Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish

Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. In this careful and nuanced study, Marianne Elisabeth Lien explores how the growth of marine domestication has blurred traditional distinctions between fish and animals, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal—welfare legislation.

Drawing on fieldwork on and off salmon farms, Lien follows farmed Atlantic s...