Becoming Salmon

"Becoming Salmon takes banal aspects of life and reveals their shocking strangeness. Marianne Elisabeth Lien traces this strangeness--navigating across theory, history, ethnography, and poignant personal accounts--to illustrate how the relation of human to nonhuman lies at the core of our lives." --Ben Orlove, Professor at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and coeditor of Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society

"Through meticulous attention to the multiple practices of salmon farming in Norway and beyond, Lien convincingly shows how human and animal worlds are co-constituted in a mutual process of becoming."--Kirsten Hastrup, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

"Traveling with Lien, we learn that salmon domestication was always more lively, uncertain, and multiple than we had realized: salmon can come to have rights, they can be escapees, they can be biomass. Out of this multiplicity, Lien reveals a rich political and imaginative field."--Andrew S. Mathews, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests

"Lien beckons us into the mysterious trading zone where species as different as humans and fish touch--and shape each other's fates."--Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World