Yannis Hamilakis (University of Southampton; y.hamilakis@soton.ac.uk), Brian Boyd (Columbia University, New York; bb2305@columbia.edu) and Kerry Harris (University of Southampton; kmh102@soton.ac.uk)

Through this session we would like to explore the role of ‘the wild’ in farming societies. We would like to move beyond the notion of the wild, be it animals, plants or the landscape, as simply opposed to domestic in a structuralist mode, and the ideas that view it simply as an exploitable emergency resource base. We wish instead to reconsider it in terms of a different and fluid set of relationships with the environment beyond the everyday. We suggest that the wild may be a realm, albeit of mutable and permeable boundaries, in which the temporality of the rhythms of agricultural and domestic life are transcended; an arena of embodied engaging with the unfamiliar; and a place where unconventional, deviant or subversive social practices may take place. With this in mind we would like to consider the ways in which participation in these realms or relationships would have contributed to the negotiation of social relationships in the past.