Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-Species Relationships - Paperback

by Charles Stépanoff (Editor), Jean-Denis Vigne (Editor)

Domestication challenges our understanding of human-environment relationships because it blurs the dichotomy between what is artificial and what is natural. In domestication, biological evolution, environmental change, techniques and practices, anthropological trajectories and sociocultural choices are inextricably interconnected. Domestication is essentially a hybrid phenomenon that needs to be explored with hybrid scientific approaches.

Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-species Relationships attempts for the first time to explore domestication viewed from across disciplines both in its origins and as an ongoing process. This edited collection proposes new biosocial approaches and concepts which integrate the methods of social sciences, archaeology and biology to shed new light on domestication in diachrony and in synchrony.

This book will be of great interest to all scholars working on human-environment relationships, and should also attract readers from the fields of social anthropology, archaeology, genetics, ecology, botany, zoology, history and philosophy.

Author Biography

Charles Stépanoff is a social anthropologist (Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne, France). His research interests include human-animal relationships in hunting, herding and shamanism in North Asia.

Jean-Denis Vigne is an archaeologist (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelles, Sorbonne Universités, France). His research interests lie in archaeozoology, focused on interaction dynamics between animals and human societies, namely domestication, since the last hunters to the preindustrial farmer societies, mostly in the Mediterranean area, Southwest Asia and Central Asia and China.