Anthroposalmonidae; or, A Salmoborg Manifesto

Please join us for a lecture given by Stan Thayne, Senior Lecturer of Anthropology, Environmental Studies and Religion.

Salmon are cyborgs. After being “spawned” in buckets by humans and reared in laboratories, juvenile salmon are sent through a series of factory machines that first mark their bodies (by clipping a fin) and then embed a microchip transponder in their flesh so that biologists can survey their movements. They are then released into a wild that historian Richard White dubbed “the organic machine”—the Columbia River. At dams they are passed through intricate “juvenile passage systems” that resemble waterpark slides and many of them are loaded into tanks on barges or trucks to shuttle them past subsequent dams. Their movements are not only surveyed by but are often literally driven by humans. I refer to this mesh as anthroposalmonidae. For better or worse, salmon are not only produced by but are themselves (at least partially) modern machines. In this paper I will use the concept of anthroposalmonidae to address two related questions: (1) is a “wild” salmon (whatever that means) still a viable possibility in the Columbia Basin? Or (2) is it simply better to be a salmoborg than to be extinct?