ABSTRACT
The social and cultural influence of the domestication narrative is starting to emerge. Domestication, it seems, is at the very heart of the ideology of human exceptionalism, but as Hunter Tarde notes, “this idea was far from being an inevitable one.” Tarde’s laudatory statement on domestication has more in common with the scientific definition than at first it might appear. In the revision of the domestication event, communication is materially embodied, a physically engaged experience, inter-relational and interconnected. The dog domestication story is thus a particularly historic communication between humans and other animals, the first “contact zone,” to use Donna Har-away’s insight, the first mapping of human social life, the first “mortal world-making entanglement.” In the domestication story, the “scavenger” in fact instigated one of the greatest feats of knowledge transfer of all time. In the establishment of a home and place came a most extraordinary metamorphosis of humans, as it were, into a world of imitation, into society.
