Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish

Description

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. Cover......Page 1 BECOMING SALMON......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 CONTENTS......Page 8 Illustrations......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 1. Introduction: Salmon in the Making......Page 16 2. Tracking Salmon......Page 42 3. Becoming Hungry: Introducing the Salmon Domus......Page 63 4. Becoming Biomass: Appetite, Numbers, and Managerial Control......Page 91 5. Becoming Scalable: Speed, Feed, and Temporal Alignments......Page 119 6. Becoming Sentient: Choreographies of Caring and Killing......Page 141 7. Becoming Alien: Back to the River......Page 163 8. Tails......Page 179 Notes......Page 188 References......Page 212 Index......Page 224