Wilderness and domestication in human-other-than human primate collectives

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing the frontier between wilderness and domestication in the production and experience of human and non-human primate collectives. It describes three diverse ethnographic cases: populations of humans and other primates in a wildlife and exotic rescue centre in Italy, in a protected park in The Gambia, and in unprotected forests in Brazil. Such a panorama of frontiers between wild and domesticated human-non-human primate collectives allows to observe how these are constantly redefined
as flexible interactions in specific lived experiences. Active agency of non-human primates emerges in the described ethnographic examples as one of the main elements in the production of the wild-domesticated-wild frontier. The main thesis is that wilderness and domestication are movements of mutual symbioses producing dynamic networks in which involved actors are reciprocally redefined. Such a frontier, far from defining a static dichotomy, crosses epistemological and ontological borders, constituting a device for the multiplication of the voices in ethnographic descriptions.

KEYWORDS:
Multispecies. Human-non-human primates. Domestication. Wilderness.