Celebrating Recent Work by Hannah Chazin

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by HANNAH CHAZIN

Reconceptualizes human-animal relationships and their political significance in ancient and modern societies.

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. Appealing to anthropologists and archaeologists alike, this daring book offers a reconceptualization of human-animal relationships and their political significance.

About the Author

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 work has been published in The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, Asian Archaeology, and Annual Review of Anthropology, among others.

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, that is 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 is the Seth Low Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. She specializes in early modern European history and the history of science. Her current research focuses on attitudes to nature in early modern Europe and the Scientific Revolution, with particular attention to craft knowledge and historical techniques. She is founding director of The Making and Knowing Project, founding director of The Center for Science and Society, and chair of Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience. Books include From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia (ed., University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250-1750 (co-edited with Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop; Manchester University Press, 2014).

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Host or Publisher Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy