From Philosophical Dwelling to Domestication – Following the Trace of the Snail in Anti-colonial World-making.

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a new philosophical rendering of the concept “domestication”. Updated from its use in anthropology and biology, domestication is examined not as a fixed biological or cultural category but as a critical tool for examining colonial power, ecological loss and relational ways of being. In this paper the concept is introduced in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger’s thinking on dwelling and habitation, broadening their critiques of modernity by attending to modernity’s colonial underside.  Domestication is defined as the naming, taming, and maintaining of relations of dependence and difference. With the historical contextualization of modernity as coloniality in place, domestication as a dialectic of nature and culture is brought into dialogue with Thom Van Dooren’s account of snail extinction in Hawai’i. Domestication is employed as a heuristic to trace the repression and representation of nature and culture in colonial modernity, providing a generative way to consider anti-colonial practices of inhabitation in this era of ecological devastation.