Hannah Chazin, PhD

Department of Anthropology, 

Columbia University

Abstract:

The archaeology of politics has spent the last couple of decades grappling with how to incorporate nonhumans into our understandings of political life in the past. Non-human animals’ (especially domesticated livestock's) exclusion from models of the political is somewhat different from other categories of nonhumans that have received greater attention in archaeological theory to date. This talk introduces a performative approach to politics, one which allows me to rethink the roles that domesticated herd animals played in political life in the past. I discuss the importance of processes of fractal recursion, a powerful form of semiotic recontextualization and sorting, which have a key role in the performative production of both relations of belonging and exclusion and relations between rulers and ruled. I discuss the archaeological evidence for processes of fractal recursion in stock in human-herd animal relations in the Late Bronze Age (1500-1100 BCE) South Caucasus. In addition to providing a new theoretical approach to political life in the past, the concept of fractal recursion also has interesting methodological implications for the work of archaeological knowledge production, by highlighting the specific nature of potential gaps between the salient categories of social analysis in the present and those that may have operated in the past.

Bio:

Hannah Chazin’s research focuses on the long-term history of human-animal relations and the analysis of how archaeological science shapes contemporary practices of archaeological knowledge production. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, and prior to that, she worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center (2016-2017). Her current research examines how humans’ relations with domesticated herd animals were key factors that shaped political life in the Late Bronze Age (1500-1100 BCE) in the South Caucasus. Her forthcoming book, Live Stock and Dead Things: Zoopolitics between domestication and modernity (University of Chicago Press), challenges the deep-seated narrative that contemporary forms of inequality and instrumental relations with animals have their origins in humans’ relationships with domesticated herd animals. Instead, the book posits that humans’ relations with domesticated herd animals in the deeper past were spaces of potential – one where the capacities of both humans and herd animals were altered by novel material-semiotic practices and multispecies labor relations. Re-working the theoretical and methodological tools of (zoo)archaeology, the book uses the unanticipated results of the zooarchaeological analysis to offer a new and more-expansive theoretical approach to both politics and human-animal relations in the past.