The premise of this joint-seminar is to interrogate the human settlement through a critical genealogy of domestication and its corresponding architectures and ecologies. Our main hypothesis is that domestication, the process by which our industrial, capitalist civilization has been produced, works on two registers: the house and the environment.
From prehistory to contemporary times, the practice of environmental disturbance has been fundamental to human existence, yet within practices of ecological intensification, the rise of the sedentary family household marks an act of enclosure that fundamentally disturbed the pooling of resources that was characteristic of premodern settlements. In other words, the logic of the house as primary enclosure initiated a transformation of the whole environment, with the domestication of crops and animals becoming an irreversible ecological turning point and an origin point for the patriarchal premises of both capitalism and colonialism. By studying the evolution of the household alongside changing practices of subsistence, this joint-seminar locates the house and the environment as two fundamental sites of transformation.