disciplines

As a team closely working together, we aim to employ our methods and disciplines across different research sites for interdisciplinary integration and co-authored publications (see below results and interdisciplinarity). 

1. Anthropology will use ethnographic participant observation and interviews, living with hunters, herders and conservationists and employing a co-production of knowledge approach. Anthropology can best incorporate different perspectives on local and indigenous cosmologies that include diverse ideas of symbiosis and companionship with domestic animals, comparability of human and animal souls, and the concept of spiritual guardians of species. This focus allows us to identify different ideas of morality that extend Naess deep ecology to also include ideas of transcendence and perspectivism in the environment where ‘nature’ becomes a pantheon of souls that can take shape in humans, animal and other beings alike. These concepts are different in each field site, hence we selected anthropologists with decades-long knowledge to access the depth of this material.
2. History will explore the fluid realities of specific examples of the human-wild-hybrid-domestic animal relations through phenomenologically oriented oral history interviews embedded in participant observation, as well as through archival research, revealing different historical and contemporary perspectives. We will trace historical paths of particular sets of human-animal relationships, thus demonstrating how humans have influenced animal habitat, populations and behaviour (their ‘wildness’, ‘ferality’) through past actions such as mobility and selection practices. 
   

3. Legal studies: in law as a fundamentally human concept, animals are represented only through human perception, without agency – unlike in indigenous cosmologies. We will investigate existing human-animal governance concerning e.g. loss of livestock to wild animals, and the problems of hybrids in wildlife conservation, to improve our understanding of both the content and the worldview underlying the two legal systems. Very rarely for legal scholars, the legal data will not only focus on written texts, on fieldwork too, where the legal scholar lives with the animal practitioners and jointly experiences animal governance. This will reveal an entirely new perspective on laws and norms. Understanding differences and problems in implementation when static norms meet fluid, dynamic human-animal livelihoods will draw on court cases related to hunting/poaching, showing when hybrids and feral animals are considered wild, thus be either hunted or protected, or domestic, thus owned by humans.  
4. Genetics will draw on most recent advances beyond biological determinism that consider processes of adaptation, development, behaviour and human-induced selection. As such, for the first time geneticists will apply perspectivism to their studies, which challenges the traditional genetic understanding of the species. We will sequence DNA and RNA data from Yakutian horses, reindeer, sheep and dogs/wolves. Additional RNA samples of feral and wild animals will be taken from blood and adipose tissues of specific animals that practitioners consider ‘at the crossroads’ between the wild and the domestic. Gene expression is measured using RNA sequencing, for studying expression profiles in F1 reindeer and wolf/dog hybrids, as well as feral horses and reindeer with the same methods as used by Pokharel et al. with F1-sheep hybrids. Where the status of hybridization is not known, we will use whole-genome sequencing for investigation. Bioinformatic methods will reveal a) genetic similarity or diversity of these hybrid animals from those considered domestic or wild, and b) the relation of habitat and behaviour to gene expression.
   

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.