“Scale on Another’s Trough”: The Continuity of Reindeer Herders’ and Dogs’ Worlds in the Context of the Ethnography of Food
The article is focused on the case of dog feeding in the reindeer herding brigade. The rations of the first and second chum dogs differed strikingly, but on the days when one family was absent, the portion from the dog moo was divided equally between the “master” dogs and the dogs “under care”. The greed with which the latter gnawed on the metal to eat the grease scale could not be ignored by all members of the brigade. The desperate attempt at satiation became a metaphor for describing the conflicts between the two chums: it went beyond avarice, the lack of care and energy in dogs and humans, touched upon the quality of food and approached the issues of loyalty and the ability to serve each other, the unprofitability of matrimonial parties, and even dealt with the theme of sudden deaths. In the context of anthropology of food and multispecies ethnography, I consider the way we consume food and satisfy hunger as signs of a special kind that not only humans but dogs are capable of generating and exchanging. Hunger and lack of food as a sign made its way from the dog and its behavior through a process of metapho-rization: the process of living semiosis involved dogs and humans, members of different families, adults and children. This path outlines social hierarchies, but as a response to the critique of interspecies hierarchies, the article examines “unscalability” as an important tool for escaping the capitalist logic of production, and how it determines forms and formats of food and nutrition. The gap between the worlds of humans and dogs is bridged through the interpretation of food consumption not as language, but as speech. The dog's overcoming of hunger and the urge to live is interpreted as a statement that is understood by the feeding humans, and therefore from a semiotic perspective points to the “continuity” of the worlds of human and nonhuman in the hybrid community of reindeer herders.
Keywords
anthropology of food,
multispecies ethnography,
reindeer dogs,
Yamal,
companion species,
ecology of selves,
perspectivismAuthors
| Rakhmanova Lidia Ya. | Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera) | muza-spb@yandex.ru |
Всего: 1
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