When Friedrich Engels read Lewis Henry Morgan’s work on American beavers, he concluded that animals transform their environments without intention, while humans always have “an end in mind” before acting. This mental image—the idea that humans first conceive a plan and then impose it on nature—became the foundation for celebrating domestication as humanity’s transcendence of the natural world. But what if making things, growing plants, raising animals, and bringing up children all work through the same fundamental process: not the application of pre-existing mental templates, but skilled engagement that sets up conditions for growth? Across four continents, from Amazonian gardens to Colombian peasant farms, from Papua New Guinea pig husbandry to Dogon agricultural practices, people describe their relationships with plants, animals, and children not as domination or engineering, but as participation in processes of growth and development.
The Mythology of Mental Templates
The standard story of human distinctiveness rests on a simple claim: we think first, then act. Marx famously contrasted the “worst human architect” with the “best bee,” arguing that even incompetent human builders possess something bees lack—a mental image of what they want to create before they begin building. This idea—that humans first conceive a plan in their heads and then realize it in the physical world—treats construction as the universal template for understanding all human productivity. Engels extended this reasoning to conclude that while animals might radically transform their environments through their activities, these effects are “by and large unintended.” The beaver builds its dam, but it has no conception of its task. Humans, by contrast, supposedly always labor “in order to” change their surroundings, with deliberate control and a mental plan.
This distinction became the cornerstone for celebrating domestication as the “decisive moment at which humanity transcended nature, and was set on the path of history.” Until people began deliberately breeding plants and animals, according to this mythology, they remained biological creatures living in nature. But once they brought plants and animals under human control through “art”—artificial selection—they pulled themselves above the natural world and became historical beings capable of culture and civilization. The very word “culture” shares its root with “cultivation,” reinforcing the idea that growing plants and becoming civilized are fundamentally the same process.
Francis Bacon’s 1624 utopian vision captures this enthusiasm perfectly. He imagined orchards and gardens where people “make (by art)” trees and flowers “to come earlier or later than their seasons,” make them “greater or taller than their kind is,” make them “more fruitful and bearing than their kind is,” and make them “differ in colour, shape, activity, many ways.” The word “artificial” was a term of praise, not criticism. Making things by art meant exercising human mastery over nature’s raw materials.
Marxist Anthropology and the Celebration of Production
This framework profoundly influenced anthropological thinking about human distinctiveness. V. Gordon Childe’s influential 1951 book bore the telling title Man Makes Himself: The Classic Study of the Origin and Progress of Man from Earliest Recorded History to the Rise of Modern Civilization. A Marxist archaeologist building on Engels’s foundation, Childe saw domestication as the moment when humanity made itself through labor and production. Marx and Engels weren’t advocating a return to nature—they wanted to harness productive capacities even more effectively, to build a socialist utopia that would out-produce capitalism.
Many anthropologists adopted this celebratory view of domestication, though often for different reasons than Marx and Engels intended. Sidney Mintz, for example, emphasized domestication to highlight non-Western contributions to global civilization. He would catalog the incredible achievements of plant and animal domestication around the world—wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs—and then note with irony: “And what did Europe give us? The Brussels sprout.” His point was that virtually everything we eat was domesticated by people who were supposedly “primitive” or “without history,” thousands of years ago. These were human achievements that demonstrated sophistication and intelligence, even if Western stereotypes refused to acknowledge them.
Other anthropologists questioned whether domestication actually represented progress. Richard Lee’s work on the !Kung San demonstrated that hunter-gatherers worked only 10 to 15 hours per week to meet their subsistence needs, spending the rest of their time in social activities. Marshall Sahlins built on this research to argue that hunter-gatherers were the “Original Affluent Society.” Jared Diamond went even further, calling agriculture “the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” because it led to class stratification, infectious disease, and chronic malnutrition. Anthropology spent considerable energy questioning whether the transition to agriculture improved human life.
But even these critiques, Ingold suggests, accepted the basic framework—that there was indeed a fundamental transition from gathering to producing, from hunting to herding, from wild to domestic. The question was only whether this transition was good or bad, progressive or destructive. What anthropology hadn’t done was question the very categories themselves.
Amazonian Gardens as Scaled-Down Forests
When we look at how people actually relate to plants and animals in different societies, the wild-domestic distinction starts to dissolve. Among the Achuar of the Upper Amazon, people maintain gardens at the forest edge, but they don’t see these gardens as opposed to the forest. Instead, the garden is understood as a scaled-down version of the forest itself. The forest is an “untidy” garden, and human society is a scaled-down version of nature’s society. As anthropologist Philippe Descola describes it, the garden plot “temporarily realizes the virtualities of a homely wilderness.” Rather than imposing human order on wild chaos, Achuar horticulture participates in the same kind of growth and development that characterizes the forest.
This isn’t simply a different metaphor for the same underlying reality. The Achuar aren’t thinking “really we’re domesticating plants even though we describe it differently.” They’re engaging in a fundamentally different kind of practice—one that doesn’t involve imposing mental templates on passive matter, but rather setting up conditions for the plants’ own processes of growth.
Papua New Guinea: Pigs Moving Between States
In Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, Marilyn Strathern documented a similar pattern with raising animals. People distinguish between things that are mbo and things that are rømi, which initially appears similar to our distinction between domestic and wild. But the actual logic is quite different. The key factor is whether something is under human care. A pig being cared for by people is mbo, but the same individual pig becomes rømi if it runs off into the forest. The distinction isn’t about an animal’s inherent nature or breeding history—it’s about its current relationship with human caregivers.
Even more striking, children are always mbo. “The child does not begin as rømi and become mbo,” Ingold notes. “It is mbo from the outset, by virtue of its planting within the field of human relationships.” There’s no sense that children start as wild or savage creatures who must be civilized through training. They’re embedded in relationships from the beginning, growing into maturity through participation in social life rather than through having social rules imposed on them. This reveals how raising animals and bringing up children follow the same logic—facilitating growth within relationships rather than imposing predetermined forms.
Dogon Agriculture: The Bush as Source of Power
Among the Dogon of Mali, the relationship between cultivation and wilderness takes yet another form. People distinguish between the garden and the bush, but the bush is where power comes from. When plants are moved into the garden and cultivated, their vital force gets “used up” or evaporates. This represents “an almost exact inversion of the modern Western notion of food production as the manifestation of human knowledge and power over nature.” For the Dogon, “it is nature—in the form of the bush—that holds ultimate power over human life, while the cultivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.”
This isn’t a matter of the Dogon being confused about where food comes from. They know perfectly well that they grow crops in gardens. But they understand this process as drawing on power that originates in the bush, not as human mastery imposing order on chaos. The garden is a place where the bush’s vitality is temporarily concentrated and consumed, not where human ingenuity creates something from nothing.
Colombian Peasant Farmers: Earth as Source of Force
The peasant farmers of Boyacá, Colombia, studied by Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera, express similar ideas. For these farmers, the earth is the source of fuerza—strength, energy, force. Before that, God provides this vital power, but it manifests through the earth. Human farmers don’t impose their will on passive soil. Instead, they assist the earth, helping to draw out the force that already resides there. The farmer’s skill lies not in dominating nature but in facilitating growth, in setting up the right conditions for the earth’s inherent vitality to express itself through crops.
These Colombian farmers, like the Dogon, the people of Mount Hagen, and the Achuar, understand their work as participating in processes of growth rather than constructing products according to mental plans. The contrast with Engels and Marx couldn’t be sharper. Where Engels saw intentional transformation according to pre-conceived ends, these farmers see skilled facilitation of inherent potential.
The Same Process Across Four Domains
Across these four ethnographic examples—from Africa, Papua New Guinea, and two different regions of South America, including both indigenous communities and peasant farmers—a consistent pattern emerges. People don’t describe themselves as socially superior beings acting upon nature or as humans controlling and dominating natural processes. They have different ideas about the relationships between gardens and forests, between earth and humans, between care and wildness. But in no case do we find the hylomorphic model of form imposed on matter, of mental template realized in physical product.
Instead, what appears consistently is the idea that people set up conditions for growth. And crucially, there’s often an explicit parallel drawn between growing plants and bringing up children. In the Amazonian case, there was even a kind of competition between plants and children for maternal attention—both were understood as requiring similar kinds of care and involvement. This parallel makes sense once we abandon the idea that children are savage animals who must be trained into civilization, stamped with society’s rules and regulations. Whether you’re making things as a craftsperson, growing plants as a gardener, raising animals as a herder, or bringing up children as a parent, you’re engaged in essentially the same process: facilitating development rather than imposing form, educating attention rather than transmitting blueprints.
The difference between gathering and cultivation, or between hunting and animal husbandry, lies not in some fundamental ontological divide but in “the relative scope of human involvement in establishing the conditions for growth.” This is, as Ingold emphasizes, “a matter of degree rather than kind.” There are gradations along a continuum rather than a sharp boundary between wild and domestic. Moreover, these gradations can vary over time. Weeds can become crops. Domestic animals can turn feral—as anyone fighting wild hogs can attest. The supposedly clear line between wild and domestic constantly blurs and shifts.
Trees and the Problem of Temporal Interlocking
Trees present a particular challenge to domestication mythology. Humans have long relied on trees for food, materials, and medicine, but trees don’t fit neatly into categories of wild versus domestic. It’s difficult to imagine selectively breeding a tree in the way we think about breeding annual crops or livestock. The literature on domestication tends to avoid discussing trees precisely because they complicate the standard story.
Ingold suggests that what may have happened—rather than some decisive transition from wild to domestic—is that humans increasingly came to rely on faster-reproducing plants and animals. This “temporal interlocking” of human and non-human life cycles might better explain the patterns we see than any story about mental templates being imposed on nature. Humans didn’t suddenly develop the ability to think first and act second. They gradually became more involved in the growth processes of particular species whose reproductive cycles meshed well with human activities.
Fellow Participants in the World’s Transformation
This reconceptualization has profound implications. “We can no longer think of humans as inhabiting a social world of their own, over and above the world of nature in which the lives of all other living things are contained,” Ingold argues. There isn’t a social world floating above a natural world below. Instead, we need to see ourselves as “fellow participants in the same world.” This echoes the earlier claim that scientists and hunter-gatherers “are fellow passengers in this world of ours,” engaged in a long history of interaction rather than divided between objective observers and subjective participants.
From this perspective, “human beings do not so much transform the material world as play their part, along with other creatures, in the world’s transformation of itself.” This isn’t a romantic return-to-nature sentiment. It’s a more accurate description of how making, growing, raising, and bringing up actually work. When you make something as a skilled practitioner, you’re not simply imposing a mental template on passive materials. You’re working with the properties and potentials of your materials, responding to what they offer, adjusting your actions as the work proceeds. When you grow plants, you’re not programming them according to specifications. You’re providing conditions and watching how they develop, intervening when necessary but always responding to the plants’ own patterns of growth. When you raise animals or bring up children, you’re not molding blank slates according to predetermined forms. You’re facilitating development, educating attention, participating in processes that have their own momentum and direction.
The model of mental image realized in physical product misrepresents all of these activities. It treats construction as the universal template when in fact growth, not construction, characterizes most of what humans do with plants, animals, children, and even many material objects.
Why Rethinking Making, Growing, and Raising Matters
The mythology of domestication as humanity’s transcendence of nature has consequences. It positions humans as separate from and superior to the rest of the living world. It treats intervention in natural processes as always and necessarily domination. It makes it difficult to imagine forms of human involvement with plants, animals, and landscapes that aren’t based on control and mastery. And it misrepresents the actual skills and knowledge of farmers, herders, craftspeople, and parents—treating them as if they’re executing mental programs rather than engaging in skilled, attentive practice.
By recognizing that making things, growing plants, raising animals, and bringing up children all work through skilled engagement rather than blueprint application, we open possibilities for thinking differently about human relationships with the more-than-human world. We can acknowledge the sophistication of agricultural knowledge without buying into narratives of domination. We can understand child-rearing as facilitating growth rather than imposing civilization. We can recognize that even skilled craftwork involves responding to materials rather than simply commanding them. And perhaps most importantly, we can see ourselves as participants in the world’s ongoing transformation rather than as engineers standing outside nature and remaking it according to our designs.
This has particular relevance for contemporary ecological challenges. If we can’t imagine human relationships with the environment except in terms of either domination or complete withdrawal, we’ll struggle to develop sustainable practices. But if we recognize that humans have always been participants in the world’s transformation—whether making tools, growing food, raising livestock, or bringing up the next generation—then we can ask better questions: not “how do we stop affecting nature?” but “how do we participate more skillfully, more attentively, more responsibly in ongoing processes of growth and change?”
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Making Growing Raising – Related Resources
For Ingold’s deeper argument that neither DNA nor mental designs work as blueprints—and that forms emerge from generative principles in skilled movement—see On Weaving a Basket.
For how Ingold developed this argument further, see the section on Material Thinking in Imagining for Real.
For archaeological evidence that early farming was actually compatible with egalitarian social arrangements, see Flood Retreat Agriculture in The Dawn of Everything course.