Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish / Edition 1

by Marianne Elisabeth Lien

Overview

Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. In this careful and nuanced study, Marianne Elisabeth Lien explores how the growth of marine domestication has blurred traditional distinctions between fish and animals, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal-welfare legislation.

Drawing on fieldwork on and off salmon farms, Lien follows farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial husbandry, exposing how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and “alien” in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to both the economic context of industrial food production and the materiality of human-animal relations, this book highlights the fragile and contingent relational practices that constitute salmon aquaculture and the multiple ways of “becoming salmon” that emerge as a result.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520280571
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/30/2015
Series:	California Studies in Food and Culture , #55
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction: Salmon in the Making 1

2 Tracking Salmon 27

3 Becoming Hungry: Introducing the Salmon Domus 48

4 Becoming Biomass: Appetite, Numbers, and Managerial Control 76

5 Becoming Scalable: Speed, Feed, and Temporal Alignments 104

6 Becoming Sentient: Choreographies of Caring and Killing 126

7 Becoming Alien: Back to the River 148

8 Tails 164

Notes 173

Reference 197

Index 209

Editorial Reviews

"The book is both a keenly insightful exploration of the mutual effect of salmon and the people who raise them, and an engaging love letter to ethnography, which illuminates the ways in which such work can expand the boundaries of how we think about vexing issues of science and society... Here is anthropology that speaks to all of us about our food systems and the animals caught up in them, and about the inevitability of uncertainty, offered with no closure and with a masterly voice."

Times Literary Supplement

"Superb."

American Anthropologist

A timely contribution. . . Overall, Becoming Salmon is a detailed and illuminating study of a rapidly growing industry, offering key insights into the practices of care that literally bring fish as food animals to, and through, life.

Anthropology of Work Review