Live Stock and Dead Things: The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity
by Hannah Chazin

In Live Stock and Dead Things, Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of nonhuman animals in the rise of modern societies. Conventional views of this process tend to see a mostly linear development from hunter-gatherer societies, to horticultural and pastoral ones, to large-scale agricultural ones, and then industrial ones. Along the way, traditional accounts argue that owning livestock as property, along with land and other valuable commodities, introduced social inequality and stratification. Against this, Chazin raises a provocative question: What if domestication wasn’t the origin of instrumentalizing nonhuman animals after all?

Chazin argues that these conventional narratives are inherited from conjectural histories and ignore the archaeological data. In her view, the category of “domestication” flattens the more complex dimensions of humans’ relationship to herd animals. In the book’s first half, Chazin offers a new understanding of the political possibilities of pastoralism, one that recognizes the powerful role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority. In the second half, she takes readers into her archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasus, which sheds further light on herd animals’ transformative effect on the economy, social life, and ritual.

About the Author

Hannah Chazin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her current research focuses on how human-animal relationships shaped systems of value and political power and inequality in the past and how these relationships can be investigated materially through archaeology. She is also deeply interested in rigorously understanding how archaeologists use material sciences to generate understandings of the past, present, and future. She is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is analyzing the animal remains included in burials in the Bronze and Iron Age necropolis at Karashamb, Armenia. Recent publications have appeared in American Anthropologist, Journal of Field Archaeology, and Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

About the Speakers

Brian Boyd is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, the Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and the Co-Chair of the University Seminar on Human-Animal Studies. He works on the prehistory and politics of archaeology in southwest Asia, with a focus on Palestine. He is particularly interested in the writing of microhistories as a counter to the grand narratives of social life in the deep past. He also writes on critical human-animal studies, museum anthropology, gender/queer theory and sound studies. His recent work has been published in Annual Review of Anthropology, Quaternary International, and Jerusalem Quarterly, among others. He is currently co-writing a book with Palestinian colleagues entitled "From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba."

Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. She is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, gender and sexuality, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her first book Animal Intimacies (University of Chicago Press, 2018; Penguin Viking India 2019) is an ethnography of the myriad symbolic, material, and affective relationships that villagers in the Central Himalayas have with a variety of nonhuman animals. It explores how this relatedness is shaped by wider issues and contexts including colonialism, rural-urban migration, changing religious practices, wildlife conservation, and the politics of gender.

Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Lomnitz is also the Director of Columbia's new Social Studies of Disappearance Lab, housed in the Anthropology Department. He works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. Since 2021, Claudio Lomnitz has turned his attention to bringing anthropological insight to the transformation of the state and of community in contemporary Mexico, and especially to the study of the disjointed relationship between sovereignty and the state. His books include Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), and a recent trilogy in Spanish: El tejido social rasgado (Ediciones ERA, 2022), Para una teología política del crimen organizado (Ediciones ERA, 2023), and Antropología de la zona de silencio (Ediciones ERA, in press).

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is the founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org). Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. Other collaborations include the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France (2020), immersion courses in traditional Thai weaving, human-natural interactions in the minescape, and interdisciplinary workshops. She is now collaborating on a new project on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.

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