CowDom - Between Domestication and Ferality
Cattle-Human Relations in the Making of Post-colonial South-America

Project Team Contacts

Project

The project CowDom aims at understanding how different configurations of human-cattle relations reflect social, economic and political dynamics in four countries in post-colonial South America. It will answer this question by analyzing the values, practices and colonial legacies related to human-cattle relationships in four South American countries - Brasil, Argentina, Paraguay and Colombia - by focusing on the opposite poles of the domestication process: genetically improved races and feral or semi-feral creole cattle. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interdisciplinary teams of zoologists and anthropologists will delve into cattle fairs and historical feral cattle territories.

The general objective is to study the impact of cattle domestication practices and ideology on post-colonial South American society, providing an analytical framework for future studies on this topic on a regional scale, and by including feral dynamics linked to the arrival of cattle to the American continent as a crucial element of a wider colonization process. 

Through an ethnographic analysis of specific case-studies, the project will achieve this objective by focusing on the following questions: 

  • What specific idioms and practices concerning the domestication of cattle have emerged in post-colonial South America, at the crossroad between local ecologies, cattle agency, historical lineages, industrial projects and market dynamics; 
  • How do changes in cattle farming systems reflect/effect changes in society; 
  • What kinds of socio-ecological entanglements did the presence of feral and semi-feral cattle produce, and what are the socio-ecological conditions for their survival in present times; 
  • How did the presence of feral and semi-feral cattle influenced people’s values and imagination; 
  • What values are implicitly or explicitly influencing cattle breeding practices, and from which historical/contingent lineages they originate.

Team

Valentina Bonifacio
Valentina Bonifacio

Principal Investigator

Santiago Martinez Medina
Santiago Martinez Medina

Research grant holder

Advisory board

  • Maria José Hötzel (Federal University of Santa Catarina | UFSC)
  • Marisol de La Cadena (University of California, Davis)
  • Mario Blaser (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
  • Radhika Subramaniam (Parsons School of Design, NY)