wire

2021-2025
Funded by the Academy of Finland, decision no. 342462

What do people mean when talking of ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ animals?

Unrealistic conceptual and administrative boundaries between wild-protected and domestic-exploited animal species have contributed to a catastrophically unsustainable human separation from nature which the most recent UN global biodiversity outlook identifies as the source of humanity’s catastrophic impact on the environment. What do people mean when talking of ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ animals? These terms are widely used, from the looseness of everyday speech to the rigidity of laws and regulations. In the WIRE project we study a range of human-animal relations across various field sites in the circumpolar world, to test these categories to their limit. Sustainable human life in this region depends largely on relations with animals, yet there are numerous ambiguous situations in which the categories of “wild” and “domestic” are hard to apply.

Our project studies the fluidity between widely unquestioned categories of ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ animals in the Arctic, building on local knowledge to move beyond ‘separatist’ ideas of humans as superior over the environment, which continue to be perpetuated by scholars, conservationists and many others in the promotion of environmental stewardship and in the practice of co-management regimes. Such a positivistic approach is in sharp contrast to both indigenous cosmologies and recent scientific research on human-animal relations, which emphasise partnership and co-agency with animals both domestic and wild.

We aim to reduce conflicts between hunters, herders, conservationists and others by increasing mutual understanding, and thereby to increase sustainability. For the first time with such a large range of disciplines crossing natural and social sciences, we adapt theories of perspectivism to show how the categorisation of animals as wild, domestic, hybrid or feral represents different points of view depending on multiple factors. 

Wild and domestic thus emerge not as polar opposites, but a shades along a spectrum of symbiosis, cooperation, and even mutual benefit. This is very well understood by indigenous peoples, but much less so by scientists, or by the national legal regimes which regulate human-animal relations, and which we believe will be particularly instructive in revealing the hidden assumptions behind these categories. Our emphasis on fluid reality stands in strong opposition to the fixity implicit in such approaches, in which animals are seen as void of agency, but rather passive objects of control or protection.

Perspectivism as in interdisciplinary umbrella has transformative potential for understanding human-environment relations, and our project realises this potential across so many disciplines for the first time. While anthropologists have engaged with genetics in their perspectivist theorizing of fluid realities, biological determinism largely fails to embrace the potential of perspectivism in genetics. Our genetics team has already started exploring more processual approaches through innovative gene expression analysis. The RNA sampling in this project will be pioneering through an explicitly perspectivist approach.

Thus, for all disciplines in this project, perspectivist approaches lead to transformative insights not only within their respective fields, but also to a new integrated theory of the domestic and the wild in human-animal relations that acknowledges diversity of perspectives, yet is united by the idea of fluent realities and thus questions static categorisations. For human sustainable livelihoods in a northern environment, perspectivism means going beyond the search for one ideal solution to overcome unsustainable human behaviour. The diversity of approaches on both sides of the Finnish–Russian border is an excellent arena to demonstrate the potential of this approach.

Banner photo by Lukas Allemann.: Camp no. 8 of the Lovozero Reindeer Herding Cooperative, Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, in 2013. This camp and herding area is now falling victim to the beginning extraction of lithium in the area by the company Nornickel.