By: FRANCESCA CORRADINI, MATTEO FERRARI
In the Western tradition, domestication has been widely understood by scholars as a one-way process in which humans dominate nonhuman animals. However, this narrative has obscured histories and other geographies in which humans and nonhumans shared spaces of mutualism and reciprocity. Multispecies ethnography, as well as new trends in archaeology and genetics, shed light on other kinds of engagements that suggest sharing and reciprocity. This aspect is crucial when society is in the age of the sixth mass extinction and the Anthropocene. Thus, rethinking the human way of being with non-human others by looking at the past is the goal of this paper.
