The CHAMA Anthropology Collective is holding a seminar entitled “Seeking ‘the best of both worlds’: how a black truffle hunting dog is made in Chile.”
In this presentation, Luísa Fanaro will discuss the practices of preparing human-canine pairs for hunting black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) in Chile. Based on an ethnography conducted during her doctoral research, defended in the Postgraduate Program in Anthropology at UFSCAR, the author shows that this process depends on a dual dynamic of communication: between dogs and truffles — an underground fungus — and between dogs and humans. If, on the one hand, it is necessary to “condition” or “manufacture” animals for this activity — through a process that involves choosing the parents, selecting the puppies and their subsequent training —, on the other hand, dogs also participate in the formation of the humans with whom they live and work, teaching them to interpret signals, gestures and sensory forms of perception.
Using field data, Fanaro argues that it is through the canine sense of smell that what is hidden underground can be revealed. It is dogs that connect to the smell of truffles, allowing humans access to an invisible, subterranean world. This world only becomes accessible thanks to interspecific communication: a sensitive dialogue mediated, on the one hand, by the odors that connect dogs and fungi and, on the other, by the joint construction of ways of understanding, translating and sharing this olfactory experience.
The Anthropology, Environment and Biotechnodiversity Collective (CHAMA) is a research group that was born in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS -USP) and relies on classical studies of the anthropology of technology and the emerging anthropology of life to launch a program of teaching, research and scientific dissemination on biotechnodiversity, that is, the diversity of biotechnical actions and concepts.