Hybrid Communities

Biosocial Approaches to
Domestication and Other
Trans-species Relationships

Edited by Charles Stépanoff

and Jean-Denis Vigne

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 Introduction
Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne

The end of domestication?

In the past few decades, we have seen crisis after crisis in the world of agriculture
and animal farming, leading us more than ever to question the nature and mean-
ing of the links that unite us with domestic plants and animals. Mad-cow disease,
bird flu, scandals around the maltreatment of animals in industrial farming and
slaughterhouses, widespread worries concerning pesticides, endocrine disruptors,
GMOs: the very conditions in which we produce our food and manage live raise
questions and doubts. With each new epizootic episode, the public witnesses the
destruction of animal populations suspected of carrying diseases caused by the
very conditions in which they are bred. In 2001, during the mad-cow-disease cri-
sis, Claude Lévi-Strauss noticed a “diffuse feeling that our species is paying the
price for having contravened the natural order”. He saw modern breeding as hav-
ing reached an impasse and imagined a future where it would be abandoned: “Our
former herds will be set free and become just like any other game, in a countryside
returned to the wild” (Lévi-Strauss 2001, 13).
This feeling of crisis has intensified ever since with the fast disappearance of
wild biodiversity and a growing awareness of the global environmental changes
which the concept of the anthropocene refers to: the Earth System itself seems
now threatened by human activities which would have become comparable to a
geological force, bringing down the walls between nature and society (Hamilton
et al. 2015; Latour 2017). One key question is that of the origins of this chain of
changes that humanity seems to have unleashed around it and has lost control
of: when did the anthropocene begin? Some date the dividing point to 1945 and
the first atomic bomb, others to the invention of the steam machine. For others
still, it is with the first instances of plant and animal domestication that humans
started to set in motion radical changes within the ecosystems which ultimately
affected the climate (Smith and Zeder 2013). Neolithic scholar Jacques Cauvin
already maintained it: “in our domination of the Earth, the decisive step was taken
in the Neolithic Age and we are its heirs and direct product.” (Cauvin 1994, 15).
For Cauvin, the rise of this domination resulted from a mental and environmental
process of separation between the wild world and the domestic world: “Little by
little, wild nature was confronted by an initially limited portion of land that was

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 2 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
constantly expanded, worked, ‘civilized’ and reshaped by human activities and
exploitation: a process of conquest was started” (Cauvin ibid). This vision of a
war waged by the domestic against the wild is not different from the environmen-
talist Paul Shepard’s statement that “in the ideology of farming, wild things are
enemies of the tame; the wild Other is not the context but the opponent of ‘my’
domain” (Shepard 1996, 178).
With the growing awareness of the environmental crisis, the once triumpha-
list narrative of this struggle has taken on ever darker nuances. The nostalgia
for pre-agricultural and pre-state societies is not new, going back as it does to at
least Jean-Jacques Rousseau (18th century). However, for some people, in recent
years it has taken on a new dimension in the guise of a phobia of domestication,
the latter being perceived as an original sin containing the germ of all subsequent
disasters. A turning point has undoubtedly been paleopathology highlighting the
Neolithic’s negative impact on human health (Cohen et al. 1984), which, together
with the spread of inequality and violence, has led Jared Diamond to denounce
the agricultural revolution as “the worst mistake in the history of human race”
(Diamond 1987). A growing number of authors see domestication as a radical
change of attitude toward the environment, a taking of ownership of living beings
the result of which are domination, slavery, and the current global ecological cri-
sis (Diamond 1998; Harari 2014; Lestel 2015; Oelschlaeger 1991; Scott 2017;
Shepard 1996). For the philosopher Dominique Lestel, “we need to either radi-
cally change our culture or disappear; nothing can be salvaged. [. . .] The West
truly has a major problem with nature and its collapse was programmed from its
origins” (Lestel 2015). The use and abuse of domestic animals have become the
archetypal images of an irredeemable environmental and moral failure. Taking
note of the negative effects of domestication, increasingly less marginal social
movements but also influential thinkers (Nibert 2013; Francione 2009; Regan
2005; Singer 1976) have been promoting global veganism, “cruelty-free con-
sumption”, and “abolitionism” – that is, the abolition of the right to treat animals
as property and resources. Is not this, in fact, a way to absolve ourselves of a rela-
tionship with animals whose either roots and causes, or consequences and goals,
we no longer understand?
In not such a distant, more optimistic past, the great march of domestication
was supposed to lead to “civilization” and the “liberation of humanity from the
constraints of nature”. Today, for a growing fringe of Western societies it leads
to a deadly procession of disasters. These apparently contradictory positions
paradoxically share the same determinist view of domestication as the already
mapped-out route of a divorce between nature and society, for better or for worse.
Both points of view ignore the animals’ slow familiarization with the humans,
well before the advent of Neolithic agriculture and breeding, and the bio-cultural
process spanning thousands of years which saw domestic animals and plants
adapting to humans just as much as human societies were shaped on the basis of
the animals and plants they incorporated.
In this work, we explore views of domestication which differ from that
of a great programmed march leading to a sole destination. Bringing together

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 Introduction 3
archaeobotany, archaeozoology, genetics, ethology, ethnoecology, ethnobotany,
and social anthropology, our work draws on both the variety of the present situ-
ations observed as well as the long period during which they emerged and high-
lights the multiple ways in which a domus, a home, accommodating several
species can be built.
“Domestication” refers to a becoming, a process set in time which causes living
beings to go through different states, between the outside and the domus, between
far and near, between predation and familiarity. Domestication does not simply
cross these boundaries; it blurs them and questions categories, whilst at the same
time adding its own apparent order by describing a succession of changes as ori-
ented stages. Talking about domestication means giving narrative shape to the
events’ diversity and taking the risk of finalism by bringing ex post meaning to
that which had none at the beginning.

The tale of the nature-culture divorce

On this point, the great narrative dominating in the West is that of the Neolithic
Revolution. Deplored or hailed, this change of trajectory split human history
in two: an age of foraging was followed by an age of production to which we
currently belong. It was the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe who coined
the phrase “Neolithic Revolution” and outlined its scenario: “The escape from
the impasse of savagery was an economic and scientific revolution that made the
participants active partners with nature instead of parasites on nature” (Childe
1942, 55). According to this author, this “new aggressive attitude” (ibid.) toward
nature was supposedly triggered by the climatic change at the end of the Pleisto-
cene and the drying up of the Near East, spurring human societies to invent new
sources of subsistence. It is striking to note that Childe’s narrative is based on a
division between a natural world governed by causal mechanisms and a human
world marked by intentionality, innovation, and agency. It is in this sense that
domestication is often (and of course wrongly) seen as the entry of humanity into
the world of culture, which is subjected to human will and lies outside the laws
of nature.
Archaeologists have long since repudiated Childe’s scenario which, neverthe-
less, retains its strong influence as a founding myth. First, the period when early
domestication occurred in the Near East covers a vast region comprising different
environments and spans thousands of years between the last Ice Age and the first
bending of the Holocene climatic optimum. We can no longer link early domesti-
cation with a unique climatic or environmental situation characterized by a sim-
ple event such as a great drought or, conversely, a period of natural abundance.
Besides, the issue is no longer so much to find a cause as to identify the system of
interaction between multiple environmental and human factors which, here and
there, went out of control and thus triggered the upheaval of domestication (Vigne
2011, 2015). Whilst this transition may have spanned tens of human generations,
“whatever motivations might have been there at the beginnings of domestication
they may no longer have played a role later in the process or at the end of the

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 4 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
domestication process” (Fuller 2010, 9). The role of human control in this lengthy
emergence has been downplayed: domestication is now described as a “process
of unintentional entanglement” with plants and animals, people becoming trapped
in feedback loops of increasing labour, domestic plants and animals evolving in
response to human innovations (Larson and Fuller 2014, 120). The idea of a gulf
between nature and culture opened up by domestication paradoxically comes up
against the evidence of hybridizations which it has in fact helped proliferate. The
life and evolution of domesticated living beings inextricably link biological pro-
cesses with cultural choices. Agricultural, health, and ecological crises continu-
ally remind us that domestication breaks barriers. As Budiansky (1999, X) noted:
“Where domestication is concerned, the terms artificial and natural lose any sharp
meaning.” In this domestication paradox we recognize the moderns’ fundamental
contradiction revealed by Bruno Latour (1993): we postulate a metaphysical split
between nature and culture whilst surrounding ourselves with hybrids dissolving
the nature-culture divide.
Postulating a unilineal pathway leading from domestication to the modern
Western way of managing and dominating nature means ignoring the variety of
the centers of domestication which the world has known during the Holocene: the
Near East 11,500 years ago, China 10,000 years ago, South America 10,000 years
ago in the case of plants, New Guinea probably 7,000 years ago, India 5,000 years
ago, and East Africa 5,000 years ago (Price and Bar-Yosef 2011). Many instances
of domestication, including that of the horse, the dromedary, and, indeed, the rab-
bit, even started outside these great centers, in extremely diverse biogeographical
and cultural contexts: Southwestern Europe in the Central Middle Ages in the
case of the lagomorph (Callou 2003), Central Asia and Arabia in the fifth or fourth
millennium in the first two cases (Outram et al. 2009; Almathen et al. 2016). In
each of these regions, people have developed original ways of building long-
standing hybrid communities with plants and animals. What avenues should now
be adopted in order to conceptualize domestication outside the Eurocentric and
contradictory myth of the Neolithic Revolution?

Other narratives
Western archaeologists are of course not the only ones to have taken an interest in
the question of the origin of cultivated plants and domestic animals. In the various
centers of domestication throughout the world, people know of narratives explain-
ing the close relationship formed with certain species. In Amazonia, the Kayapo
mythology tells that Indians used to eat rotten wood until a small rat came and told
a woman about the existence of maize, which humans could then adopt as their
food (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 175–176). For the Achuar, the humans got the manioc
from Nunkui, the mother of cultivated plants and protective spirit of gardens, who,
in the narrative, takes the shape of a sloth (Descola 1986, 239–244). In Niger, the
cattle-breeding Fula people say that the first domestic bovines came out of a river,
attracted by human campfire. Ever since then, the Fula have made fires every night
so cows may gather around them to avoid mosquitos and predators (Dupire 1962).

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 Introduction 5
In Siberia too, narratives often invoke the animals’ curiosity or attraction to
human camps. A Nenets myth recounts that the reindeer used to live separately
from humans. Because they were harassed by wolves, some of them decided to go
to the humans in search of safety. The other reindeer refused and remained wild.
The humans harnessed the reindeer that had come to them and they started to live
together (Golovnev 1995, 220).
It is striking to note that, in these mythologies, we never encounter the trium-
phalist image of humans transforming wild plants and animals into submissive
domesticated beings as in the narrative of the Neolithic Revolution. Rather, they
are multi-agent narratives in which, alongside human agency, the agency of cos-
mic or landscape entities and that of the plants and animals themselves play a part.
Often, a kind of agreement is made as humans and non-humans find it in their
interest to live side by side. For example, both in Africa and Siberia, livestock find
safety and comfort next to humans.
These multi-agent conceptualizations espoused by cultivators and herders
should make archaeologists and anthropologists wonder. We are probably partly
trapped by our academic language. The verb “to domesticate” imposes the syn-
tactic construction “[a subject] domesticates [an object]” which grants agency to
humans and turns plants and animals into passive objects, artefacts even. How-
ever, this paradigm is very recent since the Romans themselves did not have the
verb domesticare, which is a Medieval Latin invention. In the past, people used
other models, different from the subject-object schema, in order to theorize the
becoming of their relations with their plants and their animals.

How do we recognize domestication?

All theories constructed on the nature-culture divide tend to present domestication
as a radical turning point and consider the criteria for differentiating between wild
and domestic a crucial issue. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, zool-
ogy, botany, archaeology, and anthropology have sought to find, looking through
the lens of a rather essentialist perspective, the fundamental identity of domestic
beings. We shall see that each of these criteria sheds a light on important aspects
of the domesticatory relationship, but neither of them is able to embrace its diver-
sity on its own.

Reproduction control
“Domestication necessarily presupposes reproduction under man’s control”: this
famous definition by the zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire still carries
authority with many biologists and anthropologists. In fact, in his work Accli-
matation et domestication des animaux utiles (1861, 157), Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
explains that he simply borrowed this definition from the rules of a competition
organized by the Société impériale d’acclimatation (Imperial Society of Accli-
matization). What did this competition consist of? The one in 1857, for example,
offered a 1,000-franc medal to someone able to “domesticate and multiply a great

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 6 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
Kangaroo species”, with the condition that two generations be obtained in captiv-
ity (Duméril, 1860, II–III). People taking part in this competition were wealthy
amateurs, princes and members of the bourgeoisie who enjoyed the use of private
zoos where they could conduct their experiments on exotic animals got from colo-
nies at great expense. In hindsight, it is doubtful that these practices marked by
nineteenth-century colonialism and scientism could serve as a model for under-
standing the experiences of hunter-gatherers involved in the Neolithic transition.
The control of reproduction and the isolation of domestic subpopulations has
long been the acid test for distinguishing the artificial selection through which
humans produce domestic plants and animals from the natural selection through
which wild species are derived. True, humans often intervene in the reproduc-
tion of domestic plants and animals by sowing cereals, planting tubers, castrat-
ing, or selecting breeders. Nevertheless, there can be very different degrees of
intervention and these do not necessarily seek control. In Europe, today, to what
extent is the reproduction of cats controlled by humans? When domestic and wild
populations of the same species live in proximity, crossbreeding is frequent and
can even happen by design. In Siberia, Chukchi herders let wild male reindeer
mate with domestic female reindeer, which is seen as a way of strengthening a
herd’s blood (Bogoras 1904–1909). In Papua New Guinea, many groups breed
only sows, leaving the task of inseminating them to wild boars (Dwyer 1996).
These practices, which appear exotic to us, nevertheless existed in Europe: in
Bourgogne, in the eighteenth century, sows were allowed to mate with boars so as
to improve the robustness of their lineage (Poplin 1976). Recent palaeogenomic
data have confirmed that neither reproductive isolation nor intentional breeding
was as significant as previously thought (Marshall et al. 2014, cf. Frantz and Lar-
son, this volume).

The domestication syndrome

If the criterion of reproduction control still holds sway, this is because it seems to
be the best explanation for the many morphological and genetic changes observed
in domestic populations. Often grouped under the concept of “domestication syn-
drome”, these traits are frequently seen as defining by biologists.
In the case of cereals, the appearance of non-shattering rachis requiring human
intervention for spreading the seeds has been considered a marker of the begin-
ning of domestication; however, we now know that cereals were for a long time
cultivated in a morphologically wild form (pre-domestic cultivation, Willcox and
Stordeur 2012). Plants and animals can undergo a process of “domestication”
over a long period of time without it being possible to qualify them as “domestic”
in a biological sense (Vigne 2015).
Conversely, morphologically domestic animals can be taken out of the domesti-
cation process if they are feralized, as was the case with the emblematic Corsican
mouflon as early as the Neolithic age (Poplin 1979; Vigne 1988). The breaking of
ties with the humans on a social level never leads to a return to a wild morphology,
even after many generations (Zeder 2015).

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 Introduction 7
The theory of neoteny seeks to give a general explanation of the domestication
syndrome noticed in domestic animals. Shortened snout, small size, slender skel-
eton, dependent behaviour: all these changes supposedly show an immaturity in
domestic animals which, throughout their lives, retain juvenile morphological and
behavioural traits (Coppinger and Smith 1989; Budiansky 1999). This theory ties
up with the idea of the captive animals’ reduced environmental skills (Hemmer
1990). The neotenic scenario is in fact an extension of the old idea held by certain
naturalists that domestic forms degenerated in relation to the pure and complete
forms represented by the wild species (cf. Lescureux, this volume).
Recently, new morphological and ethological studies have damaged the cred-
ibility of the neotenic theory. Compared ontogeny assisted by three-dimensional
geometric morphometric analysis has shown that dogs’ skulls are not comparable
to those of juvenile wolves, nor pigs’ skulls to those of juvenile boars (Drake
2011; Owen et al. 2014). Furthermore, the fantastic recent developments in the
cognitive ethology of domestic animals have led us to question the disparaging
condescendence with which we have viewed them. Dogs, goats, horses, and even
pigs have proven capable of cognitive operations not seen in chimpanzees, such
as shared attention and the comprehension of social cues (Kaminski et al. 2005;
Nawroth et al. 2014; Proops et al. 2010). As shown by Sarah Jeannin in this vol-
ume, dogs show social and communication skills which are completely unknown
in the world of wolves. These hybridized socio-cognitive abilities acquired by
domestic mammals in contact with humans show that domestication cannot be
reduced to cognitive decline anymore than to neoteny.

Human domination
Domestication as domination is inscribed in the origins of naturalism. As Buffon
(1753, 169) put it:

Man changes the natural state of animals by forcing them to obey and serve
him for his use: a domestic animal is a slave of which one has fun, which
one uses, abuses, alters, disorients and denatures, while wild animal, obeying
only to Nature, knows no other laws than those of need and freedom.

Following Buffon, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire saw the control of the reproduction of

domestic animals as a manifestation of “man’s domination over the rest of Cre-
ation” (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 1861, 155). The domination paradigm has long
had a strong influence on the works of anthropologists and archaeologists. For
Digard, “humans domesticated animals, and still do today, first and foremost in
order to satisfy their intellectual need to know and their megalomaniac com-
pulsion to dominate and appropriate the world and the living beings” (Digard
1999, 109). As an illustration of this “domesticating zeal”, he cites the famous
zebra carriage which Lord Rothschild drove in the nineteenth century at Buck-
ingham Palace, showing off his ability to subdue this willful equid (Digard 1990,
214–215). It is doubtful that such an example can be generalized, all the more

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 8 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
since these experiments never led to the zebra’s domestication; nevertheless, the
Neolithic expert Jacques Cauvin borrowed the concept of “domesticating zeal”
from Digard, using it in his theory of “mental revolution” which seeks to explain
early domestication in the Near East by the emergence of a domination ideology
(Cauvin 1994, 175). And yet, Lévi-Strauss had already highlighted in his work
The Savage Mind (1962) what he termed the “Neolithic paradox”: the inventions
of the Neolithic age were accomplished by people who could not have shared
the world-objectifying concepts of modern science. This paradox must not be
forgotten. Domination is only one avenue among many: ethnography gives many
examples of farming and herding societies which, drawing on the autonomy and
agency of plants and animals, have preferred to build their relationships on a
model of “respectful friendship” rather than control and objectification (Haudri-
court 1962; Ingold 1996).

Property
To the morphological criterion put forward by biologists, social scientists have
long preferred that of property. In this view, domestication exists when living
animals are objects of ownership and, consequently, exchange or trade (Clutton-
Brock 1989, 7; Ducos 1978, 54; Ingold 1980; Russell 2007). Marx himself saw
domestic animals as instruments of labour devoid of will, the appropriation of
which represented a primary source of inequality between humans. However, the
property criterion has the disadvantage of including the tamed wild animals liven-
ing up the homes of many indigenous peoples (Erikson 1987) or the game living
in seigniorial and royal forests which belonged only to the landowners (Sigaut
1988). Conversely, this criterion rejects outside domestication feral and stray ani-
mal populations which can very well keep living dependently on humans even
though they no longer belong to anyone. Have the thousands of cats and dogs
ending up in rescue centers become wild simply because their owners no longer
want them?

Intimacy
Recently, archaeologists and anthropologists unsatisfied by the limitations of the
domination paradigm have highlighted the emergence within domestication of a
daily hybrid intimacy and sociality impossible to find in hunting and gathering
(Anderson et al. 2017; Armstrong Oma 2010; Knight 2012, 2005; Fijn 2011; Sté-
panoff 2017). The approaches centered on the techno-economic uses of animals
ignore what makes these possible: daily interaction, reciprocal adaptation, joint
commitment. And yet, archaeology provides striking evidence of these close rela-
tions accompanying domestication from its very beginnings: they are the seeds,
dogs, cats, lambs, or horses that humans have placed in the tombs of their dead
(e.g. Davis and Valla 1978; Vigne et al. 2004).
Once again though, on its own, this criterion would lead to qualifying the
Amerindians’ wild pets as domestic and excluding all escaped animals as well

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 Introduction 9
as millions of battery animals that no longer have any close relationship with the
humans.

Symbiosis and co-evolution

In his 1868 work The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Dar-
win set himself apart from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and other zoologists of his time
by attributing limited importance to human control and the wild-domestic divide.
Darwin suggested that domestication should be approached as “an experiment
on a gigantic scale” enabling the modeling of natural selection (Darwin 1868, 3).
Darwin distinguished two forms of selection in domestication: the “methodical
selection” which was intentional and the “unconscious selection” which produced
slight unforeseen changes accumulated over generations. This unconscious selec-
tion introduced natural selection mechanisms inside domestication processes.
Recent research on the concept of unconscious selection has shown the major
role it has played in the evolution of domestic species. The cases of the house
mouse (Mus musculus) and the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) show that
animals can go through morphological changes by adapting to anthropized envi-
ronments without undergoing any form of human-controlled selection, even sev-
eral millennia before the dawn of the Neolithic (Leach 2007; Wiessbrod et al.
2017). Even the enlarging of crop seeds, previously thought to have been caused
by deliberate selection, seems to be a non-intentional general effect of domestica-
tion; indeed, this has been noticed in the case of the potato, cassava, and sweet
potato, where people do not plant seeds, let alone harvest them (Kluyver et al.
2017). In the Near East, we now know that many morphological traits seen as
markers of early domestic animals appeared not through selection but simply as
a quasi-automatic biological consequence of being made captive (Zohary et al.
1998; Vigne 2008). Many morphological changes in domestic plants and animals
could thus be the effect of adapting to anthropized environments and a relaxation
of natural selective pressures, rather than human decisions (Franz & Larson, this
volume), domestication being seen as an environmental change and therefore a
change in selection pressures (Vigne 2011, 2015).
Protected, cared for, and spread throughout the world by humans, domestic
populations have benefited from obvious advantages compared to wild popula-
tions. The domestic horse or cattle conquered the world while the wild one disap-
peared. From this point of view, some authors describe domestication as a natural
phenomenon of co-evolution comparable to the symbiosis or domestication of
aphids and fungi by ants (Rindos 1984; Budiansky 1999; Zeder 2015).
However, symbiosis implies an obligatory state of mutual dependence which
does not in any way correspond to the autonomy of domestic plants and animals,
nor to the forms of intermittent co-existence preferred by various cultivating and
herding societies (e.g. Stépanoff et al. 2017). Generally speaking, co-evolution
phenomena are undoubtedly involved in domestication; however, the concept of
co-evolution is clearly defined as a strictly biological interaction between two
or several lineages, whilst domestication is a socio-environmental phenomenon

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 10 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
characterized by constant historical and technological changes (Kallis 2007;
Vigne 2011). For the sake of accuracy, we should speak of socio-environmental
co-evolution.
As we can see, the various characterizations of domestication as reproduction
control, domination, property, intimacy, and co-evolution reveal real and impor-
tant aspects of the processes involved, but neither of them is entirely satisfactory
on its own, making clear the heterogeneous nature of domestication. Insufficient
by themselves, these criteria and approaches benefit from being used in a comple-
mentary fashion: for example, the morphological approach shows the long-lasting
marks left on bodies by multigenerational relations, whilst the social approach
centered on intimacy describes these relations as they are experienced by the liv-
ing beings.

An ongoing transformation
The authors of this volume belong to different disciplinary fields, each chapter
reflecting their personal points of view, but at the same time their works reveal
converging aspects of domestication which we shall try to outline here. This pic-
ture of domestication which emerges from this collective work is not a homo-
geneous reality but a variety of ongoing interconnected biological and social
transformations which extend through a continuum of interactions between con-
trol and autonomy.
Domestication is an ongoing process. From a biological point of view, it is
revealed by morphological changes – and these changes do not stop at the moment
the biological product of the process has become phenotypically (or even geneti-
cally) different from its wild ancestor. These changes are continuous, producing
ever new lineages, varieties, or breeds whose standards evolve as well. Unlike
those models that view domestication as a defined state and speak of “semi-”,
“proto-”, and “full” domestication (the full version given by animals bred in the
modern West, of course!), the domestication we are looking at here is never-
ending. Domestication is one of the ways in which the living world evolves, where
the main selection pressure, whether intentional or not, is the anthropic milieu with
its socio-cultural complexity and its fluctuations across time (e.g. Vigne 2011).
Domestication is polymorphous: from a genetic point of view, Laurent A. F.
Frantz and Greger Larson note in their chapter that “domestication is highly
species-specific”. Genomes are affected in dramatically different ways reflect-
ing specific “human-animal relationships during domestication”. Even at a spe-
cies level, ethnology and, more recently, archaeology (Vigne et al. 2011) have
shown that different types of relationship alternate, causing plants and animals to
go through the different states of autonomous agent, partner, demanding tyrant,
slave, food, and raw material.
Various contributions from ethnologists and archaeologists highlight modes
of domestication based not on the separation of the domestic from the wild but
on their complementarity and continuity. In their chapter, Marie Balasse and her
colleagues have managed to describe, thanks to stable-isotope data continuously

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 Introduction 11
stored in tooth enamel throughout the life, the types of interactions that pigs had
with humans during the Neolithic or the Middle Ages. In various archaeological
assemblages, they identified the concomitant presence of wild, feral, and domes-
tic pigs, showing that, for a long time, the pig evolved between commensalism
and feralization, as was also the case in many parts of the world (Albarella et al.
2007).
In the case of plants, the discontinuity between crops and weeds, which seems
obvious in a world where modern agriculture sees all spontaneous intrusion onto
a field as a risk of yield loss, is not, however, a universal model. As Amy Bogaard
and her colleagues show, Neolithic farmers in the Near East and Europe gath-
ered, stored, and sometimes cultivated “opportunistic” weed plants adapted to
soil disturbed by agriculture. The ethnography of Éric Garine and his colleagues
describes a similar situation with the Duupa of Cameroon: they practice shifting
cultivation whereby domestic and wild plants – two porous categories – are used
complementarily.
In the Upper Palaeolithic, the appearance of the first biologically defined dogs
was preceded, and made possible, by a long history of ritualized socialization
between humans and wolves, as suggested by the archaeological discoveries of
Mietje Germonpré and her colleagues. Nicolas Lescureux’s chapter explores the
multiple interactions, complementarities and hybridizations between dogs and
wolves, all the way to the present day, which are not easily accepted by conserva-
tionist policies based on a domestic-wild divide.
Nicolas Lainé’s ethnography shows that the relationship between the Khamti
and their elephants is based on the circulation between tamed individuals used for
work and the forest universe: the tamed are captured from among the wild, and
some tamed males are then led to inseminate wild females.
Unpredictable and open, the domestication link is fragile and can break in a
very short period of time, making it radically different from the biotic interac-
tions described by ecology. Since the Neolithic Age, technological innovation has
continuously led humans, animals, and plants to modify their mutual adaptations.
Sandrine Lagneaux tells us that the relationship between farmers and their cows
has been unpredictably and drastically changed by the introduction of robots on
farms: it can either intensify or disappear and cause disasters. This fragility of the
co-operative link in labour with animals is highlighted by the study authored by
Jocelyne Porcher and Sophie Nicod. In Portugal, mechanization and the economic
crisis have led owners to abandon their horses in wild areas, where they often
become the prey of wolves. The end of labour and the breaking of the domestic
link are nothing like the “liberation” imagined by the antispeciesists.

An entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies

It is the great lesson of the myths of horticulturists, farmers, and herders about
their relationship with their plants and animals: humans are not enough to create
and maintain a domesticatory link. Non-human agencies, those of the environment
as well as the plants and animals themselves, are also needed. They may be the

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 12 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
animals’ ancestors or owners, as shown in the chapters by Éric Garine and Nicolas
Lainé. This view stems from the repeated experience that human will is not enough
for a species to be successfully tamed. The Egyptians and many other peoples
have, to this date, tried and always failed to domesticate many species, including
the gazelle. Advanced archaeological knowledge has shown that the domestication
of several important species such as the cat, the pig, and maybe even the dog has
been the result not so much of human intentionality as of those species’ attraction
to anthropized environments, at least in the initial stages of the process.
Biologists have indicated that certain dispositions are necessary on the part
of the plants and animals for them to become domestic. As early as 1865, the
anthropologist Francis Galton reckoned that, in order to be domesticated, animals
“should have an inborn liking for man” (Galton 1865, 137; see Zeuner 1963).
Jeannin’s chapter discusses what cognitive ethology can tell us today about the
basis for this “fondness for man” in the case of dogs.
To what extent is the notion of fondness applicable to plants? Weeds are
plants adapted to soil disturbed by agriculture; some are “opportunistic”, while
others, in the words of Amy Bogaard and colleagues, “mimic” crops. Species
such as rye and oats were initially commensal before being, probably inad-
vertently, domesticated. Yildiz Aumeeruddy-Thomas’s chapter shows that, in
Morocco, fig trees can spontaneously grow at the foot of a wall, in which case
they are seen as a kind of gift that needs to be protected. People see trees as
“powerful agents that mediate between humans, as well as between humans and
supranatural forces, thus ensuring reciprocal exchanges” (Aumeeruddy-Thomas,
this volume).
The diagram in Figure 0.1 sums up this interpenetration between human and
nonhuman initiatives and dispositions in hybrid communities within which
domestication may (or may not) crystallize.

Figure 0.1 Hybrid communities.

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 Introduction 13
Recently, in social anthropology, the anthropo- and male-centric model of
“man domesticating nature” has strongly been challenged under the effect of eco-
feminist approaches which work with concepts such as “companion species”,
“bound”, and “entanglement” (Haraway 2003), and claim that “human nature is
an interspecies relationship” (Tsing 2012, 141). In this volume, Charlotte Brives
has taken her inspiration from the notion of “companion species” in order to
describe the “domestication of viruses”, taking the concept to its farthest limits.
She shows how viruses, pathogenic or otherwise, have for millions of years made
their way into our DNA and our history.
These approaches raise the question of the reciprocity of the transformations
within domestication. In the classic narrative of the Neolithic Revolution, it is in
their role as property and accumulation objects that crops and livestock make their
effects felt on human societies, triggering the rise of inequalities. The relational
approach developed by Gala Argent in her chapter is completely different: she
examines the effect of the horse’s central presence among Altai early nomads not
as an object but as a living being endowed with a particular behaviour. She sug-
gests that the meaning of the synchrony within the movement present in equine
sociality has been able to influence the way people perceived and organized their
relationship with their environment.
Domestication has a social and relational, but also technological and somatic
impact on humans, which is often neglected but is, in fact, symptomatic of the
fact that humans are just as much subject to the domesticatory interaction as ani-
mals and plants are. The beginnings of milk exploitation, which we now know to
have been, in the West, contemporaneous with the early domestication of ungu-
lates 10,000 years ago (Debono Spiteri et al. 2016; Gillis et al. 2017), have had
a strong impact on food practices, leading to the development of new techniques
(cheesemaking) and, in several parts of the world, the rapid selection of genes
that enable lactose digestion at an adult age (Mélanie Roffet-Salque et al. this
volume). Generally speaking, different traits of the domestication syndrome, such
as skeleton gracilization and brain size shrinking, are partly found in humans, and
are interpreted as a process of “self-domestication” (Leach 2003; Theofanopoulou
et al. 2017). Humans are not only agents but also objects of the domestication
transformations.

Domus and the common ground of domestication

We often forget that domestication implies three terms: the human, the non-
human, and the domus where their entangled lives take root in the long term.
That is why, beyond the classic domesticator-domesticated dyad, we develop a
triadic perspective on the interactional dynamics which transform the human, the
non-human, and their shared habitat. This shared habitat may be the human body
itself (microbes, parasites, etc.), the human home (pets, commensals, etc.), or the
whole anthroposystem (crop plants, weeds, livestock, etc.). The anthroposystem
or socioecosystem is forged not only by humans but also by the domesticated spe-
cies which modify the environment and have to adapt one to another, thus making

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 14 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
it necessary to use global comprehensive approaches (Vigne 2015). For example,
as illustrated by the chapter authored by Konstantin Klokov and Vladimir Davy-
dov, in Siberia, the domus that reindeer are a part of also includes dogs, and vice
versa: whereas their wild ancestors used to be predators and prey, they now have
to submit to “reciprocal learning”. This co-presence implies both constraints and
opportunities, and Klokov and Davydov draw a vast overview of the extraordi-
narily diverse “human-dog-reindeer communities” that indigenous people of the
Far North have derived from it.
Beyond the domus lies the issue of the common ground of an association
between different species. The search for favourable soil and the clearing of for-
ests are means of literally producing common ground, attractive to both cultivated
plants and their cultivators. Communication with animals relies on mediators such
as nomadic routes (Stépanoff et al. 2017); work tools, including sleds (Klokov
and Davydov, this volume), saddles, or plows; and chants and pet-directed talk
(Lainé, Jeannin, this volume).
The common ground can also consist of an activity such as milk exchange, as
shown in the chapter by Mélanie Roffet-Salque and her colleagues. In various soci-
eties, humans and animals exchange milk, forming a relationship based on inti-
macy and mutual trust. Whilst the theory of the “Secondary Products Revolution”
presumed that the relationship with domestic ungulates must have, at first, been
centered on meat production, having then, over several thousands of years, become
more refined and turned to the exploitation of living animals for milk, wool, and
labour (Sherratt 1983), it seems that milk may have been a catalyst for the initial
domestication of cattle, sheep, and goats. The consequences of this change in per-
spective are anthropologically important: the starting point of domestication was
probably not the treatment of animals as matter but as living animals playing the
role of co-operating partners (milking, traction, riding, prestige).

Hybrid communities
In ecology, the notions of biocenosis or of community refer to a set of species
interacting in a generally natural environment or space. Throughout the twen-
tieth century and still often to day, the human species was mostly excluded. On
the contrary, when social scientists speak of “community”, they mean a group of
humans which excludes any other species. It is obvious that we need more inclu-
sive concepts and it is precisely among the farming and herding populations that
we can find them. For example, the Tuva nomadic herders of southern Siberia
use the phrase aal-kodan to refer to their living place. This lexical pair includes
the encampment area and the grazing land around it, the families living in it, as
well as their herds. All the elements of this community are interdependent: human
misbehaviour toward spirits can lead to illness within the herd whilst, conversely,
the sanctified horse ydyk is charged with watching over the prosperity and health
of the whole aal-kodan.
Similar notions of inclusive communities can be found throughout the world.
The Andean ayllu community refers to the relationships between humans and

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 Introduction 15
non-humans (animals, plants, mountains, etc.) living on a given territory (De La
Cadena 2010). The notion of “hybrid communities”, introduced by Lestel with
regard to the interactions between apes and primatologists (Lestel 2004), can
be extended to refer to what is described by the Tuva notion of aal-kodan and
the Quechua notion of ayllu: forms of long-standing multispecies associations
between humans, plants, and animals around a shared habitat.
Domestication is often preceded and made possible by various kinds of hybrid
communities that are not in themselves tantamount to domestication. That is why
we have adopted an open approach, both ecological and cultural, which takes
into account the porousness of different types of interaction, such as: parasitism
(an association profitable to the parasite and harmful to the host), commensal-
ism (an association not harmful to the host), mutualism (an interaction profitable
to both parties), symbiosis (an interaction indispensable to both parties), and tam-
ing (an individual relationship without the notion of intergenerational continuity).
We include in “hybrid communities” these various forms of association in the
vicinity of domestication.
The archaeology of the island of Cyprus has revealed the intensity of the rela-
tions that may precede animal domestication. The pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers
who colonized the island brought on their boats wild boars which they released
to the wild on the island and were then able to use as game, 1,000 years before
domestic pigs made their appearance (Vigne et al. 2009). Carrying boars by sea
implies a high degree of management and familiarity. Without the humans, the
boars alone would not have come to the island of Cyprus but, conversely, without
the boars, people would have found it hard to feed themselves and settle on the
island in the long run. Hunters and boars formed a particular type of hybrid com-
munity characterized by intermittent links.
Humans and animals can be involved in different kinds of partnership which
are not domestication but are worthy to compare with domestication. In his
chapter, Edmond Dounias draws an overview of the amazing cases where wild
untamed animals assist humans in their foraging tasks on the basis of a mutualistic
relationship. May such relationships have evolved in the past into domestication
processes? It is possible, but not necessary: in the cases presented by Dounias,
animal auxiliaries, like dolphin and honeybirds, have remained wild and do not
share habitat with humans.
Biotechnologies open up new gaps in categorial boundaries, as shown by the
contribution of Sandrine Dupé in her chapter “From parasite to reared insect:
humans and mosquitoes in Réunion”. Mosquitos have a close relationship with
humans: they share our dwellings and partly feed on our blood, which makes them
ectoparasites. Recently though, some mosquito populations have displayed certain
domestication traits: humans ensure they reproduce and feed them because their
multiplication has become in their interest. Even though these insects belong to a
species parasitic on humans, have these particular mosquito populations become
domestic? But how can we ecologically contemplate a population whose only
mission is to destroy one’s species! This case multiplies the paradoxes around the
boundaries of domestication, whilst at the same time it strongly emphasizes the

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 16 Charles Stépanoff and Jean-Denis Vigne
originality behind the domesticating and, more generally, anthropic phenomenon
within a biosphere which is more than 3 billion years old.
By exploring hybrid communities, our work calls for the complementarity of
biological and social approaches, the studies included here being representative
of new forms of research which join up concepts, questions, and methods from
different disciplines. The hybridized realities of domestication require innovative
hybrid concepts and approaches.

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