Intensive aquaculture has revolutionised the husbandry of marine species. In this project we treat aquaculture as the most recent turn in the human history of domestication, and ask:

• what are the challenges involved in husbandry under water?
• how does the process of domestication change relations between species, the animals themselves, and the character of what it is to be human?
• how do these processes challenge notions of nature, and of the boundaries between the social and the natural?
• What are the appropriate methods for exploring the relations between the natural on the one hand, and the human or the social, on the other.

The project is based in Social Anthropology at Oslo, in collaboration with and Technology, Innovation and Culture (also at Oslo University) and CRESC at the Open University.

In Tana, Northern Norway, which is one of the largest salmon rivers in Northern Europe, postdoctoral anthropologist Gro Ween is looking at fishing practices along different parts of the river where the character of fishing and the understanding of salmon intersects with issues of indigeneity. She is collaborating in part with historian Kristin Asdal who is working on the history of the environment and nature in Norway. In West Norway, in the region where salmon farming first started more than 30 years ago, Marianne Lien (Oslo Anthropology) and John Law (CRESC OU) are exploring current forms of domestication in the industry of fish farming. In both locations we are working ethnographically, through long-term fieldwork among people, salmon and their technologies. We are also working comparatively, in collaboration with scholars from both the natural and the social sciences, and our concerns are partly methodological. Thus we are concerned with the development of methods for knowing heterogeneous human, animal, scientific, technological and environmental relations. The project therefore also reflects and contributes to the CRESC concern with ‘the social life of method.’

Objectives

Atlantic salmon has been subject to a dramatic transition over the last three decades, from going through a life cycle predominantly in the wild, to a situation in which more than nine out of ten Atlantic salmon worldwide are born and raised on fish farms. This offers a unique opportunity for developing a more sophisticated understanding of marine domestication.

This transition is closely connected to a global increase in intensive and industrialised systems of farming including fish farming. Here Norway plays a central role: it is by far the largest producer of farmed salmon in the world. This poses particular challenges to Norwegian politics of nature, and environmental and animal welfare policy and practice. Thus Norway is both a ‘reservoir’ of salmon biodiversity, and a place where the challenges that intensive salmon farming poses for wild salmon fisheries are particularly acute. The project works on the assumption that in order to face up to these challenges a nuanced understanding of this unique, historically unprecedented situation is required.

Through a focus on salmon-in-the-making in which we trace salmon's transitions between the wild and the farmed, we also explore notions of nature and the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Those boundaries move and they are drawn in different ways in different practices. Is the Atlantic farmed salmon a ‘natural’ species? The answer is: no longer, at least not in Norway. It’s only 30 years since its ancestors were caught in the rivers and fjords of Norway, but now the farmed salmon is on the Norwegian Black List as an ‘alien species’. As the same time, as the populations of salmon in the rivers continue to fall, there are efforts to breed ‘wild salmon’ and introduce them back into the rivers. Where are the boundaries between domesticated and wild salmon? How are they maintained? How and where do flows and movements join these two categories together? And what are the appropriate methods for studying these dis/continuities. These are our questions.

The project, 'Newcomers to the Farm; Atlantic Salmon between the Wild and the Industrial', is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, through the program 'Miljø-2015' (NRC 183352/30); the project website is here.