domestication of plants and animals figures as the counterpart of the self-domestication of humanity in the process of civilization. The second step is to consider how people who actually live by gardening, tilling the soil or keeping livestock understand the nature of their activity, drawing on examples from South America, Melanesia and West Africa. Indigenous knowledge, almost by definition, differs from Western thought and science in that it is grounded in an immediate and thoroughly practical engagement with the constituents of the environment, rather than in the assumption of human detachment from – and superiority over – the world of nature. The third step is to reconsider what it means to grow plants and to raise animals, taking this condition of engagement as a starting point. I argue that the work of the farmer or herdsman does not “make” crops or livestock, but rather serves to set up certain conditions of development within which plants and animals take on their particular forms and behavioural dispositions. My conclusion is that neither production nor collection offers an adequate conceptualization of what people are doing in their activities of livelihood. Rather, we are dealing with processes of growth , in which human beings, animals and plants come into being, each in relation to the others, within a continuous field of relationships.

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