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Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)
01:00:38
An interview with Marcy Norton
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- [00:01]
Dr. Marci Norton
Don't chew on that, Max.
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- [00:04]
Dr. Marci Norton
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food.
- [00:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Wow, he is loving it.
- [00:08]
Dr. Marci Norton
What do you feed Cooper?
- [00:10]
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- [00:19]
Dr. Marci Norton
Looks like we're switching to blue Blue Buffalo Foods are made with the superior.
- [00:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Ingredients your dog needs to thrive.
- [00:25]
Dr. Marci Norton
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- [01:24]
Dr. Marci Norton
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Dr. Marci Norton
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Marci Norton about her book published by Harvard University Press titled the Tame and the People and animals after 1492. This book is really interesting because it helps us much better understand the encounter. The encounters between Europe and the Americas in terms of animals, about animals, about human animal interactions that help us understand what those early encounters would have been like and how they shaped sort of multiple different communities and cultures going forward, not just in that time period, but much longer beyond that. So that's one of the reasons I'm very excited to have Marcy here to tell us about the book. The other, of course, is that the book is about to come out. It's released in 2024, so this is very much hot off the press. Marcie, thank you so much for coming to speak with us.
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Dr. Marci Norton
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's really a delight to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm so glad to have you with us. And I'd love to ask you to start, please, with a bit of an introduction of yourself and an explanation of why you decided to write this book.
- [03:24]
Dr. Marci Norton
So I'm a historian of the Atlantic world with a particular focus on interactions between settler European communities and indigenous communities in Central Mexico and South America, in the Caribbean. I'm also really interested more generally in the way that humans interact with the much broader ecological environments, whether through food or human animal relationships. I decided to work on this project for a number of reasons. One of them has to do with what I think is probably a feeling that is not unique to me, but just sort of almost bafflement at this current moment that we live in, where on the one hand, my relationship with, with my dog is so important to me and I consider him. And actually when I started this book, it was another dog, she, who, you know, they're like family to me. And on the other hand, we live in a moment and that, and I know a lot of people feel that way about non human animals in their lives. And at the same time, I'm aware that more animals than ever suffer because of factory farming, because of climate change, because of environmental degradation of various sorts. And so, you know, when something baffles me, I'm a. I put on my historian hat and say, like, well, how did we get here? So, and you know, I could, I could say more. It also had to do with. In the course of researching my first book on tobacco and chocolate, I just kept coming across these sort of fascinating episodes that sort of surprised me about the ways that both indigenous and European settlers and Europeans in Europe were interacting with other kinds of animals.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I completely understand those motivations, Right. On the one hand, hang on, how did we get here? On the other, ooh, look at the interesting things I'm finding in the archive, right. Either one of Those would be an impetus for a book. And if you've got two, it's like, well, how could you not pursue that?
- [05:51]
Dr. Marci Norton
This. Yeah, exactly.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I'm very glad that you did. I think one of the interesting starting points for our conversation is that in some ways this is a topic we think we know well. Right. These first encounters between European settlers and indigenous communities, certainly human animal relations have been a thing for quite a long time for a lot of people with dogs, cats, etc today. But of course there's still more we can think about. So can we start perhaps with the new approach you're taking to subjectivity and human animal relations that allows us to have a new way of investigating these questions in the book?
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, that's a great place to start. I'm not actually quite sure, in fact, that I could probably figure it out when I decided that subjectivity would be really one of the main organizing concepts of this book. But it was early. And so subjectivity, the way that it's talked about in scholarly circles, both philosophical and biological, and the way that those discourses have affected other kinds of humanists and non humanists, for that matter, tends to see it as something that is sort of inherent to different kinds of animals. And so you see kinds of debates like is language, for instance, unique to humans? Or how far should we go in considering other kinds of communication patterns, languages and non human animals? Or to what degree do other species have various kinds of intelligence or capacity for empathy? And these are fascinating questions that have been pursued by ethologists and other kinds of biologists. But I felt like that, rather than approaching it that way, that science has the answers and will tell us, and once we find those answers, we can sort of apply that as a lens to historical evidence. We could perhaps go in the other direction and think about subjectivity as something that is discernible to an observer or through interaction. And I was really influenced by the philosopher Cora diamond and also Donna Haraway, who both talk in really beautiful ways about the way that what we know about other animals is not through reading studies about them, but how we interact with them. And that that the interactions themselves produce what we can perceive about the subjectivity of another animal. And then knowing that the way that we interact with other animals is not something that. That any individual for the most part has total control about, but it's something that we're born into structures that kind of organize the way that we interact with other animals. And so that that became sort of a starting point. And it also seemed like a really rich way to think about cultural differences as well, to sort of hone in on these sort of organizing structures that, that help put the sort of parameters for, for many people about how they will interact with other animals. And so, yeah, so that was kind of how I approach this issue of subjectivity, if that makes sense.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, it does. And it is, as you said, a helpful framework to understand how people conceptualized interactions with non human animals and therefore kind of what that led them to do given those frameworks. So if we stay on the European side for a moment, what differing forms of subjectivity were created by European conceptions specifically of hunting, which I found fascinating because it's such a thing in our kind of idea of late medieval culture of Western Europe, but we don't really think about the impact it necessarily has. So can you take us through the differing forms of subjectivity if we compare European hunting versus indigenous conceptions of predation?
- [10:30]
Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to do that. So, you know, to back up just a little bit for Europe, I focused on two what I term modes of interaction. One of them is the aristocratic hunt and the other one is livestock husbandry. And I saw these as sort of the most paramount organizing structures that conditioned how Europeans thought about and experience actually even more than, you know, sort of prior to thought, but experience the subjectivity of non human animals. And in the Americas, hunting also existed, though I use the term there, predation, both because I think it captures some of the indigenous terminology and because as you, you know, as sort of in your question was, is quite different from the way that hunting worked in Europe, though there is a fair amount of overlap as well. And so just on the European side, one of the things that I was trying to do in really delineating hunting from livestock husbandry is to get us away from this idea that there was some kind of, you know, root anthropocentrism, which sometimes you read about in other historical works that can help explain a whole diverse ranges of behaviors from hunting to, you know, the consumption of animals as food, and rather showing the ways that in fact, subjectivity in these relationships is actually produced in very different ways between hunting and husbandry. And so in some ways my argument about hunting might for some seem a little bit paradoxical on the European side, because I see it as a realm in which it forced people and delighted people, and I should say here, people being mostly elites in these contexts to really cherish the subjectivity of certain non human animals. And so there's sort of two meta categories in the European Hunt or one are those animals that I refer to vassal animals in part. I mean, again, that language of sort of chivalry and vassalage is very much part of the discourse of European hunt. So those would be the dogs, the horses, and the raptors that were trained to work in collaboration with humans in hunts, and then prey animals, who, of course, would be the target. And both sets of animals were in fact, very much treated and understood as fellow subjects in the European hunt. And those animals, those sort of special groups of animals, were given very well, in the case of vassal animals, extremely, you know, excellent treatment in many ways. And, you know, there's. There's sort of remarks that the. The meat that raptors would eat would be of better quality than those eaten, you know, by peasants, for instance. And so, and then your. Your question about, you know, so how does this compare to predation? So also in native America, and here I'm focusing on. On Central Mexico and the lowland areas of South America and the Caribbean, hunting was also, you know, a very important activity. But one of the chief differences was that there was not an intermediary set of animals as there was in Europe, in terms of vassal animals that were mediating the relationship between the prey in those regions. In other parts of the Americas, dogs were used, but not in these areas. And so a lot of the techniques of hunting involved a kind of a metamorphosis of the hunter in order to attract the prey. So that might be learning how to communicate with the prey in order to make them come to them, and a really deep understanding of the prey's habitat and in fact, sort of disguising, becoming one with the environment in order to attract the prey. So part of my suggestion is that in predation, some of the ideas that appear in kind of indigenous stories about humans turning, ancestral humans turning into animals are actually related to these really practical and material conditions of becoming close to the animals through forms of mimesis, through forms of imitation. In both Europe and indigenous America, different forms of hunting help humans see the subjectivity of other kinds of animals. But they do so in very different ways. And in fact, the subjectivity is quite different because in one, the real emphasis is above all, in some ways on the relationship with, you know, dogs and raptors and horses. And then the other one, it's a kind of, you know, mimesis transformation into the prey itself or himself or herself.
- [16:14]
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- [16:28]
Dr. Marci Norton
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- [16:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So given that emphasis on mimesis and the understanding of the natural habitat, livestock husbandry as practiced by Europeans seems especially odd and strange to transplant over into indigenous America. To what extent might we think of this practice being imported as not just being different in terms of subjectivity, but also as an extractive industry? And what might thinking of it that way help us understand about this clash of ways of considering human animal interaction?
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, so indeed, livestock husbandry was one of the most foreign things that there could be from the perspective of native communities in these regions that I study. And part of it has to do with, I mean, one. One way that I sometimes, in a kind of very pithy way, like to compare livestock husbandry with forms of human animal relationships that you see in the Americas. Is that the kind of essence of livestock husbandry and is that you feed another animal in order to eat it. Whereas in many parts of South America, the act of feeding another animal, human or otherwise, would make that other animal into kin, and so the last thing you would do would eat it. So there's just this really fundamental conflict between the mode of interaction of livestock husbandry and that of which is something I will probably talk about a little bit later, that of familiarization, the act of sort of taming through feeding wild animals. And I should also say that in thinking about livestock husbandry in terms of the colonization in the Americas for such a long time, it was kind of assumed that animal domestication, the way that it developed in Europe, and the livestock husbandry practices that followed from it were an essential and necessary stage in human development. And so that from the perspective of Europeans who arrived, and then also the kind of authorities back in Europe who were trying to understand and justify their own, you know, extremely violent forms of colonialism, the lack of these forms of domestication was seen as, you know, evidence of kind of inferior cultures. And to a kind of shocking degree, those assumptions are often embedded in modern scholarship. You can, for instance, see it in Alfred Crosby's the Columbian Exchange. So part of what I was trying to do in this book is eliminate any sense of superior or inferior ways of interacting with animals and just sort of look at what their effects were. So that's one of the ways that, you know, the kind of transplanting of livestock husbandry is really important. Now you. In your question, of course, you talked about another aspect that I discuss in the book, which is seeing it as an extractive endeavor. And so, in addition to seeing the way that livestock husbandry transplanted to the Americas brought with it practices and ideas very, very foreign to indigenous cultures, I also argue that husbandry itself was transformed in the Americas and became extractive. And what I mean by this is in. Let me look at this on a number of different levels. One of them is that in the context of Europe, when an animal was killed for slaughter, it was thought that it was organized around the eating of the animal. It's flesh for food, but. But the whole animal would be used, so the skin would go to the tanners, innards would go for sausage makers, the entire animal would be made use of. In the Americas, the livestock husbandry turned into something quite different where, because of the way that these different kinds of animals. And here I'm talking. Let's focus for a second on cattle could take the run of the land. And because they had no natural predator. Well, I shouldn't. They did have natural predators, but were able to in certain regions, really multiply. Practices came into being that just didn't exist in Europe. And one of these would be the killing of the animal in the. In the open plains and just trying to use the hide of the animal and exporting that and letting the meat just rot in the plains and be available, you know, for the crows and the vultures, sorry, the vultures circling it, or just, you know, rot in the field. And this was something that was actually really shocking to the Europeans who saw this as well, that you would have so much waste. And I take this kind of waste of the animal as being kind of exemplary of this kind of extractive mentality, that you would only use the hide for sort of its profitability in the Atlantic market and let the rest of it go to waste. So that's one kind of element of this sort of extractive quality of livestock husbandry. And the other is that the way that livestock husbandry itself becomes a really important instrument of indigenous dispossession. And so one of the things that I'm sort of arguing against is the tradition of the Colombian exchange of. Seen as sort of separate phenomena, the transplantation, to use Crosby's term, of the biota of. Of European originating animals. And then also the arrival of Old World diseases as sort of a separate phenomena. But you see in livestock husbandry that they become, which, you know, I should, that had these catastrophic death tolls. One of the things that you see in livestock husbandry is that these processes are actually linked together. The Europeans, I think, used the sort of institution of animal husbandry to take away from indigenous communities their labor by forcing them to work directly. And this is something that you can see throughout the Americas where, where first the Spanish and later other European powers created settlements, forcing indigenous people to work as laborers, or forcing them, in the case of New Spain, to provide, you know, for instance, a certain number of chickens. And one of the effects of. Of these exactions is that people were unable to work in their fields, for instance, for their own food security. And then the animals themselves, of course, would directly damage indigenous fields where they were harvesting staple crops. And so these together contributed significantly to people's ability to withstand the effects of diseases. We know in our own times, of course, that, for instance, with the COVID pandemic, that different populations were affected differently. This was even more of an intense phenomena in the violent context of colonial Americas. Then a third way that livestock husbandry contributed to dispossession is then through the transformation of lands into a category that the Spanish called baldios or commons. So that this again is specifically particularly apt in New Spain, where lands that then were not worked for food would then be considered to that the property rights of indigenous owners would not be respected and would be taken by Spanish ranchers. So anyway, that's a very long answer to your question, but showing how livestock husbandry then becomes a kind of tool of extractivism and dispossession in the context of the Americas.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, a very helpful answer because that might not be how we are used to thinking of it, but as that answer shows, there's a more than one reason that we probably should. So thank you for taking us through the kind of direct aspects and the way it feeds into this wider change ecologically in terms of agriculture as well. I'd like to now move, however, to pick up on something you mentioned earlier a little bit, because I'd like to talk about it properly. Familiarization, which is a fascinating process you discuss in the book as an indigenous practice that is helpful in understanding kind of some later things that go over to Europe, but also pokes some holes in ideas that domestication of non human animals is sort of a set thing and means the same thing everywhere. So can you tell us a bit about familiarization what it is and how it reveals some of these limits.
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, I would love to do that. So when I started this project, one of the things that, and I, you know, I started by just actually reading various chronicler accounts of Europeans describing animals and indigenous interactions with animals in the Americas. And something that kept reappearing were descriptions of indigenous capture of wild animals and then the taming of them. And it was happening, so it was appearing so repeatedly in the sources, in ways that you don't see systematically in descriptions of that practice in Europe, that it seemed to be something that was a kind of widespread and important phenomena. And as I read further, I started looking at more recent ethnographies by anthropologists and I discovered that in fact there was already a name for this which was familiarization. What familiarization refers to is, as I said, but I'll say it again, the practice of capturing an individual from really any kind of animal and then taming it in such a way as to make it a companion or even, you could say, sort of family member. A really important moment in this research was seeing that in fact, the, this was a concept that indigenous people had their own set of terminology for. So the first time I really saw this elaborated in a source was in a 17th century dictionary by a French Dominican named Raymond Breton. And he had written a vocabulary of colinago and French. And so he had a very simple definition for, for this term egg, which at its most pithy, he had a one line definition, which he, he described as an animal who one feeds. And then in order to explain this to his European audience, he actually contrasts it sort of explicitly with European livestock husbandry, or I should say implicitly describing how different it was. And he explained that these animals, that once they were fed, they wouldn't, they would never be killed. And in fact, even he goes on and elsewhere to explain that if a tame animal arrived, you know, in a settlement, that, that they would consider them to belong to their gods and that they wouldn't kill them. And he remarks, and giving an example, he said, they don't even eat chickens, not even an egg. And I found this to be really fascinating because in fact, the animal, of course, that he gave as sort of an example of this was not an indigenous animal, but a European animal. Chicken. Chickens were introduced by European colonizers. And so this is, you know, well over 100 years after Europeans had been in the Caribbean. And so what you see here is how powerful familiarization was as a structure. It was a way that indigenous people were very ready to accept European animals, chickens here being an example, but also in some areas, dogs, where there hadn't been a practice of raising dogs, but not accepting them through the lens of European livestock husbandry, but rather using their own structure of familiarization. And one of the things that I talk about is sort of trying to understand why this has been something that hasn't been more discussed by other historians, even though once you start looking for it, it's everywhere. It's in, you know, visual sources as well as various kinds of textual sources. And I think this goes back to, you know, something else that you mentioned in your question is how much that the notion that animal domestication is the proper way to interact with animals, it made it basically invisible to your. To European observers, both past and present.
- [32:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is a fascinating and very helpful thing to excavate, and goes back to kind of the initial impetus of. Hang on, I'm seeing interesting things in the archives. What's going on here? So thank you for taking us through that piece of it. Staying on Indigenous subjectivities for my next question, if we go back to thinking about predation subjectivities and the mimosis aspect of it and its very strong contrast to European practices, why might we understand Indigenous predation subjectivities as a generative process?
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Dr. Marci Norton
Right. Well, yeah. And so also, one of the things that I emphasize to sort of tie two of these questions together is that predation, and this is building off of work that anthropologists have done as well in contemporary period, is that predation and. And familiarization are actually sort of two sides of the same coin on a number of different levels in ways that, in fact, in Europe, livestock husbandry and hunting are actually, I think, often in conflict with each other in terms of subjectivity and sort of almost confusing for European culture as a whole. So in predation. Well, if any. So this is also where, you know, the title of the book comes from the. The Tame in the Wild, that almost. Well, any animal in the wild, which is, you know, pretty much every animal to begin with, has the potential to be both a companion, a kin member, or to be turned into food. And so. And so it's a kind of contingent relationship about which. What outcome will be. So sort of the subjectivity, the potential and real subjectivity of all animals is available, but the way that that subjectivity becomes manifest is very different depending on which outcome it is. So in predation, and this goes. Now, that was a sort of roundabout way to get to your question and sort of its generative qualities is that in the process of Both of hunting another animal and then consuming another animal. In fact, it's thought that the subjectivity of that animal can potentially become part of the subjectivity of the hunter. And this is, you know, my thinking about this was very much influenced by the great Brazilian ethnographer, Eduardo Vivaros de Castro. And so thinking about it both in the ways, as I mentioned already, that the very process of hunting, hunting itself required people to sort of merge themselves with the other animal. And then at the end, when one consumes an animal, either by wearing its fur or some of its bones or eating, it might take on the attributes. And this kind of subjectivity was actually could be a locus of sort of anxiety. So it wasn't. It's not that every time you would eat another animal that you would want to take on the subjectivity. So you actually, there are certain processes to ensure for certain kinds of certain moments in a life. For instance, when one is pregnant or one's partner was pregnant, it was important to be careful about what you would eat so as not to affect the kind of child that you would have. But at the same time, with certain kinds of animals, sometimes you would want to take on aspects of their subjectivity. So for instance, if you would want to. And now I'm thinking of examples that again comes through this dictionary by Raymond Breton, some of his other writings. If you would want some of the fierceness of a raptor, such as a kite or a jaguar that you were maybe importing from the mainland, you would go through procedures such as wearing some of its. Some of the fur around your neck, or even taking the heart of a raptor and having it penetrate your skin through cuts that you make in it to take on some of that fierceness and certain kind of rights for boys going into manhood. Or another example is the wearing of the beautiful feathers of, you know, different kinds of parrot species, for instance, which is a practice that you see in many regions. And in these cases, the birds were not necessarily hunted. They could actually be birds that you were raising as familiarized animals. But by taking on, but by wearing various kinds of feather feathered ornaments, you would be possessing in a sense, some of the kind of knowledge and beauty that these birds have and taking on some of their subjective traits as well. So thinking about then predation as a way of making the human body porous to other kinds of subjectivity and in that way generative, which is a really.
- [38:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Interesting thing to kind of then put together with some things you've already told us into my next question, because aside from the sort of shock of livestock husbandry in the Americas, which we've discussed already. The other sort of clash really that caught my attention the most in the book was between these concepts you've just been talking about of predation and familiarization, both of them individually, and the idea of being, as you said, two sides of the same coin with European religion, with Spanish Catholicism, which I admit, as someone who is not a Spanish Catholic, my impression, especially of this period does centre pretty heavily on. There's a whole bunch about devil and hell. And I'm sure religious studies scholars will tell me that there's a lot more to it than that, but there are still those components. How did that conception of this world, the next world, the afterlife, etc. Deal with indigenous practices that had a very different relationship to non human animals?
- [39:36]
Dr. Marci Norton
So to, to answer that wonderful question, I need to go back a little bit to some of what I propose about livestock husbandry. And, and one of it is that I actually link some of the demonological thinking and discourse to livestock husbandry in Europe in the sense that, you know, we tend to perhaps take for granted that depictions of demons, for instance, have these sort of. That you see in medieval Europe and Renaissance Europe as being kind of animalistic. That, that is sort of a normal way, but I sort of approach it as well, let's think a little bit more why that should be. And also the way that certain depictions of hell, and above all, I see Bruegel's Triumph of Death as an example of this, actually look a bit like an inversion of livestock husbandry operations where you have figures of death on horses operating like cowboys herding, literally herding together naked humans into these compact spaces. And so, and then you also have examples where, where there's concerns about one, one aspect of thinking about, you know, sort of witches, for instance, is that they have relationships with animals and familiars, for instance, as being sort of overly close. And that in fact, animals who seem a little bit too human like are themselves very suspicious. In other words, animal subjectivity itself could be a sign of a demon in disguise. And one of the ways that I think it's worth considering thinking about these is, is that this is sort of the kind of a mirror side of livestock husbandry, that a kind of discomfort with this. There's a sense that non human animals do have subjectivity which people experience, for instance, through hunting. And so what to do about these processes of livestock husbandry that treat them like objects rather than subjects. And that these concerns show up in theological discourse, in visual arts. In people's dreams and so on. And to add to this, it happens that, right. That some of the people, some of the clergy who are most involved in the early evangelization in the Americas, in both its positive and negative aspects, and I'll explain a bit more by what I mean about positive and negative, were themselves involved in persecuting witches in the Basque country in the 1520s. And these men then arrived. And specifically, I look at the man who becomes the archbishop in Mexico, Samaraga, and his colleague Andres de Olmos, who write treatises about indigenous idolatry and write sort of proto ethnographies. And they are coming, you know, right over from Europe with already they are primed to be looking for these kind.
- [43:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of.
- [43:32]
Dr. Marci Norton
You know, kind of demonological and sorcery practices, because that is what they have been thinking about in the Basque country. And so they arrive in central Mexico and are working in the 1530s and conducting these sort of. These what they would consider idolatry trials. And what I suggest is they literally don't have the kind of intellectual resources to quite understand what they're seeing in terms of the practices that we've talked about already, the practices around predation and familiarization. But what they do have is this kind of demonological framework. And so that they. They kind of slot in these practices and treat them, you know, the way that they would understand kind of what they see as kind of, you know, European witchcraft practices of turning into animals. So I'm a little bit more suspicious than some scholars about some of these early accounts from friars about scene of describing practices around people turning into animals. The Nahuat term is the nahuali, as being something that is purely indigenous, but in fact is something that is sort of mixed with these European ideas. And then on the other side of things, I'm really interested in the way. And this again, I'm building on wonderful scholarship of others who talk about the indigenization of Christianity, such as the foundational work of, for instance, Louise Burkhart, among other scholars. And look at how Christianity is actually quite adaptable to practices around predation and familiarization, and look at how Corpus Christi festivals and Easter festivals in Tlaxcala, to take one example, become opportunities to actually take many of the elements that would have been part of pre Hispanic festivals and sort of repurpose them in these Christian dramas. And I particularly focus, in fact, on the role of familiarized animals. So you see, for instance, a kind of drama with St Francis of Assisi, not surprisingly, at the center, who is busy talking to a and it's just described in the source as sort of a wild beast. I would like to imagine it is actually like a coyote or maybe a jaguar. It could have been either of those. We have examples of those as being tamed animals and imploring the animal to not attack livestock and to behave itself. And so you see here where the choice of a Christian story that lends itself to pre existing ideas about animal familiarization being adapted and so the way that Christianity as a structure could be really malleable to accommodate these existing ideas of predation and familiarization.
- [46:53]
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- [47:20]
Dr. Marci Norton
While supplies last hey, it's Brooklyn Adams.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Marci Norton
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- [47:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So speaking of that idea, right, of the adaptation of the entangling of the mingling between different practices, if we kind of go the other direction across the Atlantic instead of European practices in the Americas, if we go the other way, to what extent might we see the origins of European practices of having non human animals as pets related to indigenous practices of familiarization that you've been describing?
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah. So in the last part of the book, I'm interested then, of course in looking at the, as you mentioned, the way that not only do European modes of interaction transform indigenous societies, but indigenous modes of interaction have important consequences for European culture. And one of those domains is in the realm of the pet. So I think a good way to start here is to be clear that different people, different people, different scholars understand the category of pet in different ways. And for some people And I think there's, you know, there's advantages and disadvantages for any definition, but for. For some scholars, a pet is. Is. Is as broad as any, you know, relationship that is kind of organized around affection. And so for those scholars, for instance, a hunting dog, what I call a vassal animal, would be considered a pet, or. Yeah, that would be an example. But I am with. I am in the camp that sees a pet as. That it's useful to think of pet in a more restricted way. And that's in part because the term itself, pet and its synonyms in other European languages doesn't really come into practice until much later. And I think we should use those kind of linguistics until the 17th century, those sort of linguistic clues as revealing of real change within European society. And so other scholars who have looked at the origins of. Of pet as a more modern phenomena have tended to focus on things like, for instance, the rise of bourgeois domesticity in. In the 18th or 19th century. And so what. What I would like to contribute to the conversation is to take seriously another turning point in European history, which is the arrival of egg of these tamed, familiarized animals, these parrots and these monkeys that we start seeing in aristocratic portraiture in the early 16th century. And so that. To think about the pet as a kind of the result of an entanglement between existing European practices around the cultivation of close relationships with vassal animals and the arrival of what is, I think, truly a new phenomena of animals whose really only purpose is to provide companionship and reciprocal affection, which I think is the egg. So I. I consider the. The idea that the pet is sort of, you know, born at the intersection of the vassal animal, the court animal and the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And the egg, which is deeply intriguing. Especially I immediately thought of the paintings, the portraits of, for example, you know, early modern royalty with the parrot, with the monkey, with the whatever and going, hang on a second. Where did they get the parrot? Why did they want the parrot? So immediately that's where my mind went. And I thought it was a really interesting camp to be in and to tell us about. As my penultimate question, I'd love to stay in this theme of the intertwining of the entangling between the different cultures, the different subjectivities, and ask you to tell us a bit about. Of the many interactions and legacies of indigenous engagement with European especially sort of. It might be a bit early to call it scientific knowledge, but in that vein, of the many interactions in this area, can you maybe pick out some of the more interesting ones to share with us here.
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, I would love to do that. So, yeah. So the final chapter is about, I think we can absolutely call it scientific knowledge. And so one of, and what I really focus on is the entanglement of two projects. And one of them is a natural history that was chiefly authored by a team of indigenous men who were very much, you could say bicultural. They were schooled by, they're descendants of elite Nahua families for the most part, and they were educated by Franciscan missionaries and so were fluent in Latin, Nahua and Spanish. And they produced sort of an encyclopedia of indigenous knowledge that is known to many called the Florentine Codex. But I really focus on the sort of first draft that was created in the 1560s and in the book that was devoted to different kinds of animals. And look at the way that these indigenous modes of interaction, predation and familiarization were actually the sort of structures that produce some very, very detailed descriptions of a plethora of different animals that describe in great detail the sort of the coloring, the behaviors, the diets, the habitats of these animals in central Mexico. And that this work I suggest is really inspirational for the project of a Spanish physician who is, is ordered by Philip II to go to the Americas and his name is Francisco Hernandez, and to start to collect information about plants that will be of medicinal use. And in addition to writing about plants, he also writes about animals. And I think part of the reason that he chooses to, even though it's not part of the decree to write about animals, is he's so inspired by the, this work of these indigenous scholars. And so that, and, and his work which never gets published in his lifetime. It's, it's the translation of the title is the Natural History of Animals of New Spain circulates in manuscript and eventually portions of it get published in 17th century books, including an edition in, by the Lynch Academy in Rome, who also sponsors Galileo. And so I suggest that kind of the, you know, in some ways the origins of modern zoology are one of the origin points that has not been sufficiently appreciated. Is this the way that predation and familiarization produce this kind of extremely detailed knowledge about these different animals and the way that it then inspires this, the Spanish, we could call them, you know, sort of proto naturalist and becomes a model for other kinds of natural history endeavors.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for taking us through that. I think this is probably, I mean I could have said this at any point really, but this is perhaps a particularly good one to point readers to the book itself for all of the details on this particular topic. But thank you for giving us a highlights version of it. I do have one final question, if you'll allow me. And it feels almost cheekier than this question usually does because this book really has just come out. And yet my traditional final question is is there anything you might be working on next, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's on this exact subject that you'd like to preview for us while we read this book?
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Dr. Marci Norton
Yeah, well, it actually is a. It's a good segue from what I was just talking about. So in thinking about the entanglement of these indigenous modes of interaction and European forms of knowledge, I felt like I actually was only sort of scratching the surface. And I'm particularly so something that actually I haven't really gone into as much detail so far, but maybe I'll mention it. Here is one of the sources that I use in this book and when I'm focusing on Nahua communities in central Mexico are the pre Hispanic screen fold books. And I put books in quote marks because that term doesn't quite do justice to what they are that are made out of deer skin. And in fact, I think diagram the importance of predation in really interesting ways. And for instance, map onto stories that circulate in textual form the colonial period that talk about the. The way that there were earlier populations of humans who become transformed actually into different kinds of animals, into monkeys and turkeys and fish because they are devoured and these humans are devoured in kind of apocalyptic events such as through hurricanes and earthquakes, earthquakes and fire. And some of them, rather than dying, turn into these animals. And how that some of those concepts that we can see in these, in these pre Hispanic books actually make their way into these colonial texts like the Florentine Codex that I just mentioned, and that then make their way into these European natural histories. And so I'm really interested in kind of this thinking more seriously not only about the, you know, the kind of knowledge about plants and animals that Spaniards learn from native people by interviewing them, which they do, but also about indigenous epistemological concepts, structures of knowledge, and how they influence European, you know, concepts of natural history and ultimately, you know, even biological and ecological ideas.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Intriguing. And in fact, as you said, a very appropriate jumping off point from the last question on this book. So thank you very much for sharing that. But to remind listeners who might be going, hang on, this book's just come out, I need to get my hands on it. The title is the Tame and the People and animals after 1492 published by Harvard University Press. Marcy, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
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Dr. Marci Norton
Thank you. It's such a delight to talk with you.