ABSTRACT
Dogs are omnipresent across the globe and in some settings are subjects of great affection and importance. Human–dog relations across the North, however, vary in remarkable ways, often being far more complex than the owner-pet connections that are so familiar to us today. Lines intersecting with dogs and people are emphasized here, but other things and beings are also always intertwined across the North – sleds, fish, reindeer, landscapes, and so on. Relations of intimacy with dogs in the North are perhaps easiest to make sense of, but they are by no means consistent, even over the lifetime of an individual animal. Harriet Ritvo could be credited with identifying and coining one such redirection, namely the animal turn. V. Gordon Childe follows a similar path to Lewis Henry Morgan's work on human stages of evolution. He argued that civilization of humankind unfolded with the domestication of animals and plants.
