Eating (With) Piranhas: Untamed Approaches to Domestication

Abstract

In this article I begin by describing my sense of ethnographic unease concerning the commensality and the conviviality of two predators in Amazonian lakes -piranhas and fishermen. From this starting point I then discuss the notion of domestication, commenting on the current tendency to reaffirm use of the term in social anthropology and revisiting two approaches: that of Jean-Pierre Digard (and other French authors) and that of Tim Ingold, both of whom make use of this notion in their ethnographic explorations of the relation between humans and animals. The article then returns to explore the potential of the notion of domestication for making explicit contemporary questions and dilemmas such as nature and culture, human and animal, subject and object. I conclude with a reflection on the ideas of domestication and predation in the relationship between piranhas and fishermen.Keywords: Human-animals relations; fishing; predation; domestication; Amazonia. Comendo (com) piranhas: aproximações indômitas da domesticação ResumoEste artigo parte de uma inquietação etnográfica sobre a comensalidade e o convívio entre dois predadores nos lagos amazônicos -piranhas e pescadores. Deste ponto de partida será discutida a noção de domesticação, primeiro com um comentário sobre a tendência de reafirmação do termo na antropologia social e em seguida revisitando duas abordagens: a de Jean-Pierre Digard (e outros autores franceses) e a de Tim Ingold, ambos tendo feito uso desta noção como modo de tratamento dos variados sentidos e formas das relações entre humanos e animais. O artigo trata então da noção de domesticação enquanto forma de explicitar questões e dilemas contemporâneos como natureza e cultura, humano e animal, sujeito e objeto.Concluo com uma reflexão sobre as ideias de predação e domesticação para compreender a relação entre piranhas e pescadores.

Fences in the borderland: technique, landscape and the architectures of domestication in the Brazilian-Uruguayan Pampa

“…In other words, through an analysis of these physical structures and their agentive potentialities, we can better understand the oscillation between "cultures of control" and "cultures of reciprocity" (Anderson 2014) that supposedly permeate different systems of domestication, moving beyond the focus usually afforded to one or the other relational modality. This perspective, as I see it, converges with that of other contemporary researchers who have underscored the ethnographic importance of technical objects and material infrastructures in mediating interactions between humans and nonhumans (Sautchuk 2016;Segata 2017;Stoeckli 2017), as well as that between the landscape and its surrounding medium as aspects of the process of domestication (Ingold 2000;Leach 2007;Wilson 2007; Stépanoff e Vigne 2019). Finally, my approach in this article is also inspired by authors linked to the Maussian anthropology of techniques tradition (Akrich 1987;Lemonnier 2012;Descola 2002), which focus on the indissolubility of technical, social and political processes, endowing technical objects, their patterns of manufacture, use and selection, with great heuristical value for the social sciences in general.…”

“…Is the difference between the two one of nature, of degree, or does it reflect an ethnocentric projection of western ways of classifying our relations with and to animals? This is, of course, a fascinating and contentious theme in anthropology (Ingold 1980;Descola 2002;2005;Sautchuk 2016), to which this article has sought to contribute with historical and ethnographic data from a region in which these two worlds -cynegetic and pastoral -meet in a permanent state of contact, translation and friction.…”

From food to offspring: engagement between humans and sea turtles in two communities on the north coast of Espírito Santo

“…5 Other authors, in turn, reinforce the entanglements and bonds between beings, in a non-dichotomous way, emphasising the existential continuities between them, including Haraway (2016), Stengers (Pinheiro Dias et al 2016;Stengers 2015 andSwanson et al (2017). In contrast, Sautchuk (2016), and the authors with whom he aligns, defends the use of the notion of domestication, because it is more dialogical with other areas of knowledge outside of Anthropology, and provides greater temporal extension to the analyses and greater power to the doing of ethnography.…”

“…Despite the predominance of the naturalistic identification mode (Descola 2014) in the Tamar Project, for brief moments and without realising it, beach trainees raise sea turtles to a level of familiarity (Sautchuk 2016), referring to relationships of kinship different from that commonly expounded in books on biological evolution.…”