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Paper short abstract

Oyster farming aims the production of oysters’ flesh. Domestication is a process through which humans tend to include other beings to their close and anthropized environment, the domus, creating a common time and space for humans, oysters and their environment: the domus ostrearia.

Paper long abstract

Oyster farming in France is one of the most recent domestication, dated from around 150 years from now. It aims the breeding (often labelled as cultivating) of oysters for their meet/flesh. Domestication is a process through which humans tend to integer other beings to their close and anthropized environment, the domus. This process impacts both the domesticated and the domesticators, humans. Their lives (humans and non-humans) are mostly impacted by the new calendar that emerge from this artificial co-habitation: conjugating the restraints of both (biological, economical, social, …) to achieve the exploitation of the domesticated non-humans. Oyster farmers so organized a sum of steps – rooted on their knowledge of oysters’ life cycle and the socio-economical calendar – to produce fresh oysters ready to be consumed by humans, mostly raw and alive. Although this division between exploiters/domesticators and exploited/domesticated seems to draw a line, the reality is far more blur… specially in oyster farms where oysters and humans are balanced between land and sea. To analyse this way of co-living, and the common time and space that emerge from it, I suggest to use the concept of domus ostrearia, combining the domus with the specificities of oyster farming, a domestication and breeding taking place in an open environment. This communication, based on a year-long ethnographical fieldwork in Etang de Diane in Corsica, New-Caledonia lagoon and Etang de Thau in South of France, wish to discuss this analysing-tool and the way it helps to (re)think domestication in a fast-changing world.