Chapter 1 uses the picture of human creation to “rule” other creatures in Genesis 1 as an entry point for exploring how the category of “animal” most fundamentally identifies a nonhuman being that is a) exploitable if useful or b) expendable if not. At the same time, Genesis 1 provides an occasion to reflect on how agriculturally oriented humans created gods in their image, gods who exhibited both the power and the care of other beings characteristic of domesticators.

Introduction: Using “The Lord is my shepherd” as a point of entry, this chapter rethinks domestication as a shared condition forming both human and animal lives rather than a practice imposed only upon nonhuman creatures. By exposing how ancient, human-centered frameworks of subjugation obscure the mutual confinement of humans and animals within long-standing systems of power, it reveals domestication as a pervasive and largely unrecognized structure of social life.

Chapter 2 looks at how the Genesis 1 and related domination-oriented onto-stories compare with accounts of domestication that emphasize co-evolution and mutuality of humans and animals. It places human domestication of animals within a broader picture of forms of inter-species relations, including mutualistic symbiosis, parasitic symbiosis, commensalism and mixed categories.

This article offers an assessment of the current state of scholarship on animal ethics in Islam. It first discusses a group of texts that share the preoccupation of demonstrating the superiority of Islam’s animal teachings, thus exhibiting a clearly apologetic tone. Then it turns to the debate on animal ethics in Western academia. By raising challenging questions, the latter holds the promise of delving deeper into the subject, but at its current stage much of it is still hampered by factual inaccuracies and methodological flaws. In conclusion, the article explains why the subject of animal ethics in Islam is particularly deserving of careful study.

Friendship has its public life in urban spaces. Drawing on recent social constructionist approaches to the domestication of space in urban studies, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the outdoor spaces of a mall in Beijing, China, this chapter explores how ordinary visitors domesticate the mall in their everyday lives. Focusing on the practice of friendship in three small groups, I trace how the mall’s spaces are (1) appropriated as “playgrounds” by after-school children, (2) negotiated as “informal childcare workshops” by guardians, and (3) claimed as “senior centers” by elderly visitors. I argue that the mall is not merely a backdrop for friendship, but that friendship practices constitute the mall beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This chapter contributes to scholarship on modern friendship beyond the private realm and advocates for a more embracing conceptualization of friendship in urban spaces.

Threats to the ability of democratically elected governments to drive and preserve their citizens’ economic development and thus promote their human rights are threats to the confidence of their citizens in democracy itself. Threats to the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure assets — that enable and preserve economic development — are threats to that very confidence. This chapter positions the technical backbones for digital public infrastructure (DPI), which delivers digitally native essential services, as critical infrastructure assets. This chapter uses the approach to DPI of the world’s largest democracy as a case study. It explores how India’s DPI — built per an open standards-based paradigm, implemented by protocols and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that comprise the ‘India Stack’ – operates at the scale of the world’s largest population. It finds the cyber resilience of the technical backbones for India’s DPI vital to India’s democratic resilience. This chapter thus calls on India to prosecute systemic cyber risks to these backbones that stem from the critical software running on them. India must incentivise vendors of that software to invest in the security of their software development life cycles and mitigate software supply chain risks. India must also manage open source software risks to its DPI appropriately. This chapter concludes by putting forward how India can export its approach and the India Stack. Other democracies, especially India’s Global South partners, stand to gain from its experience, including by strengthening the trust and confidence of their citizens in democracy itself, as well as by implementing norms for responsible state conduct in cyberspace that were approved by the United Nations General Assembly. Such benefits will be reinforced by Indian advice on how to deploy DPI in a cyber-resilient manner, informed by the multilateral consensus on DPI, software security and cyber resilience, which India forged as G20 President in 2023.

The chapter deals with fidelity of content, specifically concepts and register. I first discuss the querelle (‘dispute’) between those who favoured word-for-word translations and those who believed in updating or beautifying the ancient text for their contemporary audience, as captured in the phrase ‘les belles infidèles’, an approach which involves the notion of ‘compensation’. I then ask how translators tackle key concepts in Virgil’s oeuvre, such as the untranslatable pietas of the Aeneid, along with specific challenges that arise from Virgil’s Latin texts, such as puns and the incomplete lines. I investigate how translators attempt to match the various registers of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, then I consider the lens provided by the theoretical spectrum of domestication and foreignization, with examples including Aeneid translations in Italian, English, Romanian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian, concluding with Chew’s uncategorizable Georgics.

This introductory chapter includes analysis of the earliest versions of Virgil: in eleventh-century Ireland, in the Roman d’Enéas and in Middle High German. It explains how I chose to organize discussion of the translation history of Virgil in the Western tradition. I explain the chronological, geographical and linguistic scope of the book and discuss the relevance of translation theory and reception theory to the project. I account for the organization of the book by considering what it might have been (and is not) as well as what it is; I include summaries of the ten following chapters along with indications of the major and minor translations tackled in each. Because the book is composed of numerous case studies, I close by facing the hermeneutic challenge of how to rise above the case study and by indicating the interpretative gains of this study and ways in which it opens up further avenues for exploration by other scholars.

We explore and document the joint evolution of domesticated cereal production and highly hierarchical social structures in deep history and then trace the similar structures thorough to the plantation system. All of this history points to the gradual evolution of the monocultural system, today very prevalent but highly criticized on both social and ecological grounds. This is followed by a detailed examination of what it means to convert from the monocultural ideology to a polycultural system and all the details that emerge from such a move. We note that agriculture did not start with the idea of monoculture, the latter situated in particular historical moments, but that early agriculture and today’s more advanced agroecological systems are more accurately characterized as diversified farming systems.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

Colonial horse breeding regulations attempted to manage and classify equine difference, but conceded to the numerous challenges in establishing desired physical traits. Likewise, emerging feral horse herds challenged narratives of Spanish domination over colonial environments. Importantly, these feral horses were a direct product of Spanish husbandry methods that used both controlled and uncontrolled breeding. In this sense, both the free-ranging horses and selectively bred colonial horses illustrated the limits of domestication in their diverging from human efforts to intervene and control them.