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saved Dec 28/2006 02:18AM by chris witmore
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Companion species "In place of any presupposed, arbitrary divisions that abound between natures and cultures, Donna Haraway coming soon... articulates the concept of companion species (2003). For Haraway, the story of people and companion species involves much more than, as in the case of sheep and goats, the exploitation of food, fiber, and milk. Humans are coupled with their flocks and droves in gene flows and in infectious exchanges over the very long term. They live jointly. Their fates are intertwined in ways that the old distinction between domesticator and domesticated cannot adequately address. Bonded in what Haraway calls significant otherness (2003, 16), sheep, goats and humans are all actors in the articulation of landscape. They transform the land as a collective. Understanding the members of the droves and flocks of the southern Argolid as companion species is a path toward the analytical leveling necessary in understanding the countryside in terms of such mixtures and entanglements; what Haraway terms ‘naturecultures’' (Witmore 2005).

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