‘If You Were Always with Them, You Were Their Friend’: Cows and Oxen Co-Constituting Childhoods in Grazing Memories of Rural Slovenia

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic study of childhood memories related to animal husbandry in Southeast Slovenia, the article explores how more-than-human sociality unfolded in the everyday encounters of working and living together through children’s taking care of cows, oxen, and land. The article contributes to the discussion on multispecies assemblages and more-than-human sociality in the context of rural childhoods. Highlighting the shared agency of animals and children, cows and oxen are situated as subjects co-constituting the rural landscape and everyday lives of young people. By extending sociality to the more-than-human world, the article proposes that work related to animal husbandry in a domestic agricultural economy was embedded not only in social relationships but also in multispecies assemblages. Furthermore, by troubling the notions of children’s socialization alongside animal domestication, the authors suggest reconceptualizing children’s socialization as a relational multispecies process of coming into being and reframing social relations as more-than-human sociality.