Human-Animal Relationships and The Columbian Exchange Norton M 2015

The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange
Author(s): MARCY NORTON

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2015), pp. 28-60
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43696335
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The Chicken or the legue : Human-Animal Relationships
and the Columbian Exchange
MARCY NORTON
Nhamácachi: Animals who come tame before them, whom they believe belong
to their Gods, and whom they dare not kill.1
In 1543, a Taìno man had been living in the mountains in the central southern part
of Hispaniola for twelve years. Though fluent in Spanish and familiar with Spanish
ways, he had fled to escape the oppressive exploitation of the encomienda. The man
survived in the wilderness through a special relationship with three formerly feral
pigs, two males and a female. The man and his pigs would go hunting for "wild" pigs,
in the same way Europeans hunted prey with dogs - one pig tracking, one seizing,
and one assisting, with the Indian giving the final thrust of death with a make-do
spear. Once the prey was killed, the man would preside over the ritual distribution
of the carcass, as was done in traditional hunts in Europe with dogs, "giving the
interior parts to his companions," while he made a barbecue for himself and salted
the flesh for several days' consumption. When prey was not readily available, the man
also foraged for roots and plants, which he ate and shared with his porcine company.
"At night," wrote the conquistador-turned-chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo, "the said Indian went to bed among that bestial company, petting for hours
one and then the other, devoted to the swine [la porcesa ]." Tragedy ensued, however,
when the pigs were spotted by several Spanish soldiers who were in the mountains
looking for runaway slaves after a recent rebellion. Assuming that these were feral
pigs who roamed the countryside rather than the property of an individual, the sol-
diers slaughtered them. Bereft over their loss, the man told the three soldiers, "Those
pigs gave me life and maintained me as I maintained them; they were my friends and
good company; one I gave this name, and the other was called so-and-so, and the
female pig was called so-and-so." Oviedo reported that "the deaths of these three
Funding for this project, as well as opportunities to share it, was provided by George Washington Uni-
versity, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Carter Brown and Huntington Li-
braries. I am grateful for the useful feedback I received from readers and audiences at Columbia Uni-
versity, Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Davis, and
New York University, as well as the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History.
I also wish to express my enormous appreciation for those who read drafts of this article and offered
insightful critiques and suggestions: Luiz Costa, Ben Cowan, Lauren (Robin) Derby, Carlos Fausto, Lynn
Hunt, Maya Koretsky, Rita Norton, Istvan Praet, David Sartorius, and Zeb Tortorici, as well as the
editors of and the anonymous readers for the AHR. I am also thankful for the research assistance of
Robert B. Stoner. And special thanks to Claudia Verhoeven for being such a good reader of so many
drafts, and to Paul and Lilly ("Shmaug") for helping me think about intersubjectivity.
1 Raymond Breton, Dictionaire françois-caraibe (Auxerre, 1666), 20.
28
The Chicken or the legue 29
animals brought much pain and suffering to the Indian, and that the soldiers reported
feeling very bad for having slaughtered the companionable pigs."2
Oviedo was amazed by "this great novelty" in which "pigs being hunted were
converted into being hunters." He credited the Indian, "being a rational animal and
human man," with impressive ingenuity for "teaching those beasts in hunting, bring-
ing a trainable friendship to that occupation," and convincing his pigs "to kill others
they came across, because their master did not have love for these others." Yet he
also wrote scornfully of the choice to "fle[e] men and be content living with beasts
and being bestial." The conquistador vacillated between considering this an illus-
tration of man's superiority to animals and viewing it as a case of a man's debasement
into beastliness.
Prying open this sad encounter, we see central divergences between European
and Amerindian cultures' ways of organizing inter-species relationships. Oviedo's
account reveals the European principles of maintaining proper boundaries between
humans and beasts and adhering to a hierarchical taxonomy of kinds of animals. In
other words, for Oviedo and his European readers, the Taino man mystified, at best,
and erred, at worst, both by living in overly close proximity to "beasts" and so "being
bestial," and by confounding a legitimate "vassal" animal, a category that was con-
fined to certain dogs (as well as horses and raptors) used in hunting and warfare, with
the lowliest of livestock animals, the pig.3 For many Europeans, the human/animal
and hunting/livestock binaries were organizing principles, and those who confused
or attempted to cross these boundaries were troubling.4 For Amerindians such as the
unnamed Taino man, the fundamental dividing line was between wild and tame be-
ings. This divide bridged and superseded the human/non-human binary, grouping
human kin and tamed animals on one side and human enemies and prey on the other.
For this man and many other Amerindians, the transformation of wild into tame, of
enemies into kin, of prey into "pets," was a central and desirable pursuit.
The adoption and taming - or "familiarization" - of non-human animals was
ubiquitous among Caribbean and lowland South American indigenous groups.5
Some individuals of non-human species, ranging from parrots to peccaries, were
hunted and consumed; other individuals of the same species were tamed and cher-
ished as iegue, a Carib term that can denote a tamed animal or an adopted human
child. Likewise, the same logic organized many Caribbeans' and South Americans'
2 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias [hereafter HGN], ed. Juan
Pérez de Tudela Bueso, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Madrid, 1992), 1: 221-222. All translations from Spanish and
French are my own unless otherwise noted.
3 I have argued that that "vassal" animals (horse, hound, and hawk) were deemed superior to
livestock (cattle, swine, poultry, etc.). Marcy Norton, "Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings
in Early Modernity," in Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800
(London, 2012), 53-83; Norton, "Animal" (Spain), in Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills, eds., Lexikon
of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (Austin, Tex., 2013), 17-19.
4 On "anthropocentrism" in early modern Europe, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World:
Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1983); Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals ,
Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006). An account that deemphasizes
anthropocentrism and focuses on the "diversity" and "complexity" of "the Spanish cultural vision of
animals" is Abel A. Alves, The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and Human
Interaction with Other Animals, 1492-1826 (Boston, 2011), 10.
5 Because the focus of this article concerns the colonial period, I will primarily use the past tense
in referring to the practices of indigenous groups, but as the table in the Appendix and the text make
clear, many of these practices continue into the present.
American Historical Review February 2015
30 Marcy Norton
interactions with non-humans prior to European acculturation.6 Hunting and war-
fare were understood and enacted as analogous activities in which a primary goal was
to obtain captives who would be subject to either the regenerative death of prédation
or the social birth of adoption. Some captives, primarily though not exclusively chil-
dren and women, were incorporated into communities, with individuals' status rang-
ing from kin to slaves. Other captives, primarily men, were killed, often accompanied
by cannibalization and/or "trophy-taking" (transforming body parts - heads, bones,
teeth - into ritual objects), and so also incorporated in another fashion.
legue was a fundamental concept and structure that organized inter-species, as
well as intra-human, relationships in many parts of native America. Though there
is overlap with the concept of "pet," a key difference is that the category iegue bridges
the divide between humans and other animals. While Amerindian practices of cap-
turing, taming, and socially assimilating wild animals have received some attention
from contemporary ethnographers working in lowland South America, historians
have not attended to these phenomena. However, a systematic investigation of the
extensive, if scattered, ethnohistorical evidence of Amerindians' predilection to
tame wild animals, found in the textual and visual accounts of explorers, soldiers,
missionaries, naturalists, and indigenous writers, illuminates the importance of these
practices and their vitality over the longue durée, as well as how they affected the
reception of domestic animals imported from Europe.
In addition to the intrinsic significance of iegue, understanding the taming process
forces us to rethink conventional narratives concerning the place of animal "do-
mestication" in history. That the domestication of animals represents a necessary
milestone in the "progress" of a civilization is discernible in, among others, the bib-
lical story of Jacob and Esau, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod's "stages of man,"
colonial discourses about Amerindian barbarism, and Enlightenment narratives of
progress, including those of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.7 An early theorist of animal
domestication marked it as the pivotal phase in which man moved beyond "the
threshold of barbarism" - to which, "perhaps more than to any other cause, we must
attribute the civilizable and the civilized state of mind."8
These social-evolutionary assumptions (stripped of overtly Eurocentric lan-
guage) survive to a surprising degree in influential scholarship on animal domes-
tication and the related phenomenon of livestock husbandry.9 Definitions of animal
domestication vary, but many consider it "a process through which animals are in-
6 This equivalence, based on twentieth-century ethnography, has been noted by Philippe Erikson,
"De l'apprivoisement à l'approvisionnement: Chasse, alliance et familiarisation en Amazonie améri-
endienne," Techniques & Culture 9 (1987): 105-140; and Philippe Descola, "Pourquoi les Indiens
d'Amazonie n'ont-ils pas domestiqué le pécari? Genealogie des objets et anthropologie de
l'objectivation," in Bruno Latour and Pierre Lemonnier, eds., De la préhistoire aux missiles balistiques:
L'intelligence sociale des techniques (Paris, 1994), 329-344.
7 On domestication as a narrative of progress, see Kay Anderson, "A Walk on the Wild Side: A
Critical Geography of Domestication," Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 4 (1997): 463-485; Tim
Ingold, "From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human-Animal Relations," in Aubrey
Manning and James Serpell, eds., Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives (London, 2002),
1-22, here 2-4.
8 Nathaniel Shaler quoted in Anderson, "A Walk on the Wild Side," 467.
9 An important exception is the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold; see, for instance, "From Trust
to Domination" and The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Iowa
City, 1987).
tegrated into the domestic realm as property or prestige goods by controlling their
reproduction and by providing them with the means for feeding and protection."10
For others, who focus more on changes in the animal population than on the per-
spective of human domesticators, "domestication can be described as the process
during which the gene pool of subsequent generations of a population is altered
through human selection, with the ultimate result being animals that are capable of
dual identification [identifying with both humans and members of the same species -
"conspecifics"] and that reproduce in an anthropogenic habitat."11 Animal taming
shares some features with domestication, namely non-human animals' "integration
into the domestic realm" and their capacity for "dual identification." Very signifi-
cantly, taming does not require human involvement in the reproductive process; nor,
in the South American context, was it associated with pastoralism or livestock hus-
bandry, "economic systems[s] based on the use of domestic animals."12 It makes
sense to infer, as is common in the scholarship, that the taming of wild animals was
a necessary prelude to "domestication" in Eurasia. However, the converse does not
hold: to apply the term "semi-domestication" to the taming of wild animals among
present-day "hunter-gatherers" is a distortion, as it implies a teleological and uni-
versal trajectory that is not warranted. Jared Diamond makes this teleology (and
Eurasian-centrism) explicit when he asks, "Why were Eurasia's horses domesticated,
but not Africa's zebras? Why Eurasia's pigs, but not American peccaries or Africa's
three species of true wild pigs? . . . Did all those peoples of Africa, the Americas,
and Australia, despite their enormous diversity, nonetheless share some cultural ob-
stacles to domestication not shared with Eurasian peoples?" His answer is that they
did not, and the answer he provides is that the native species of Africa, Australia,
and the Americas were not suitable "candidates" for domestication. By assuming
that only "obstacles" would explain non-Eurasians' failure to domesticate animals,
Diamond furthers the ancient belief in a universal trajectory of human progress
dependent on domestication. He eschews that older model in which non-Westerners'
"barbarism" prevented them from domesticating (large) animals as capably as Eur-
asians, replacing it with one that blames the surly dispositions of non-Eurasian non-
human animals.13 Evidence suggests that there indeed was a "cultural" reason (but
no reason to think "obstacle") for why the trajectory of animal-human relationships
did not lead to Eurasian-style domestication in South America. Parrots, peccaries,
10 Guillermo L. Mengoni Goñalons and Hugo D. Yacobaccio, "The Domestication of South Amer-
ican Camelids: A View from the South-Central Andes," in Melinda A. Zeder, Daniel G. Bradley, Eve
Emshwiller, and Bruce D. Smith, eds., Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological
Paradigms (Berkeley, Calif., 2006), 228-244, here 230. The standard general treatment of domestication
remains Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1999).
For a useful overview of different definitions and models, see Nerissa Russell, "The Wild Side of Animal
Domestication," Society and Animals 10, no. 3 (2002): 285-302.
11 Werner Müller, "The Domestication of the Wolf - the Inevitable First?," in J.-D. Vigne, J. Peters,
and D. Helmer, eds., The First Steps of Animal Domestication: New Archaeozoological Techniques (Ox-
ford, 2005), 34-40, here 35.
12 Mengoni Goñalons and Yacobaccio, "The Domestication of South American Camelids," 230.
13 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs , and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997), 163,
my emphasis, and more generally 161-167. For a critique of teleological assumptions about the process
of domestication and of Diamond in particular, see Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters , Herders, and Ham-
burgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York, 2005), 83-85; see also Ingold,
"From Trust to Domination."
32 Marcy Norton
monkeys, tapirs, and sloths, among others, appear eminently tameable.14 But in the
cultural system of Amerindians in the Caribbean and lowland South America, con-
trolling animal reproduction and maintaining livestock was not desirable.
When Amerindian groups did adopt European domesticates, they did so on their
own terms, placing them in the same category as other iegue , not that of European
livestock. "Columbian Exchange" is the label applied to the intertwined ecological
and social consequences of the cross-hemispheric transfer of previously isolated flora
and fauna in the wake of European expansion into the Americas beginning in 1492.
In Alfred Crosby's pathbreaking works The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cul-
tural Consequences of 1492 and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900-1900, colonization became more than the intentional actions of hu-
mans; it focused on the role of feral pigs, horses, and erosion-causing sheep, as well
as smallpox and influenza, in transforming American ecologies.15 Though Crosby's
seminal scholarship rightfully spotlighted the unintentional effects of hemispheric
integration, there was little attention to the extent to which important elements of
the transfer depended on human knowledge, particularly non-European knowledge.
Markedly absent in these environmental histories and others that followed in their
wake is a consideration of the cultural and social apparatus with which Amerindians
mediated their interactions with animals, or their responses to novel fauna and social
structures (European-style hunting and husbandry) brought by colonizers.16 Some
recent studies have rectified the tendency toward biological determinism, yet there
is much more to know about how inter-species encounters depended on social struc-
tures and human knowledge possessed by Amerindians.17
The arguments being put forward about "domestication" (or the lack thereof)
and the Columbian Exchange highlight the agency of Native Americans. But what
about the agency of non-human actors, the animals hunted and the iegue tamed? The
question of non-human agency and subjectivity is a vexing and fraught issue for the
recent surge in scholarship that concerns human-animal relationships, as well as
contemporary debates about animal "rights" and "personhood."18 But there is no
agreement on how to approach non-human animal actors. In the field of environ-
14 Descola, "Pourquoi les Indiens d'Amazonie n'ont-ils pas domestiqué le pécari?," 340. For a dif-
ferent cultural explanation, see Philippe Erikson, "De l'acclimatation des concepts et des animaux ou
les tribulations d'idées américanistes en Europe," Terrain 28 (1997): 119-124.
15 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th
Anniversary Edition (Westport, Conn., 2003), chap. 3; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological
Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986), chap. 8.
16 See, for instance, Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the
Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994).
17 For exceptions to the tendency toward biological determinism, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson,
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004); Marcy Norton,
Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008); Judith A.
Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the At-
lantic World (Berkeley, Calif., 2009).
18 In addition to the titles mentioned below, my reflections on animal agency and/or subjectivity have
benefited from Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington, Ind., 2002); Tom Tyler and
Manuela Rossini, eds., Animal Encounters (Leiden, 2009); Dorothee Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures: An-
imals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville, Va., 2010); Lauren Derby, "Bringing the An-
imals Back In: Writing Quadrupeds into the Environmental History of Latin America and the Carib-
bean," History Compass 9, no. 8 (2011): 602-621; Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?
(New York, 2012). In accordance with Claude Lévi-Strauss's dictum that "animals are good to think
with," there have long existed histories of human views about animals. On the difference between animals
mental history, including the above-mentioned studies concerning the "Columbian
Exchange," animals often figure as one of many components of "nature," alongside
other organisms and subsumed within larger ecological systems; non-human animals
are assigned agency, but not subjectivity.19 Other scholars, however, want to chal-
lenge anthropocentrism and humans as privileged historical subjects by showing that
assumptions about a fundamental divide between humans and (some) other species
are groundless. Many are inspired by the work of animal behaviorists, who have
shown that capacities once thought to be uniquely human are in fact shared with
other species.20 They point to studies showing that dogs have a sense of fairness,
elephants exhibit empathy, chimps display language abilities, and many species dem-
onstrate a capacity to grieve.21 Likewise, seeking to efface unwarranted barriers sep-
arating humans from other creatures, a number of philosophers focus on the "an-
imal" characteristics of humans rather than the so-called "human" characteristics of
animals. These thinkers, among them Cora Diamond and Jacques Derrida, contest
the Kantian subject organized around reason, and instead, in the words of Cary
Wolfe, show "how our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude makes us . . .
'fellow creatures' in ways that subsume the more traditional markers of ethical con-
sideration, such as the capacity for reason, the ability to enter into contractual agree-
ment or reciprocal behaviors, and so on."22 Some also invoke the inclusionary agenda
of social history and subaltern studies, and see the fight against "anthropocentrism"
and "speciesism" as the next frontier, following the struggles against sexism and
racism.23 Despite the heterogeneity of this scholarship, there is a shared understand-
ing that the world is divided between subjects (sentient beings who act with conscious
intent) and objects (inert matter), though the former category is no longer reserved
as "objects of human analysis" and "as beings in the world who may themselves create change," see Erica
Fudge, Renaissance Beasts : Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana, 111., 2004), 3.
19 For instance, J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-
1914 (Cambridge, 2011). While underscoring non-human agency, he upholds an ontological distinction
between "nature - viruses, plasmodia, mosquitos, monkeys, swamps," on the one hand, and "human-
kind," on the other (2).
20 For instance, Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents : The Moral Status of Animals in
the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh, 2005); Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human,
Animal, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 157; and see my conclusion below.
21 Examples include Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (New York,
2002); Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York, 2009);
Virginia Morell, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (New York, 2013).
22 Cary Wolfe, "Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy," SubStance
37, no. 3 (2008): 8-36, here 8. The Ur-text for many following this line is Jacques Derrida, "The Animal
That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369-418.
These philosophers are moving away from earlier kinds of arguments, such as those by Peter Singer,
that hinged on proving that animals have certain kinds of faculties. For an overview of these debates,
see Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents ; LaCapra, History and Its Limits.
23 See, for instance, Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad, eds., Species Matters: Humane Ad-
vocacy and Cultural Theory (New York, 2012); Erica Fudge, "A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History
of Animals," in Rothfels, Representing Animals, 3-18. At the most politicized end of the spectrum, see
the website of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies: "ICAS believes that to eliminate the domination
and oppression of animals in higher education animal advocacy/rights/liberation/abolitionist scholars
must come together under one common field of study, similar to that of other marginalized fields of study
(e.g., Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latina/o Studies, Native American Studies), while constructively
debating theories, tactics, and strategies for the advancement of animal liberation and freedom."
"ICAS's Core Belief," http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/about/.
34 Marcy Norton
for humans alone. Other traditions seek to dismantle a nature/culture and subject/
object divide altogether.24
Rather than finding methodological, epistemological, or ethical justification in
these various traditions that emerge from European lineages (for example, "West-
ern" philosophy, laboratory science, and social sciences), recent landmark studies
have sought to recover ideas of animal agency from non-European perspectives.
Following the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we have begun to "move
out from the Amerindian world as an object of observation/study into an effort to
look to the world (including its non-human components) from an Indigenous point
of view. Not the return of the native, but the turn of the native."25 As Abel Alves
in The Animals of Spain and the contributors to Centering Animals in Latin American
History have shown, this is imperative in the Latin American colonial context, where
"power over humans is often via power over animals, or the animalization of hu-
mans," so apparent in Oviedo's account of the Taino man and his three pigs.26 It is
then critical to pay attention to Amerindian ontologies, in the words of anthropol-
ogist Carlos Fausto, in which "intentionality and reflexive consciousness are not ex-
clusive attributes of humanity but potentially available to all beings of the cosmos,"
so that "animals, plants, gods, and spirits are also potentially persons and can occupy
a subject position in their dealings with humans."27 Part of the value of recovering
Amerindian concepts of animal agency and practices concerning iegue, and therefore
trans-species notions of subjectivity, is that it avoids the universalizai ion of specif-
ically European notions of subjectivity and agency, particularly important in fraught
colonial settings. It also reveals that there exist trajectories other than European
traditions that have led to today's trans-species understanding of "personhood."28
Recent scholarship has emphasized cultural continuities among pre-contact in-
24 Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and others in the tradition of science and technology studies
emphasize the co-constitution of beings and objects. A foundational text is Bruno Latour, We Have Never
Been Modern , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet
(Minneapolis, 2007).
25 Alvaro Fernandez Bravo, "Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Some Reflections on the Notion of Spe-
cies in History and Anthropology," Bio /Zoo 10, no. 1 (Winter 2013), http://hemisphericinstitute.org/
hemi/en/e-misferica-101/viveiros-de-castro. See also Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture , trans.
Janet Lloyd (Chicago, 2013).
26 Neil L. Whitehead, "Loving, Being, Killing Animals," in Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, eds.,
Centering Animals in Latin American History (Durham, N.C., 2013), 329-345, here 331; see also Few and
Tortorici, "Introduction: Writing Animal Histories," ibid., 1-27; Heather McCrea, "Pest to Vector:
Disease, Public Health, and the Challenges of State-Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1833-1922," ibid.,
149-179; Alves, The Animals of Spain. As seen in the opening epigraph, classifying Amerindians as
"bestial" was a significant part of the ideology that justified colonial subjugation.
27 Carlos Fausto, "Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia," Current An-
thropology 48, no. 4 (2007): 497-530. Seminal works include Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature:
A Native Ecology in Amazonia , trans. Nora Scott (Cambridge, 1994); and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,
"Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4,
no. 3 (1998): 469-488. More recently, see Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology
beyond the Human (Berkeley, Calif., 2013); and Istvan Praet, Animism and the Question of Life (New
York, 2013).
28 Western origins are attributed, variously, to Stoicism, sixteenth-century Copernicanism, nine-
teenth-century Utilitarianism, or the biological sciences as they originated through the work of Charles
Darwin. For these narratives, see Richard Sorab] i, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the
Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); Stephen T. Newmyer, Animals, Rights and Reason in Plutarch and
Modern Ethics (New York, 2005); Thomas, Man and the Natural World; Peter Singer, Practical Ethics ,
3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2011).
digenous groups in the Caribbean Islands and lowland South America, likely a con-
sequence of migration patterns and interactions resulting from warfare and trade.29
The ubiquity of animal familiarization across these areas lends support to such cul-
tural categorizations. (See the Appendix.) The evidence is drawn particularly from
Amerindian communities who inhabited the Greater and Lesser Antilles; the littoral
of northern South America, extending to Panama; the tropical forest and savanna
regions of the Orinoco River Basin (modern-day Venezuela); intermediate areas in
the Guianas; and the coastal region south of the Amazon (Brazil).
The concurrence in the taming practices recorded in colonial-era texts and those
described by ethnographers in the last 150 years is compelling and warrants the
temporal reach of the longue durée . However, we must be attentive to the important
critiques of "upstreaming" (assuming that the practices and beliefs of contemporary
indigenous groups necessarily were those of their ancestors) and anthropological
approaches that have assumed an "ethnographic present" (for example, belief in an
unchanging "primitive" society).30 Accordingly, it is important not to interpolate
identities, practices, or other aspects of culture discernible in one period into an-
other, or to attribute those from one ethnic group to another. Rather, where there
is independent evidence for similar phenomena across time, they should be con-
sidered comparatively and seen as support for the strength of a particular structure
rather than as evidence for some overall "timelessness."31 The fact that evidence
29 Neil L. Whitehead, "Ethnic Plurality and Cultural Continuity in the Native Caribbean: Remarks
and Uncertainties as to Data and Theory," in Whitehead, ed., Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the
Anthropology of the Native Caribbean (Leiden, 1995), 91-111, here 93, 96, 99. He also warns of earlier
scholarship that failed "to perceive the past regional scale and supra-ethnic character of Amerindian
social organization"; Whitehead, "Ancient Amerindian Polities of the Amazon, Orinoco and Atlantic
Coast: A Preliminary Analysis of Their Passage from Antiquity to Extinction," in Anna Roosevelt, ed.,
Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives (Tucson, Ariz., 1994),
33-53, here 34. See also Nelly Arvelo- Jimenez and Horacio Biord, "The Impact of Conquest on Con-
temporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield: The System of Orinoco Regional Interdepen-
dence," ibid., 55-78, here 55-56; Jalil Sued Badillo, "The Island Caribs: New Approaches to the Ques-
tion of Ethnicity in the Early Colonial Caribbean," in Whitehead, Wolves from the Sea , 61-90, here 61;
Neil L. Whitehead, "The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean (1492-1580),"
in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Amer-
icas, vol. 3: South America, pt. I (Cambridge, 1999), 864-903; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe
and the Native Caribbean , 1492-1797 (London, 1986), 4; Antonio M. Stevens- Arroyo, Cave oftheJagua:
The Mythological World of the Tainos (Albuquerque, 1998), 22-35.
30 In recent decades, ethnohistorians of Greater Amazonia have stressed that "European conquest
effected the transition from ancient chiefdoms to indigenous village societies or peasant communities
through a long process involving military defeat, decimation, forced migration, enslavement, miscege-
nation and acculturation," while still allowing for considerable cultural continuities. Anna C. Roosevelt,
"Amazonian Anthropology: Strategy for a New Synthesis," in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians from Pre-
history to the Present, 1-29, here 9. Whitehead, "Ethnic Plurality and Cultural Continuity in the Native
Caribbean," 95; Whitehead, "Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies," especially 887, 891, 894;
Sued Badillo, "The Island Caribs."
31 Another reason for considering this phenomenon across this vast time period is that different
groups and regions suffered the consequences of European colonialism at different times. For example,
the "contact period" gave way to colonialism before the end of the fifteenth century on Hispaniola,
whereas that shift took place among the groups inhabiting the Lesser Antilles in the middle of the
seventeenth century, among those in the Orinoco region in the late seventeenth century, and among
other Amazonian groups within the last century. Whitehead, "Crises and Transformations of Invaded
Societies"; Franz Scaramelli and Kay Tarble, "Fundación y desarrollo de la frontera colonial en el
Orinoco Medio (1400-1 930), "Antropologica 103 (2005): 87-118, here 94; Adélia Engrácia de Oliveira,
"The Evidence for the Nature of the Process of Indigenous Deculturation and Destabilization in the
Brazilian Amazon in the Last Three Hundred Years: Preliminary Data," in Roosevelt, Amazonian In-
dians from Prehistory to the Present , 95-119.
36 Marcy Norton
suggests that there was (and in some places is) a common core to practices across
the indigenous Caribbean and lowland South America is not incompatible with the
fact that there were (and are) regional and local variations.
Iegue needs to be understood in the context of "prédation" and "familiarization,"

as they mediated both intra-human and inter-species relationships in the Caribbean
and lowland South America. The Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto, following
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, has suggested that "warfare in Amazonia is to be seen
as a particular form of consumption, inflected toward the appropriation of the vic-
tim's capacities and incorporeal constituents" or "the conversion of the enemy's
destruction into the production of kin I call the mode of producing persons by means
of the destruction of persons."32 If one objective of Amerindian warfare is to capture
the "vital capital" that is "contained in war trophies [and] bodily substances," it "also
comprises the capabilities of actual men and women - namely, the reproductive
power of female captives, the warring abilities of captive boys brought up as members
of their masters' societies, and the labor force of slaves, servants, and tributaries who
contribute services or goods," in the words of Fernando Santos-Granero. He is one
of several scholars who have explored the incorporation of captives into the host
community as wives, children, and "slaves," widespread practices across the native
Circum-Caribbean and South America.33
These two facets of prédation as a way to create "vital capital" or to produce new
32 Carlos Fausto, "Of Enemies and Pets: Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia," trans. David Rod-
gers, American Ethnologist 26, no. 4 (1999): 933-956, here 933, 936, 937; Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism
in Amazonia , trans. Rodgers (Cambridge, 2012).
33 Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Prédation , and the Amerindian Political Econ-
omy of Life (Austin, Tex., 2009), 217; for the Caribbean and lowland South America, see Whitehead,
"Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies," 882-888; Neil L. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit :
A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498-1820 (Dordrecht, 1988), 182 and chap.
8 generally; Juan Villamarin and Judith Villamarin, "Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of
'Señoríos Naturales,' 1400 to European Conquest," in Salomon and Schwartz, South America , pt. II,
577-667, here 600; Patrick Menget, "Note sur l'adoption chez les Txicáo du Brésil central," Anthro-
pologie et Sociétés 12, no. 2 (1988): 63-72; Arvelo- Jiménez and Biord, "The Impact of Conquest on
Contemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield," 58. Primary source descriptions include Pietro
Martire d'Anghiera, De orbe novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d' Anghera, trans. Francis Augustus
MacNutt, 2 vols. (New York, 1912), 1: 63, 71; Pierre Pelleprat, Relation des missions des Pp. de la Com-
pagnie de Jésus dans les Isles, & dans la terre ferme de l'Amérique méridionale (Paris, 1655), pt. 2, 57-63.
The organizing logic of prédation and familiarization still appears powerful among groups where
there is no evidence for the physical consumption of enemies, such as the Taino of the Greater Antilles.
See, for instance, the origin stories reported by friar Ramón Pané, whom Columbus assigned on his
second voyage in 1493 to investigate the "ceremonies and antiquities" of the local inhabitants. Pané
recorded a Taino origins story that is suggestive. Pané, ed., An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians ,
new ed., with an Introductory Study, Notes, and Appendices by José Juan Arrom, trans. Susan Griswold
(Durham, N.C., 1999), 13-14. See also Stevens-Arroyo, Cave of the J agua, chap. 6.
On mortuary endocannibalism as a form of prédation among twentieth-century Wari' and ritual serial
killing of kanaimà in indigenous Guiana, see Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Can-
nibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, Tex., 2001); Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and
the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, N.C., 2002). Prédation can also be manifest in realms that do not
directly involve killing or death. For instance, Christine- Anne Taylor proposes that "we find a relation
of violent capture" in twentieth-century Jivaroan marriage, explaining that there is "prestige linked to
successfully 'domesticating' a woman captured in warfare and turning her into a loving spouse, a definite
sign of masculine achievement since this is a feat that can only be carried off, it is thought, by mature
and experienced men who know exactly how to dose seduction and coercion to achieve a proper taming."
Anne Christine Taylor, "Wives, Pets, and Affines: Marriage among the Jivaro," in Laura Rival and Neil
subjects are well illustrated by captive warfare as practiced among the Kalinago of
the Lesser Antilles.34 Raymond Breton was a missionary who lived among the Ka-
linago on the island of Dominca for long stretches between 1642 and 1654.35 His
Dictionaire caraibe-françois (1665) and Dictionaire françois-caraibe (1666) were as
much ethnographic compendia as lexicons, and the dictionary "genre" may well allow
native categories and points of view to percolate more readily than other genres of
European sources used for ethnohistorical reconstruction.36 Captive warfare, and
the resultant adoptions and ritual anthropophagy, appear in several places in the
Dictionaire caraibe-françois. Under the entry for "caiman huétoucounou," translated
as "we go to war," Breton explained: "they make great preparations, gathering sev-
eral pirogues and canoes; they bring only one woman on each vessel to comb their
hair, apply red paint, and feed them . . . They kill their prisoners with a hit of bouttou :
if they are women, they give them as wives and slaves to old men; if they are male
children, they keep them as slaves; if they are grown, they make them fast, because
they don't eat any fat, then they kill them."37 In this concise passage, Breton describes
the two outcomes of prédation.
Breton perceived that among his Kalinago hosts there was an equivalence be-
tween killing a captive and giving birth (which also was analogous to adopting). For
instance, he included a word, "iuenematobou," defined as meaning both "my first-
born" and "the reason for my fast," elaborating that "savages fast quite often, par-
ticularly at the death of kin, the arrival of a first child, and the capture of an enemy."38
Elsewhere he offered a glimpse of an evocative scene under his entry concerning
proper names. After explaining that adults considered it dangerous to be called by
proper names, he added that they might be known as "the father of so and so" or
"the mother of so and so," since children could be named. Or, "when they are drink-
ing and half drunk, they act as if it is a great honor that they are known by the name
of the Arawak that they killed."39 This process relates to what Fausto, in his study
of "familiarizing prédation" over the longue durée in lowland South America, has
explained as "the appropriation of an alien subjectivity through the transformation
of the killer-victim relation into a father-child or namer-named relation."40 Sym-
L. Whitehead, eds., Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of
Peter Rivière (Oxford, 2001), 45-56, here 46-47.
34 Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies , 49-55, 175-177; Norton, "Going to the Birds," 64-66. Kalinago
have also been known as "Island Caribs."
35 Sybille de Pury, "Le Pere Breton par lui-même," in Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire caraïbe-fran-
çais , ed. Marina Besada Paisa (Paris, 1999), xv-xlv.
36 Raymond Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois: Meslé de quantité de remarques historiques pour
Vesclaircissement de la langue (Auxerre, 1665); Breton, Dictionaire françois-caraibe.
37 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 375. He describes a firsthand experience with an anthropo-
phagie feast (216, 222). The practice of going to war to take captives to kill or adopt was so central that
it figured in the Kalinago foundation story (229-230). Other missionary accounts and testimony from
a Spanish woman who was captured and enslaved offer corroborating evidence for these practices; see
Charles Rochefort, The History of the Caribby- Islands, trans. John Davies (London, 1666), book 2, chap.
21, 266, 271, 323-331; Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les françois , 2
vols. (Paris, 1667), 2: 379-380, 405-407; Whitehead, "Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies,"
877-888. Whitehead underscores that women were "an entirely inappropriate object of such a practice
[of cannibalism]" (883).
38 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 373.
39 Ibid., 221-222.
40 Fausto, "Of Enemies and Pets," 947.
38 Marcy Norton
bolically the two outcomes of warfare, adoption and consumption, were linked, both
generative of life.
If prédation led to the "appropriation and familiarization of alien subjectivities"
through both consumption and adoption among humans, it did so as well between
humans and other beings.41 Breton's Kalinago hosts celebrated rites that articulated
the proximity of consumption and adoption as twinned elements of prédation.
Breton described a feast, "one of their most solemn," in which birds of prey he
identified as mansphoenix (a species of raptor, likely a kite) were forced to play a
starring role.42 Several months before the feast, men sought birds in their nests ("lit-
tle ones for the little ones, and for the married men, big and heavy ones") to raise
for this " mystere " (rite). On the day of the feast, the chief warrior crushed his bird
against his head, letting the blood trickle down and leaving it there for the duration
of the ceremony. Soon thereafter, those who "have had a child or killed an Arawak"
did the same, smashing their birds with red chili. The men then smeared the blood-
ied, chili-covered carcasses on the boy initiates. Earlier the boys had their flesh in-
cised with agouti teeth; other times, Breton mentioned that the old women in the
community were responsible for cutting boys with sharp pineapple leaves.43 At the
end, each boy and man ate the heart of "his bird," then swallowed a vomit-inducing
tobacco infusion.44
These rites illuminate at least two significant characteristics of prédation that
were widespread across lowland South America. First, we see how the permeable
body - the openings of skin and mouth - led the predator/warrior/hunter to manifest
the qualities of who or what he had ingested.45 It is also likely that the agouti-teeth
device used to cut the flesh of the young initiates had a handle made from the bone
of a prisoner of war who had been ritually killed - allowing, too, the transfer of some
41 Ibid., 948; Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies , 195; Viveiros de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and
Amerindian Perspectivism," 470.
42 Breton identified the "mansphoenix" as a miliari , or kite; Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 37. Ref-
erences to this bird are also on 21, 100, 231, 255, and 290. See also Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles
habitées par les françois, 2: 252. Lawrence Waldron, "Like Turtles, Islands Float Away: Emergent Dis-
tinctions in the Zoomorphic Iconography of Saladoid Ceramics of the Lesser Antilles, 250 BCE to 650
CE" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2010), 183.
43 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 132. On this ceremony, see Tertre, Histoire générale des An-
tilles habitées par les françois, 2: 377; on using agouti teeth in rituals generally, see 2: 297, 365, 373-375.
44 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 203. He also wrote of a gourd filled with the flesh of the raptor
mansphoenix "that they wear around their neck like a relic in order to become strong and valiant" (192).
45 See also Antoine Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en Visle de Cayenne (Paris, 1664), 353, 435;
Matias Ruiz Blanco, Conversion de Píritu: De Indios Cumanagotos, Palenques, y otros (Madrid, 1690),
14; Pelleprat, Relation des missions , 2: 67. For twentieth-century examples among the Shipibo, Waiwai,
and other lowland groups, see Peter G. Roe, "Paragon or Peril? The Jaguar in Amazonian Indian So-
ciety," in Nicholas J. Saunders, ed., Icons of Power: Feline Symbolism in the Americas (London, 1998),
171-202, here 177-178; Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic
Drugs among the Indians of Colombia (Philadelphia, 1975), 16-21. On raptors in nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century Amazonia, see Catherine V. Howard, "Feathers as Ornaments among the Waiwai," in
Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, eds., The Gift of Birds: Featherwork of Native South American
Peoples (Philadelphia, 1991), 50-69, here 66-67; Peter T. Fürst, "Crowns of Power: Bird and Feather
Symbolism in Amazonian Shamanism," ibid., 92-109. On connections between cannibalism and trophy-
taking, see James B. Petersen and John G. Crock, "'Handsome Death': The Taking, Veneration, and
Consumption of Human Remains in the Insular Caribbean and Greater Amazonia," in Richard J. Cha-
con and David H. Dye, eds., The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians
(New York, 2007), 547-573.
of the vitality of the deceased.46 When warriors ingested the flesh, donned the skin,
wore the teeth, and soaked up the blood of raptors or jaguars, they were appro-
priating the courage, ferocity, and power of these apex predators. These are rites in
which outer display and internal transformation were linked through the materiality
of objects, whether it was flesh digested, blood entering the bloodstream, or feathers,
teeth, or pelts covering hair and skin. The belief that in ingesting another being one
took on its essential attributes was manifested in attitudes toward less prestigious
prey animals as well.47
A second characteristic of the rites of raptor sacrifice described by Breton was
the "familiarization" of the sacrificial being. This is what Fausto calls "familiarizing
prédation," in which the captor/predator relates to the captive/prey as "between
father and adopted child or between master and xerimbabo (wild pet)." He finds
equivalences between the way Tupinamba captors temporarily "adopted" their pris-
oners of war as kin before killing them, and the way Jivaro warriors "adopted" pigs
before killing them to mark successful raiding expeditions, rites very similar to the
bird adoption and killings described by Breton.48 In ordinary life, one would not eat
a familiarized being - a human or non-human iegue. But in these liminal rituals, the
ceremonial adoption of a subject who was to be killed underscored the connections
creating a subject through birth (or adoption) and appropriating a subject through
incorporation (or killing).
Non-human iegue are kin who are fed, not prey whom one eats.49 Though a few
contemporary ethnographers in South America - above all Catherine Howard (Wai-
wai), Loretta Cormier (Guaja), Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden (Kantiana), and Luiz
Costa (Kanamari) - have attended to the creation of "wild pets," particularly in con-
texts in which European domesticated animals have been integrated, the phenom-
enon has not been considered in historical perspective.50 This neglect is due in part
46 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois, 191.
47 Rochefort, The History of the Caribby -Islands, 2: 303; André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France
Antarctique (Paris, 1558), chap. 30. In surveying contemporary Amazonian ethnographies, Carlos Fausto
argues that in other instances, prey (or human corpses) was made into game and thereby "desubjec-
tified," so that a "person" would not be consumed; "Feasting on People," 501-504. See also Luiz Costa,
"Making Animals into Food among the Kanamari of Western Amazonia," in Marc Brightman, Vanessa
Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva, eds., Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals ,
Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberìa (New York, 2012), 96-112.
48 Fausto, "Of Enemies and Pets," 937, 938. In this article Fausto identified them as peccaries, but
he has since communicated that they were, in fact, domestic pigs, possibly substituting for peccaries once
used. The original source is Rafael Karsten, The Head-Hunters of Western Amazonas: The Life and Culture
of the Jibaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador and Peru (Helsingfors, 1935), 228.
49 On the relationship between eating with someone as opposed to eating someone, see Fausto,
"Feasting on People"; and Carlos Fausto and Luiz Costa, "Feeding (and Eating): Reflections on Strath-
ern's 'Eating (and Feeding),'" Cambridge Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2013): 156-162.
50 Catherine Vaughan Howard, "Wrought Identities: The Waiwai Expeditions in Search of the 'Un-
seen Tribes' of Northern Amazonia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2001); Loretta A. Cormier,
Kinship with Monkeys: The Guajá Foragers of Eastern Amazonia (New York, 2003); Felipe Ferreira
Vander Velden, Inquietas companhias: Sobre os animais de criação entre os Karitiana (São Paulo, 2012);
Luiz Costa, "Alimentação e comensalidade entre os Kanamari da Amazónia Ocidental," Mana 19, no.
3 (2013): 473-504, translated into English as "Fabricating Necessity: Feeding and Commensality in
Western Amazonia," in Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto, and Vanessa Grotti, eds., Ownership and Nur-
ture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations (forthcoming, 2015); Fausto and Costa, "Feeding
40 Marcy Norton
to the fact that European explorers' and colonists' assumptions about animal do-
mestication made it difficult for them to see iegue as an independent or significant
cultural production. Moreover, as the preponderance of early and late modern vis-
itors were male and much of the work of familiarization was gendered female (par-
ticularly in comparison to the quintessential^ male activity of hunting), outsiders
had minimal exposure or access to it. Given these blind spots, the fact that colonial
texts (and a few images) do offer so many glimpses of animal adoption practices
among native Amerindians is telling.
Among the most important evidence for the notion that the category of tame
beings was of primary importance to groups throughout the Caribbean and lowland
South America is linguistic. Breton defined the term iégue (male form; the female
form he recorded was nilliguini ) as "an animal whom one feeds" in his Carib-French
volume and as "my animal" in the French-Carib volume, thereby emphasizing both
the nurturing and the proprietary aspects of the term. In another gloss, he further
illuminated the concept by explaining that his Kalinago hosts did not raise animals
in order to eat them; rather, they were kept for "diversion" or for their services:
roosters for their wake-up crows, brightly plumaged birds for their feathers, or dogs
for their help in hunting pigs and agouti, for example. He concluded, "if they have
chickens, they would die before eating them," a proscription that extended to "even
an egg." Breton understood that the Kalinago's iegue was fundamentally different
from European livestock because the former were not supposed to be slaughtered
by their guardians. He also provided the definition for another word, nhamácachi
(or nhamacachitina), which he translated as "Animals who come tame before them,
whom they believe to belong to their Gods, and whom they dare not kill."51
Carib-speaking groups far removed in time and space use related terms in the
same way as the Kalinago. Ethnographer Patrick Menget reported that Txicão on
the Xingu River (an eastern tributary of the Amazon) defined egu as "a familiar
animal who lives in one's lodging"; among the egu present were various types of birds
(macaws, parrots, and also an aquatic species), monkeys, and the large rodent capy-
bara. The term was also applied to adopted children, as well as to "trophies taken
(and Eating)." The first to systematically take note of the phenomenon may have been the missionary-
ethnographer Everard Ferdinand Im Thurn, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," Timehrì
1 (1882): 25-43.
See also J. Christopher Crocker, "My Brother the Parrot," in Gary Urton, ed., Animal Myths and
Metaphors in South America (Salt Lake City, 1985), 13-47; Erikson, "De l'acclimatation des concepts
et des animaux ou les tribulations d'idées américanistes en Europe"; Philippe Erikson, "The Social
Significance of Pet-Keeping Amazonian Indians," in Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth S. Paul, and
James A. Serpell, eds., Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets
(Cambridge, 2005), 7-26; Descola, In the Society of Nature ; Descola, "Pourquoi les Indiens d'Amazonie
n'ont-ils pas domestiqué le pécari?"; James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-
Animal Relationships , new ed. (Cambridge, 1996), 61-64; Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia',
Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an
Amazonian Society (Chicago, 1992); Taylor, "Wives, Pets, and Affines"; Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.
Studies that do offer some historical perspective on animal taming are Nancy Kathleen Creswick
Morey, "Ethnohistory of the Colombian and Venezuelan Llanos" (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1975);
R. A. Donkin, The Peccary: With Observations on the Introduction of Pigs to the New World (Philadelphia,
1985); Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden, "As galinhas incontáveis: Tupis, europeus e aves domésticas na
conquista no Brasil," Journal de la Société des Américanistes 98, no. 2 (2012): 97-140.
51 These definitions are from Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 290; Dictionaire françois-caraibe,
19-20, my emphasis. For more on the feeding aspect of familiarization and making kin, see pp. 20, 22 below.
from enemy cadavers, in particular flutes made of tibia, human teeth mounted into
necklaces."52 This is clear evidence for the conceptual interrelatedness of prédation
and familiarization in captive warfare and interactions with non-human animals
alike. Among the nearby Kalapalo, another Carib-speaking group on the Upper
Xingu, itologu is the related term that ethnographer Ellen Basso defines as "pets,"
paradigmatically birds. She elaborates that the "'pet-owner' relationship" ( itologu -
oto ) "is characterized on the human side by nurture and protection within a house-
hold, and on the avian side by lack of ifutisu (in the sense of shyness), in other words,
by tameness." She notes that the relationship is analogous to that between parents
and their children: "Children and pets alike are ideally supposed to be fed, reared,
and kept within the confines of the house."53 Like Breton, Basso noted that although
itologu can belong to species considered edible, "they themselves are never eaten, nor
are they supposed to be killed," and they should receive burials upon death. Similar
constellations of meanings exist in the other major South American languages.54
Beyond this linguistic evidence, colonial chroniclers and missionaries have left
us fleeting but suggestive remarks about familiarization. José Gumilla and Felipe
Gilij were part of the group of Jesuits who founded missions and lived among the
native inhabitants of the area along the Middle Orinoco and its tributaries (Ven-
ezuela) in the early and middle eighteenth centuries. Their mission settlements were
multiethnic, attracting Arawak- and Carib-speaking groups seeking protection from
Dutch and Carib slaving expeditions, including the Otomac, Saliva, Maypure, and
Tamanaco peoples.55 Based on his experience with mission Indians on the Orinoco
between the Apure and Guaviare Rivers, Gumilla wrote succinctly in his chapter of
"animals they kill for their enjoyments and others whom they raise with care."56 Gilij,
who spent eighteen years in the region, went a step further and pondered the phe-
nomenon itself, noting that "although there are no domestic animals among the
Orinocoans, there are nevertheless domesticated ones to whom the savage nation
52 Menget, "Note sur l'adoption chez les Txicáo du Brésil central," 67.
53 Ellen B. Basso, The Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil (New York, 1973), 21.
54 For Conibo, "enemies equated with wild animal prey, whereas war captives were likened to the
young of killed animals, which were captured and kept as household pets." Speakers of a Panoan lan-
guage explain that the term hiná can be translated as "domestic animals," "adoptive children," and
"household servants." Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies , 179, 180; Cormier, Kinship with Monkeys , 93.
Viveiros de Castro explains that for the Araweté (a Tupi-Guarani people), there is a linguistic prefix
that "designates the untamed, that which one eats, as opposed to that which one raises and cares for
... it is also opposed to a more general notion, that of beings and things 'of the divinities,' a category
that includes not just the pets of the gods, but everything that has a relationship to Divinity"; From the
Enemy's Point of View, 73. See also Fausto, "Of Enemies and Pets," 938, 950 n. 6. For Jivaro terms, see
Descola, In the Society of Nature, 90. For related Carib and Arawak terms for "wild" (salvaje) and "tame"
(mansa), see also Filippo Salvadore Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana, 3 vols. (Caracas, 1965), 1: 252.
55 For the impact of the missions and colonialism more generally on indigenous Orinoco groups,
see works by Franz Scaramelli and Kay Scaramelli, most recently Scaramelli and Scaramelli, "Uncom-
mon Commodities: Articulating the Global and the Local on the Orinoco Frontier," in Pedro Paulo A.
Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, eds., Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and
Portuguese America (New York, 2015), 155-181; Arvelo- Jiménez and Biord, "The Impact of Conquest
on Contemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield"; José del Rey Fajardo, ed., Misiones
jesuíticas en la Orinoquía (1625-1767), 2 vols. (San Cristóbal, 1992); Morey, "Ethnohistory of the Co-
lombian and Venezuelan Llanos."
56 José Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido: Historia natural , civil y geographica de este gran rio
y de sus caudalosas vertientes , govierno, usos y costumbres de los indios sus habitadores (Madrid, 1745),
291. On Gumilla and his natural history, see Margaret R. Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders: Nature , Knowledge ,
and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco (Lewisburg, Pa., 2008).
42 Marcy Norton
Figure 1: "Histoire naturelle des Indes," ca. 1586, fol. 114r. The fates of these birds are the two possible
outcomes of prédation: consumption as prey or adoption as kin. In this image the deer has been killed, but
elsewhere the author wrote that a deer "is easy to tame. The Indians keep it in their houses" (61r). Shelfmark:
MA 3900. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library, New York City.
gives a particular name in order to distinguish between those that are wild and tamed
[amansadas]," finding it "incredible how tame and manageable they become." He
marveled at the "very rare ability of the Indians to tame the wild beasts," wondering,
"will it be believed by those who have never been to the Orinoco"?57
57 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 252-253.
Because of their wide range - flourishing in insular as well as landlocked envi-
ronments - birds in general and parrot species in particular were perhaps the subset
of animals most commonly and pervasively familiarized.58 From the very earliest days
of exploration, Europeans enthusiastically noted Amerindians' readiness to supply
tamed parrots. During his exploration of Hispaniola, Columbus acquired "as many
[parrots] as were asked for," at least forty.59 Portuguese and French explorers and
colonists who interacted with Tupinamba in the sixteenth century were struck by
"how the savages of this land hold [macaws] very dear," lodging them in their homes,
yet not having "to enclose them, as we do here"; plucking their feathers several times
a year for ritual objects; teaching them to speak; and "calling them in their language
'their friends.'"60 Juan Rivero, a Jesuit living among indigenous communities in the
Orinoco basin in the early eighteenth century, wrote of abundant "parrots and ma-
caws for which the Indians are great enthusiasts, particularly the Achagua people,
and they raise them not only for their diversion and recreation but also for their
interest in their feathers, which adorn their headdresses."61 Though parrot species
were particularly attractive for their speaking ability and brilliant feathers (which
could be plucked without killing the bird), many other varieties of birds were tamed
as well. Everard Ferdinand Im Thum, a missionary with ethnographic inclinations,
visited indigenous communities along the Essequibo River and tributaries in British
Guiana in 1878 and remarked on at least five different species of birds as well as
various kinds of parrots in one village alone.62 "Among the commonest tame animals
in Indian houses," according to Im Thum, were the trumpet birds, who liked to have
58 Reina and Kensinger, The Gift of Birds; Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture : Our 2,500-Year-
Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia, 2004), 50-55; see also Norton,
"Going to the Birds," 66-69. For prehistoric objects represented as parrots in the Caribbean, see Wal-
dron, "Like Turtles, Islands Float Away," 228-230; Sven Lovén, Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2010), 631; Louis Allaire, "Archaeology of the Caribbean Region," in Salomon and
Schwartz, South America, 668-733, here 705-706. For faunai remains in Tobago, see David W. Steadman
and Sharyn Jones, "Long-Term Trends in Prehistoric Fishing and Hunting on Tobago, West Indies,"
Latin American Antiquity 17, no. 3 (2006): 316-334, here 326-327; David W. Steadman and Anne V.
Stokes, "Changing Exploitation of Terrestrial Vertebrates during the Past 3000 Years on Tobago, West
Indies," Human Ecology 30, no. 3 (2002): 339-367, here 358.
59 Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493 ,
transcribed and translated into English by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman, Okla., 1989),
223. See also Paul Boyer, Veritable Relation de tout ce qui s'est fait et passé au voyage que Monsieur de
Bretigny fit a l'Amerique Occidentale (Paris, 1654), 300; for parrots along the South American littoral,
see Anghiera, De orbe novo , 1: 344, 254.
60 Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, tols. 92v-93v; Jean de Lery, History of a Voyage
to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, translation and introduction by Janet Whatley (Berkeley,
Calif., 1990), 88; Amy J. Buono, "Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Inter-
culture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2008),
109-113. See also Joannes de Laet , L'histoire du Nouveau Monde, ou, Description des Indes Occidentales
(Leiden, 1640), 490; Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions
of America, during the Years 1799-1804 , trans, and ed. Thomasina Ross, 3 vols. (London, 1852-1853),
2: 311.
61 Juan Rivero, Historia de las misiones de los llanos de Casanare y los rios Orinoco y Meta Bogota,
1883), 9; for Rivero, see Rey Fajardo, "Apéndice 2: Bio-bibliografía de los jesuítas que laboraron en
las misiones del Casanare, Meta y Orinoco," in Rey Fajardo, Misiones jesuíticas en la Orinoquía, 1:
463-630, here 588-590. See also Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en l'isle de Cayenne, 343; Nicholas
Guppy, Wai Wai: Through the Forests North of the Amazon (New York, 1958), 234; Antonio Caulin,
Historia coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucía, provincias de Cumaná, Guayana y
Vertientes del Rio Orinoco (Madrid, 1779), 50; Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615), fol. 177, http://www.kb.dk/perrnalink/2006/poma/titlepage/en/text.
62 Im Thurn, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 29. These included trumpet birds,
44 Marcy Norton
their heads stroked and "follow[ed] their masters . . . like dogs," even "some distance
from home." Sometimes "an exuberance of good spirits" prompted the birds to turn
somersaults on these jaunts.63
Amerindians in the islands extended adoption practices beyond the ubiquitous
parrots to include iguanas and manatees.64 In the first decade of the sixteenth cen-
tury, before the Spanish conquest was complete, a Taino chief caught a young man-
atee in his nets and opted not to kill him for food (manatee were prized for their
succulent meat among native Caribbean and invading Spaniards alike).65 Instead, the
captive was brought to an estuary, fed with human staples (yucca, cassava bread),
and named Matu ("meaning generous or noble"). Anghiera exclaimed that "for
twenty-five years this fish lived at liberty in the waters of the lake, and grew to an
extraordinary size." Matu liked "to play upon the bank with the servants of the ca-
cique, and especially with the young son who was in the habit of feeding it," and was
known to carry riders on his back as he swam across the estuary.
On the mainland, the variety of animal candidates for adoption reflected the
unrivaled faunai diversity of South American tropical habitats. Monkeys, not sur-
prisingly, feature almost as prominently as parrots, as suggested by a drawing by the
native Andean author and artist Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala. (See Figure 2.) He
depicted the female ancestor of the peoples of the Eastern Amazon flanked by a
parrot and a monkey, likely among the things/beings that lowland groups traded in
return for highland goods such as precious metals.66 Oviedo recalled tamed monkeys
so abundant that "every day they are brought to Spain."67 Gilij noted especially the
mico monkeys, "who seem to even understand one's very thoughts."68 In addition to
the monkeys and parrots, Oviedo wrote about various tamed creatures - a sloth, a
fox, and a bivana - who came into European settlements as a result of trades with
mainland Amerindians. Oviedo acquired the tamed fox ("they are great jesters and
mischievous") from Cąribs, via traders in Cartagena, in return for some fishhooks.69
He compared the bivana (probably a kinkajou, a rainforest relative of the raccoon),
troupials, toucans, curassows, and sun birds. Everard Ferdinand Im Thum, Among the Indians of Guiana:
Being Sketches Chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana (London, 1883), 3, 26.
63 Im Thurn, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 30-31.
64 On iguanas, see Oviedo, HGN , 2: 32, 35; Im Thum, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of
America," 39.
65 Anghiera, De orbe novo , 1: 373-374; Miguel de Asúa and Roger French,^ New World of Animals:
Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot, 2005), 58. Manatee represen-
tations survive in the archaeological record for the Lesser and Greater Antilles; Waldron, "Like Turtles,
Islands Float Away," 128-129. On their tastiness, see Allaire, "Archaeology of the Caribbean Region,"
673; Waldron, "Like Turtles, Islands Float Away," 128. Oviedo wrote that they are "one of the best fish
in the world, and that which most resembles meat"; HGN , 2: 64-66.
66 Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), fol. Ill , http://www.kb
.dk/permalink/2006/poma/titlepage/en/text/. See below on trade in animals.
67 Oviedo, HGN, 2: 50.
68 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 252. See also Anghiera, De orbe novo , 1: 154; Léry, History
of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 6; illustration in Histoire naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript in
the Pierpont Morgan Library, introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, translations by Ruth S. Kraemer (New
York, 1996), fol. 107r, http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes; Biet, Voyage
de la France equinoxiale en Visle de Cayenne, 342; Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equi-
noctial Regions of America, 2: 270, 480; W. H. Brett, The Indian Tribes of Guiana (New York, 1852), 185;
Guppy, Wai Wai, 262; John Gillin, The Barama River Caribs of British Guiana (Cambridge, 1936), 44-45.
69 Oviedo, HGN, 2: 48 (sloth), 49 (fox).
procured on the mainland (Paria), to a domestic cat and described how it nestled
in the folds of his clothing.70 In the eighteenth century, Gumilla wrote of a creature
known as cusicusi (perhaps a species of olingo) that was known for its nocturnal
habits and long tongue, used for investigating small crevices, and "when it arrives
at the bed of its master, it does the same with his nostrils, and if it finds his mouth
open, that too."71 Gilij described Amerindians' facility for taming a wide range of
animals, marveling in particular at the affectionate nature of deer and referring
fondly to his own "little tapir."72 Im Thum mentioned two kinds of deer (one of
whom "made great friends with me, so that when I was sitting on the ground, it used
to climb up and stand with all four legs gathered together on one of my shoulders,"
and "it never missed an opportunity of emptying my tobacco pouch, pushing it open
with its nose and eating the contents,"), peccaries (who "become very tame - too
much so sometimes, for they follow their master wherever he goes and sometimes
even insist upon getting into his hammock"), coatis (who "play about with the dogs"),
and a variety of rodents, including the capybara.73 Henry Bates, an Englishman who
traveled in Amazonia in the nineteenth century, recorded "twenty-two species of
quadrupeds that he has found tame in the encampments of the tribes of that valley,"
including tapirs, agouti, guinea pigs, and peccaries.74
70 Ibid., 2: 52, 430-431. On its identification as kinkajou (Potus flavus ), see Omar J. Linares,
Mamíferos de Venezuela (Caracas, 1998), 139-141.
71 Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido, 299. He wrote that it was tailless, but Caulin wrote that
the animal in question does have a tail, making it fit the description of the genus Bassaricyon; Historia
coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucía , 36.
72 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 209, 229, 252, 227.
73 Im Thum, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 36.
74 Francis Galton referred to Bates's reports in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
(London, 1883), 248; see also Guppy, Wai Wai , 234-235, 258, 262, 275. For Humboldt on peccaries, see
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 2: 270; James Serpell, "Pet-Keeping
and Animal Domestication: A Reappraisal," in Juliet Clutton-Brock, ed., The Walking Larder : Patterns
of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Prédation (London, 1989), 10-21; Serpell,/« the Company of Animals,
61-64; Fausto, "Of Enemies and Pets." For myths about "tamed" animals, including monkeys, eagles,
and tapirs, among the Guiana Caribs, see Walter Edmund Rothen Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-
lore of the Guiana Indians (1915; repr., New York, 1970), 55-56, 141, 165-166; and among the Tupi-
namba, Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View, 73, 79.
It is beyond the scope of this article to investigate how dogs fit into this schema, in part because it
is difficult to disentangle pre-conquest and colonial indigenous practices concerning dogs. Many, if not
all, Amerindian groups in the Caribbean and South America interacted with dogs prior to European
contact. Waldron, "Like Turtles, Islands Float Away," 119-126; Omar J. Linares, "El perro de monte,
speothos venaticus (Lund), en el norte de Venezuela (Canidae)," Memoria de la Sociedad de Ciencias
Naturales La Salle 27, no. 77 (1967): 83-86. But see also Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early
Americas (New Haven, Conn., 1997). Whatever the pre-contact situation, many groups were quick to
adopt European hunting dogs (both the breeds and the methods). European influence on Kalinago
human-canine relationships is suggested by the terms related to dogs in Breton's dictionary that in-
corporate chien', Dictionaire caraibe-françois, 113, 154; Dictionaire françois-caraibe, 70, 73. See also Ter-
tre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les françois, 246; Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit, 42.
My speculative hypothesis is that dogs were seen like any other species of animals - with some individuals
fit for familiarization and others not. For instance, the author of the "Histoire naturelle des Indes"
described feral dogs that were either killed or captured young and trained for hunting (fol. 66r). The
similarities in the familiarization process for hunting dogs compared to that of other animals can be seen
below in Gilij's description. For parallels with contemporary human-canine relationships among the
Amazonian Achuar, see Eduardo Kohn, "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of
Transspecies Engagement," American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3-24.
46 Marcy Norton
Figure 2: Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, "Nueva coránica y buen gobierno," fol. 175 [177]. The author
identifies this woman as a representative of "Andesuyo," the eastern region of the Inca Empire in western
Amazonia. Though they are not mentioned in the text, she is flanked by two tame animals, a bird and a monkey,
whom she seems to be feeding. Shelfmark: GKS 2232. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of
Denmark, Copenhagen.
Aggregating evidence from different accounts reveals that taming, far from being
accidental or incidental, entailed a series of ritualized activities. The first step, of
course, was the procurement of the individual animal. Sometimes these were the
orphaned young of prey animals, but from the earliest sources it is also evident that
there were intentional efforts to capture wild animals to make iegue. An illustrated
sixteenth-century manuscript titled "Histoire naturelle des Indes" devoted signifi-
cant space in text and image to animal adoption practices, including "the manner
of catching parrots" of Amerindians in Trinidad and Nicaragua.75 Among the for-
mer, a captive parrot was deployed as bait to lure his compatriots into a cage with
his cries of distress.76 The eighteenth-century missionary Gilij described how Am-
erindians of the Orinoco basin captured baby monkeys. The appearance of a mother
monkey with her babies clinging to her back offered an "opportune moment for the
hunter. He directs a spray of poisoned arrows at the mother, and she falls to the
ground with the children still clinging strongly to her back, as when she was alive.
They are still quite fierce onwards but not so much to be afraid of taking them back
in order to raise them."77 Anticipating their featured role as animal-tamers, women
participated in at least some of these expeditions; during peccary hunts, according
to Gilij, "the women take part in order to bring back piglets."78
The next stage was taming, a process subsumed into endowing an other with
personhood, be it an infant, a wild animal, or a captive animal. The most central
activity was feeding, as suggested by the linguistic equivalence between taming and
feeding: for example, Breton defined the term iegue as "an animal that one feeds"
and included a related term, aguénnêmátina, which translated as both "I don't have
an animal," and "I don't make any food" - in other words, there is no animal to
feed.79 Feeding was often gendered; women, for the most part, were in charge of
familiarization and socialization, linked to their role as mothers.80 Matias Ruiz
Blanco, a Franciscan who evangelized among Carib-speaking groups (Cumangoto,
Palenque) along the South American littoral in the mid-seventeenth century, wrote
in the context of discussing child-rearing practices, "the women have a gift for raising
the little animals [ animalejos ] that they capture," and noted that if baby animals "do
not eat, [mothers] give them their breasts."81 As this suggests, newly incorporated
animals were treated much like human infants and babies. Im Thurn described this
75 It is thought that at least two different scribes and two different artists contributed to the man-
uscript, and it illustrates some thirty ports of call in the Circum-Caribbean; Verlyn Klinkenborg, In-
troduction to Histoire naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript , xv-xxii.
76 Histoire naturelle des Indes , fol. 83r, p. 264. Of the "Indians of Nicaragua," it says: "They use an
arrow with a cotton pad at the end and when the bird is struck, it does not die, but only falls, being dazed"
(fol. 88r, p. 264). See also Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les françois, 2: 249; Antonio
de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas i tierra firme del Mar
Oceano , 4 vols. (Madrid, 1601), 1: 295; William Curtis Farabee, The Central Caribs (Philadelphia, 1924),
47. Im Thurn describes a similar method used for non-birds as well; "Tame Animals among the Red
Men of America," 39.
77 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 252. See also Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en Visle
de Cayenne , 342; Cormier, Kinship with Monkeys , 114.
78 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 2: 265.
79 For iegue and other feeding-related definitions, see n. 51 above; aguénnêmátina appears in Breton,
Dictionaire françois-caraibe , 20. The term for familiarized animals among the Huaorani in Amazonian
Ecuador is queninga, which means "it receives food from humans"; Laura M. Rival, Trekking through
History : The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (New York, 2002), 98. Naming also appears to be an
important aspect of endowing a being in formation with subjectivity, as suggested by Vander Velden's
ethnography, Inquietas companhias , scattered ethnohistorical references (again the manatee), and Léry,
who reported in History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil that a Tupinamba woman referred to her parrot
as "her cherimbaué , that is, 'thing that I love'" (89).
80 For instance, Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 88; Thevet, Les singularitez de la France
Antarctique , 92. Twentieth-century ethnographers have likewise observed the gendered aspect of fa-
miliarization: Howard, "Feathers as Ornaments among the Waiwai," 50, 60-61; Howard, "Wrought
Identities," 247; Crocker, "My Brother the Parrot"; Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View,
42, 131, 281; Cormier, Kinship with Monkeys , 114-116; Vander Velden, Inquietas companhias , 164-166,
178, especially on the connection between nurturing children and familiarized animals.
81 Ruiz Blanco, Conversion de Píritu , 33. On Ruiz Blanco and missionary activity, see Fernando
48 Marcy Norton
Figure 3: "Histoire naturelle des Indes," fol. 83r. The significance of animal familiarization as a central cultural
activity is suggested by the author's decision to have parrot capture represent the "Indian of Trinidad." Shelf-
mark: MA 3900. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library, New York City.
process less laconically: "It is the duty of the Indian women to feed the livestock
belonging to the settlement . . . These are fed with cassava bread chewed by the
women. Among some tribes, especially the Warrausm, the women suckle the young
mammals as they would their own children."82 When Bates, the English naturalist
who journeyed in the Amazon, asked what "arts" were used by a noted bird tamer,
"an old Indian woman," he was told that "she fed it with her saliva," analogous to
the practice of feeding infants pre-masticated food.83 Nursing and pre-masticating
food brought together biological birth and, in the words of ethnographer Catherine
Howard, the "social birth" of adoption.84 Ethnographers Carlos Fausto and Luiz
Costa write that "commensality for the Kanamari is part of a continual process of
making kin. It is what happens to the feeding bond between a woman and her pet
who, in time, come to iove' (wu) each other, and who thus see their relation of
feeding veer towards commensality."85 Antonio Caulin, who was a missionary among
Carib and Cumangoto groups in Venezuela in the early eighteenth century, also
detected this emphasis on commensality and shared intimacies when he wrote of
familiarized birds that "they eat at the table and clean [people's teeth] with their
beaks, and remove dandruff, and do a thousand other cute things."86 Another aspect
of the special connection between familiarized animals, feeding, and commensality
is revealed by Laura Rival's emphasis that among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ec-
uador, "pets . . . complete the process by which longhouses are turned into feeding
places that cannot be abandoned or left empty," a connection also made in the visual
materials of the sixteenth-century "Histoire naturelle des Indes" and André Thevet's
account of his time among the Tupinamba in coastal Brazil.87
Another way in which wild animals - human and non-human - became iegue was
through the application of the red plant dye achiote (annatto). Without this red body
paint, Amerindians across the Caribbean and South America felt exposed and unfit
for public presentation, and contemporary ethnographies suggest a connection be-
Arellano, Una introducción a la Venezuela prehispánica: Culturas de las naciones indígenas venezolanas
(Caracas, 1987), 238-240.
82 Im Thurn, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 40. On nursing, see also Brett, The
Indian Tribes of Guiana , 185; Richard Schomburgk, Richard Schomburgk's Travels in Brìtish Guiana ,
1840-1844 , trans, and ed. Walter E. Roth, 2 vols. (Georgetown [British Guiana], 1922), 1: 128-129; Pablo
J. Anduze, Shailili-Ko: Relato de un naturalista que también llegó a las fuentes del Río Orìnoco (Caracas,
1960), 255; James Barker, Memoir on the Culture of the Waica (New Haven, Conn., 197?), 14 (translation
of "Memoria sobre la cultura de los Guaika "Boletín Indigenista Venezolano 1 [1953]: 433-489); Howard,
"Wrought Identities," 242; Cormier, Kinship with Monkeys , 114-116; Rival, Trekking through History , 98,
205 n. 35.
83 Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 2nd ed. (London, 1864), 256-257. On
pre-mastication, see also Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View, 131; Crocker, "My Brother
the Parrot," 33.
84 Howard, "Wrought Identities," 245-246. On the enormous social significance of beads for Ori-
noco Amerindians before extensive European acculturation, see Franz Scaramelli and Kay Tarble de
Scaramelli, "The Roles of Material Culture in the Colonization of the Orinoco, Venezuela," Journal of
Social Archaeology 5, no. 1 (February 2005): 135-168, here 151-155.
85 Fausto and Costa, "Feeding (and Eating)," 157; see also Costa, "Alimentação e comensalidade
entre os Kanamari da Amazonia Ocidental."
86 Caulín, Historia coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucía , 46.
87 Rival, Trekking through History , 127. Histoire Naturelle des Indes , fol. 107r, shows a monkey and
two birds hanging out on the thatched roof of a hut, in front of which is a woman in labor. Thevet, Les
singularitez de la France Antarctique, fol. 85v (a parrot on a rafter), fol. 88v (a macaw and a monkey on
a rafter; see Figure 4).
50 M arey Norton
Figure 4: André Thevet, Les singularìtez de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1558), fol. 88v. The inclusion of the
monkey and macaw who sit on a rafter watching a healing rite corresponds to ethnographic observations that
residences were shared with familiarized animals whose presence anchored community. Shelfmark: E558
T416sp. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
tween its application and subject formation.88 So it makes sense that Im Thurn re-
ported that after an animal was captured, "its face is rubbed with faroa - the red
pigment used by the Indians for their own bodies - in order to show the poor victim
that its captors are 'good people and kind.'"89 Gilij described how dogs selected for
hunting were shaved and then covered with the same red dye; the shaving was per-
haps analogous to the removal of body hair among people.90 Familiarized birds,
particularly green parrots, were treated in a similar fashion when their feathers were
88 Among the indigenous terms for achiote were bija or bichet and roucou. Breton described it as
their "chemise blanche," an essential garment that protected the wearer from the sun, ocean water, and
insects, as well as offering adornment. For examples, see Breton ,Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 79; Oviedo,
HGN , 3: 230; Rochefort, The History of the Caribby -Islands, 254-255; Ruiz Blanco, Conversion de Píritu,
32; Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido, 146-147. The connection between "painting" a newborn
with achiote and his or her vitality among the Urarina today is suggested by the ceremonies and chants
analyzed by Harry Walker, "Baby Hammocks and Stone Bowls: Urarina Technologies of Companionship
and Subjection," in Fernando Santos-Granero, ed., The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories
of Materiality and Personhood (Tucson, Ariz., 2009), 81-102, here 84-85. Contemporary Kashinawa apply
genipap (another plant dye) to infants as part of the process of making them into persons. Cecilia
McCallum cited in Fausto, "Feasting on People," 505.
89 Im Thurn, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 39-40.
90 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 2: 124; Howard, "Wrought Identities," 242.
plucked and the follicles treated with achiote as well as other ointments.91 Twentieth-
century ethnographers have also remarked on familiarized animals "beautified with
human adornments," including feather headdresses and anklets of glass beads, and
being sung to with anent - "magical thought songs," a practice shared by new spouses
intent on "taming" each other.92 And in the case of many parrot species, the fa-
miliarization process extended to teaching the birds to speak.
Once tame, the animals were for the most part treated as free agents. Witnesses
accustomed to European practices were impressed with the liberty granted to the
adopted animals. Of the Panamanian Cuna Indians and their macaws, Lionel Wafer
wrote in the seventeenth century, "The Indians keep these Birds tame, as we do
Parrots, or Mag-Pies: But after they have kept them close some time, and taught
them to speak some Words in their Language, they suffer them to go abroad in the
Day-time into the Woods, among the wild ones; from whence they will on their own
accord return in the Evening to the Indian's Houses or Plantations."93 Gilij, de-
scribing the animals familiarized by Orinoco Amerindians, wrote: "even though they
always have their former forests before them, they never . . . abandon their love for
their masters." Philippe Descola noted that the tamed wild animals of the Achuar
among whom he conducted fieldwork "roamed freely."94 When we consider these
observations alongside the fact that Breton recorded that the Kalinago had the term
nhamácachi for animals who chose to present themselves as tame before humans,
it seems that an important aspect of familiarization included the idea of volition
among tamed subjects.
Not all familiarized animals spent their lives among their initial "captors." In
Gilij 's succinct statement, Amerindians familiarized animals "for their children or
in order to trade with other nations."95 That Europeans were the recipients of tamed
animals in gift and trade exchanges from the beginning of their arrival in the Amer-
icas - for example, Columbus's receipt of parrots upon landfall in October 1492 and
Oviedo's receipt of various tamed animals described above - attests that there were
already well-developed trading networks for familiarized animals among indigenous
groups.96 Howard proposes that a central reason why her Waiwai hosts exchanged
familiarized animals was to create "social ties" between families and villages. In a
91 Buono, "Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances," 113-118; Im Thum, "Tame Animals
among the Red Men of America," 28; Rivero, Historia de las misiones de los llanos de Casanare y los
rios Orinoco y Meta , 9. This process, observed among Amazonian and Orinoco Amerindians since the
early colonial period, was known as tapirage and resulted in parrots producing feathers colored yellow
rather than green. Most accounts of tapirage ascribe its purpose as producing beautiful yellow feathers
that were then incorporated into ritual headdresses and objects. However, given that it was more or less
the identical treatment - remove feather or hair, apply achiote (minus the toad extract) - applied to
other iegue (human and non-human), it seems likely that it also served the familiarizing process, tame-
ness being associated with hair removal and the application of red dye.
92 On adornment, see Howard, "Wrought Identities," 244. On the anent , see Taylor, "Wives, Pets,
and Affines," 47-48.
93 Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699; repr., Cleveland,
1903), 120. See also Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique , 92v-93v; Gumilla, El Orinoco
ilustrado y defendido , 299.
94 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 252; Im Thum, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of
America," 33-34. See also Alfred Russel Wallace,^ Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro,
with an Account of the Native Tribes , and Observations on the Climate , Geology, and Natural History of
the Amazon Valley (London, 1889), 251; Descola, In the Society of Nature, 90.
95 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana , 1: 252.
96 On preexisting indigenous networks of trade that prominently featured birds (and the essential
52 Marcy Norton
Waiwai village, a baby bird or puppy might be offered as a gift to an unrelated family
as a way of creating a relationship to be sustained over time, so that "portions of game
caught by the grown dog will be given to the family who gave it away as a puppy."
The same process worked "at the broadest level of social relations," so that "dogs
and parrots are exchanged with trade partners living in different Waiwai villages, and
thence to those of other groups." "The behavior surrounding the barter of dogs and
parrots is literally an exercise in international diplomacy," explains Howard.97
In this way, the exchange of animals functioned in similar ways to marriage and
traditional forms of slavery in Greater Amazonia. Neil Whitehead argues that "in-
digenous forms of warfare and marriage . . . are usually seen in active thought as
analogous mechanisms for the exchange and flow of persons between groups." "To
make the prestation of a woman in marriage created a debt on the part of those
receiving wives such that this, a fundamental social fact, became an idiom through
which many forms of imperial tribute systems and their associated labor regime were
understood," according to Whitehead.98 In their investigations of indigenous "slav-
ery," both Santos-Granero and Whitehead emphasize that "animal pets . . . are used
to picture the status of the human captive."99 Yet "pets" were more than metaphors
for captives and wives; their "prestation," too, created bonds of reciprocal obligation.
In fact, Howard noted that in negotiating the exchange of familiarized animals, her
hosts made use of a formal kind of discourse, "the same that is used in marriage
negotiations, sorcery charges, and work recruitment." Likewise, "mothers would
grieve over the loss of their pets in the same standardized vocabulary as they
mourned the departure of their married children, who likewise left behind memories,
nostalgia, and palpable absences (silence, an empty hammock space, ungrated man-
ioc, uncaught game)."100
The exchanged animals were not commodities in the European sense. Santos-
Granero and Whitehead contrast the indigenous trade in human captives with early
modern European forms of servitude organized around commodification. For those
participating in the European slave trade, the captive was "alienable for monetary
gain," whereas for participants in traditional Amerindian captive warfare, "that labor
remained invested in the social person, because the servility of labor was enforced
by kinship or ritual obligation, not the institution of law."101 The same was true of
non-human iegue - their exchange was first and foremost about creating social ties
red dye achiote discussed above) and linked lowland and highland communities, see Scaramelli and
Scaramelli, "The Roles of Material Culture in the Colonization of the Orinoco," 153.
97 Howard, "Wrought Identities," 247-252, quotes from 248, 247, 248, 249.
98 Neil L. Whitehead, "Indigenous Slavery in South America, 1492-1820," in Keith Bradley and Paul
Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3: AD 1420-AD 1804 (Cambridge, 2011),
248-271.
99 Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies , 175; Whitehead, Indigenous Slavery in South America, 248-
251.
100 Howard, "Wrought Identities," 249, 252. Howard emphasized that the animals are not the same
as children but are important as "substitutes . . . like them but not identical . . . Pets therefore serve as
'icons' of children - signifiers that not only stand for their signifieds but also comment on their signif-
icance - while the transactions of pets between trade partners become ironically liked to the transaction
of marriage partners between families and villages" (252).
101 Whitehead, "Indigenous Slavery in South America," 249; see also Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.
between groups. From initial capture to familiarization to exchange, the life cycles
of non-human and human iegue were parallel.
The centrality of familiarization to Amerindian life is evident in the ways it me-

diated colonial interactions, particularly as it relates to the reception of new animal
species and livestock husbandry.102 Across time and space in the Caribbean and
South America, Amerindians responded to the poultry introduced by Europeans as
iegue. One of the earliest descriptions of South Americans' integration of European
poultry is from Jean de Léry's sixteenth-century account of life among the Tupi-
namba. First, as with adopted parrots, the local people appreciated the chickens for
their plumage and treated them with achiote ("they set great store by the white ones
for their feathers, which they dye red and use to adorn their bodies"). Second, they
were loath to eat them or their eggs, admonishing the Europeans for their practice
("they seldom eat any of either breed . . . When they saw us eating [the eggs] instead
of having the patience to let them hatch, they were astonished, and would say 'You
are too gluttonous; when you eat an egg, you are eating a hen'"). Third, they ac-
corded them liberty and did not seek to control their reproduction: "They keep no
more reckoning of their hens than of wild birds, letting them lay wherever they
please; the hens most often bring their chicks from the woods and thickets where
they have brooded them, so the savage women do not take the trouble that we do
over here, raising turkey chicks on egg-yolks."103
These features are echoed by later accounts of assimilation of chickens. Breton's
observation of the Kalinago - "if they have chickens, they would die before eating
them, not even an egg, maybe they are less disgusted by this now" - corroborates the
proscription against eating familiarized animals, while also suggesting its loosening
as a result of colonial interaction.104 The Spanish naturalist and explorer Jorge Juan
commented on how the women "conceive such a fondness for [domestic fowl], that
they will not even sell them" and documented the dismay ("shrieks," "tears ... as
if it had been an only son") he evoked when he devoured his host's chicken while
staying in a village in western Ecuador in the first half of the eighteenth century.105
Like the Taino man with his companion pigs and Breton's hosts, Ulloa's landlady
treated "domestic" animals like any another variety of animal suitable for taming.
Another difference between Europeans' approach to chickens and that of Am-
erindians in this region was their attitude toward the animals' reproduction. Similar
to Léry, the French missionary Antoine Biet, who explored the region around the
mouth of the Cayenne River (French Guiana) in 1652, wrote that the Carib-speaking
102 Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden has arrived at a somewhat different interpretation of Tupinamba
Indians' reactions to poultry. He argues that they were thought to belong in an "intermediate" category
between their preexisting category of tamed animals and European-style domesticated animals; Vander
Velden, "As galinhas incontáveis." While over time it seems certain that Amerindians created a wide
range of creative syntheses drawing from indigenous and European conceptual categories, it is my ar-
gument that the initial response to domesticated animals relied on the category of iegue.
103 Lérv, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil , 86.
104 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-françois , 290-291; see also Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées
par les françois , 2: 389.
105 Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, trans. John Adams, 5th ed., 2 vols.
(London, 1807), 1: 409. Cited in Galton, Inquines into Human Faculty , 248.
54 Marcy Norton
Galibi "don't take the trouble to make [chickens] lay eggs, but they [the hens] hatch
their eggs in some hole in the woods, they incubate them there and bring back their
little ones to the house."106 What the European observers ascribed to laziness - the
women's lack of involvement in the chickens' reproductive life - was more likely a
product of their already developed habits and proclivities with "undomesticated"
animals, which put a premium on allowing iegue a degree of liberty at odds with
European livestock practices.
If prolonged contact with Europeans and disruption caused by colonialism
eroded these cultural values, as Breton suggested, there was also notable longevity.
The early-twentieth-century ethnographer William Farabee wrote that the Guiana
Carib valued chickens as "song birds" and refrained from eating them, and John
Gillin reported that "chickens are kept simply as luxury pets, and much time is spent
in admiring and boasting of the form, color, and feathering of the bird."107 Other
groups responded similarly. Napoleon Chagnon, the infamous ethnographer who
lived among the Y§nomamö in the mid-twentieth century, noted that "Nothing dis-
gusted [them] more than my matter-of-fact comments that we ate our domestic an-
imals, such as cattle and sheep, and many a missionary gave up in frustration after
having attempted to introduce chickens at mission posts. The Yąnomamo liked the
roosters because they crowed at dawn, and kept them essentially for this aesthetic
reason if they kept them at all, but would refuse to kill and eat them."108
The response of groups throughout the Caribbean and South America to chick-
ens complicates Jared Diamond's assertion that the "rapid acceptance of Eurasian
domesticates by non-Eurasian peoples" proves that "the explanation for the lack of
native mammal domestication outside Eurasia lay with the locally available wild
mammals themselves, not with the local peoples."109 Rather, native groups assim-
ilated domesticates such as chickens on their own terms - they appreciated them as
ideal iegue given their lovely feathers, companionability, and labor contributions
(wake-up calls). Once they were tamed, eating them would be a disturbing trans-
gression. There was, of course, no taboo against killing animals for food, but there
was one against killing an animal that one had personally raised.
The Amerindian structure of iegue is essential for understanding processes such

as domestication and the Columbian Exchange. Domestication has for too long fune-
106 Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en Visle de Cayenne , 339.
107 Farabee, The Central Caribs , 201; Gillin, The Barama River Caribs of British Guiana , 45. See also
Howard, "Wrought Identities," 245, and Im Thurm, "Tame Animals among the Red Men of America," 31.
108 Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yqnomamö , 6th ed. (Belmont, Calif., 2012), 108. He writes: "an animal,
captured in the wild, is 'of the forest' but once brought into the village, it is 'of the village' and somehow
different, for it is then part of Culture. For this reason, they do not eat their otherwise edible pets - such
as monkeys, birds and rodents - it is similar to cannibalism: eating something 'cultural' and therefore
humanlike." See also William J. Smole, The Yanoama Indians: A Cultural Geography (Austin, Tex., 1976),
185. For similar sentiments among Jivaro and Tukano peoples, see Yolanda Murphy and Robert F.
Murphy, Women of the Forest , 2nd ed. (New York, 1985), 64; Philippe Descola, "Homeostasis as a
Cultural System: The Jivaro Case," in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present , 203-
224, 207; Irving Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon (Urbana, 111., 1963), 64; Jean E.
Jackson, The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge,
1983).
109 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel , 163-164.
tioned as a Eurocentric (or Eurasian-centric) modernization narrative. Oviedo's dis-
dain for the Taino's adoption of pigs is part of a colonial tradition that still haunts
us. It "is impossible to think" about political modernity, writes Dipesh Chakrabarty,
"without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep
into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe." "Domestication" is
another such concept deployed in deep-rooted genealogies of modernity.110 By re-
covering iegue, we can destabilize domestication and the narrative of teleological,
Eurocentric historical progress that goes along with it.
Understanding iegue helps us historicize not only domestication but pets as well.
While the capability to feel affection and form powerful bonds with other species
appears to be universal (and hardly unique to humans), the contexts in which these
relationships occur differ considerably among societies, just as "companionate mar-
riage" is only one of many structures that have emerged for organizing intra-human
relationships over time. "Pet" is far from a trans-historical category; as we have seen,
before the nineteenth century, Europeans traveling in native America and lacking
the concept of or a word for an animal "pet" referred to "tamed" or "domesticated"
animals and indicated the ways in which they differed from European livestock. The
first appearance of "pet" to denote "an animal (typically one which is domestic or
tame) kept for pleasure or companionship" was in 1710, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, and similar terms in other modern European languages are also
of recent vintage.111 There are crucial differences between pets and iegue. Whereas
the term "pet" is reserved for non-human animals, terms such as iegue straddle the
species divide and denote human adoptees as well as familiarized non-humans. A
related and essential difference concerns the animals eligible for killing and con-
sumption. Today, the animal species most eligible for pethood - dogs and cats - are
ineligible for eating; for many, not only is the idea of eating one's own dog repellent,
but so is the idea of eating any dog. However, most dog owners likely feed their dogs,
as well as themselves, other animals who themselves have been fed for the purpose
of killing them. In Caribbean and South American communities, the proscriptions
were very different. Most types of animals - including human ones - were eligible for
adoption or consumption.112 However, once an individual animal from any species
was fed and tamed (unless that animal was specifically prepared for sacrifice), the
idea of eating him or her was anathema. Europeans' revulsion at the idea of eating
a person's flesh (human or otherwise) was matched by Amerindians' horror at the
idea of eating any tame being (human or otherwise.)
Iegue and pet may well be intrinsically linked, but not, as is so often assumed,
because pet-keeping is a universal impulse.113 Instead, the most important connec-
tion is historical: iegue likely contributed to the etiology of the "pet" as the concept
and practice emerged in the late seventeenth century. Affective relationships be-
tween humans and non-humans were not novel in Europe, but the idea of a pet - an
animal who is part of the familial system and whose main "purpose" is to provide
110 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, N.J., 2000), 4, emphasis in the original.
111 See Marc Shell, "Family Pet," Representations 15 (Summer 1986): 121-153.
112 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana, 1: 225-227, 263; see also Erikson, "De l'acclimatation des
concepts et des animaux ou les tribulations d'idées américanistes en Europe."
113 For the universal argument, see Serpell, In the Company of Animais, 72.
56 Marcy Norton
the pleasure of affection (as opposed to the vassal horse or dog of aristocratic hunt-
ing, or the laboring oxen of animal husbandry, or even the lapdog of the royal or
noble court) - was. Might not Europeans' extensive exposure to iegue, as the importation
of parrots and monkeys began in the fifteenth century and expanded throughout the
early modern period, have contributed to its emergence alongside the other proposed
catalysts (the rise of secular cosmology, the rise of domesticity) of pethood?114
Finally, the differences and entangled histories of iegue and pet open up a space
to consider the ramifications of these findings for contemporary debates about non-
human animals' "rights" and "personhood" - as well as those of human animals. A
dominant rationale among contemporary philosophers and legal theorists for ex-
tending "rights" or even "personhood" to animals, beginning with the nineteenth-
century Jeremy Bentham and including such adversaries as Peter Singer and Gary
Francione, is that, given that many of the "capacities" or "interests" on which human
personhood is based are also shared with some or many non-human organisms, these
other species should likewise be recognized as persons. (Whether the line should be
drawn at certain cognitive or emotional capacities or at sentience is a matter of huge
debate.) Either explicitly or implicitly, these theorists assume that some essential
truth can be known about animals, so that once there are agreed-upon criteria, an
accurate line can be drawn; they therefore turn to scientists for determining the
thresholds of cognitive ability, emotional response, or sentience.115
A few philosophers, however, do not view personhood as the outcome of such
"biological facts." Cora Diamond believes that "the difference between human be-
ings and animals is not to be discovered by studies of Washoe or the activities of
dolphins"; nor is "the biological fact that we and dogs and rats and titmice and
monkeys are all species of animal" sufficient.116 In different though complementary
ways, she and Donna Haraway point to the notion that there can be no separation
of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, whether it is Diamond's recognition of a "fellow
creature" or Haraway's interest in how humans and their "companion species"
"make each other up." The recognition of an other's subjectivity emerges because
of the act of recognizing, rather than the inherent capacities of that "other."117 The
114 On the differences between these categories and a preliminary exploration of this thesis, see
Norton, "Going to the Birds," 71-76. On parrots in Europe, see Boehrer, Parrot Culture , chaps. 3 and
4; on monkeys, see Holly Dugan, "To Bark with Judgement': Playing Baboon in Early Modern London,"
Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 77-93, and forthcoming work by Kenneth Gouwens. On exotic animals
generally, see Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-
Century Pans (Baltimore, 2002). For other interpretations of pethood, see Thomas, Man and the Natural
World; Shell, "Family Pet"; Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century
Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
115 For instance, Singer, Practical Ethics ; Steven M. Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for
Animal Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Steiner ,Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents. Even Francione,
who points to the problem of experimenting on animals to find out how smart they are and derides
"similar minds theories," reluctantly acknowledges a debt to "mainstream science" for his preferred
criteria of "sentience." Gary L. Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Ex-
ploitation (New York, 2008), chap. 3; see also Francione, "Animal Welfare and the Moral Value of
Nonhuman Animals," Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, no. 1 (2010): 24-36.
116 Cora Diamond, "Eating Meat and Eating People," Philosophy 53, no. 206 (1978): 465-479, here
470, 474.
117 Haraway's commitment to intersubjectivity is suggested in the very title of her book, as well as
the emphasis on "ongoing becoming with." She writes: "We are training each other in acts of com-
munication we barely understand ... we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love.
This love is a historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy." When Species Meet , 16, 23. 1 benefited
implication is that scientific studies that prove other animals' capacities are an effect,
rather than a cause, of recognizing "fellow creatures" - and that, most often, phi-
losophers have reversed the causality. Consider Gary Steiner's statement, for in-
stance, that "even if the nature of the apes' orientation on language is not the same
as the human orientation ... it is nonetheless clear that we can have meaningful
interrelationships with apes."118 Rather, as Haraway has made clear, it is because
primatologists have meaningful interrelationships with apes that they can appreciate
their linguistic abilities.119 History and anthropology might have more to teach us
than do the biological sciences about what conditions and frameworks offer the pos-
sibility for intersubjective experiences between and among species. This emphasis on
intersubjectivity, too, allows for the agency of the non-human, for this is what it
means to experience the cusicusi probing his human's nostril, the parrot talking to
her human, the deer emptying out the tobacco pouch, or the animal who chooses
to "come tame." In this way, we experience their recognition, as well as our own. The
Kalinago appreciated this intersubjectivity with their term for "animals who come
tame before them."
The present-day paradox of cooking some of our animals and cooking for others
of them will not be resolved by discovering which ones have sufficient emotional or
cognitive abilities. Rather, these findings suggest that the practices that constitute
animal husbandry or experimentation on animals forestall recognition and limit in-
tersubjective experience, whereas the practices of taming iegue, caring for pets, and
perhaps even hunting wild prey foster them. They also suggest the need to disag-
gregate some concepts related to subjectivity (for humans as well as other beings).
Namely, it is often taken for granted that as a universal precondition for one to harm
or kill or enslave another, it is necessary to deny his or her subjectivity; and con-
versely, it is argued that the promotion of empathy is what allows for the recognition
that "rights" should be extended to an expanding circle of beings. And, indeed, it
might be that in the European and Euro-American context, this has often been the
case. But in the system in which iegue flourished, a fellow subject could be fed, or
could be made food, but the same being could not be fed and made food, as in
Eurasian-originating livestock husbandry.
from the gloss of Haraway and Derrida in Wolfe, "Flesh and Finitude"; their views align well with Kari
Weil's call for "critical anthropomorphism," in Thinking Animals, 19-20.
118 Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents , 238.
119 Haraway, When Species Meet , 24; Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender ; Race , and Nature
in the World of Modern Science (New York, 1990). This analysis also benefited from primatologist Bar-
bara Smuts, "Reflections," in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.,
1999), 107-120.
Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at George Washington Uni-

versity, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of Spain and Latin
America before 1800. She is the author of the prize-winning book Sacred Gifts ,
Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cor-
nell University Press, 2008). She is currently writing a book about human-animal
relationships in the early modern Atlantic world.
58 M arey Norton
APPENDIX
Animal Familiarization in the Caribbean and Lowland South America, 1492-2006
B = birds; P = primates; M = other mammals. If a cell has been left blank, that means the
information is unknown.
Language Date of Familiarized

People Location Group Observation (s) Source Animals
Taino Bahamas Arawak 1492 Columbus B
Taino Hispaniola Arawak 1492 Columbus B
Taino Hispaniola Arawak 1510s Las Casas B
Taino Cuba Arawak 1510s Las Casas B
Karina Curiana, "Pearl Carib 1499 Anghiera B, P
Coast"
(Venezuela)
Cumangoto Paria (Venezuela) Carib 1508 Anghiera B
Taino Hispaniola Arawak 1510s Anghiera B, M
Karipuna Guadeloupe Arawak 1510s Anghiera B
Taino Cuba Arawak 1511 Herrera y B Tordesillas
Cumangoto Paria (Venezuela) Carib 1510s-1520s Oviedo M
Darién 1513-1525 Oviedo P, M
Tierra Firme 1513-1525 Oviedo M
(Colombia)
Cartagena
(Colombia)
Calamari/Cuna? Tierra Firme 1514 Anghiera B
Cartagena
(Colombia)
Tupinamba Rio de Janeiro Tupi-Guarani 1555-1556 Thevet B, P, M
(Brazil)
Tupinamba Rio de Janeiro Tupi-Guarani 1556-1558 Léry B, P
(Brazil)
South American 1580s Drake ms. M
Yao? Trinidad Carib 1580s Drake ms. B
littoral
Cuna (Cueva)? Chagres River 1580s Drake ms. B, P, M

Nicaragua 1580s Drake ms. B
(Panama)
Andesuyu, Upper ca. 1600 Guarnan Poma de B, P

Amazon (Peru) Ayala
Kalinago Dominica Arawak (with 1630s Breton B, M
Carib loan
words)
Kalinago Guadeloupe and Arawak (with 1640s-1650s Tertre B, M
Lesser Antilles Carib loan
words)
Kalinago Lesser Antilles Arawak (with 1640s-1650s Tertre M
Carib loan
words)
Galibi Cayenne (French Carib 1643 Boyer B, M
Guiana)
Galibi Cayenne (French Carib 1651-1652 Biet B, P
Guiana)
Galibi Guarapiche River Carib 1653 Pelleprat M
(Venezuela)
Piritu, Cumangoto, Cumana Carib 1670s Ruiz Blanco B, M
Palenque (Venezuela)
Cuna Panama Chibchan 1680s Wafer B, M
Achagua/various Middle Orinoco Arawak 1720s Rivero B
(Venezuela)
Various (e.g., Middle Orinoco Arawak/Carib/ 1720s-1730s Gumilla B, M
Saliva, Achagua, (Venezuela) Saliva
Mapoy)
Upper Amazon 1730-1740s Ulloa B, M
(Ecuador)
Carib, Cumangoto, Piritu River, Gulf Carib and 1740s-1750s Caulin B, M
Palenque of Paria, etc. Arawak
(Venezuela)
Various Middle Orinoco Carib, Arawak, 1750s-1760s Gilij B, P, M
(Venezuela) various
Tamanaco Middle Orinoco Carib 1750s-1760s Gilij B, P, M
(Venezuela)
Guahibo, Piaroa, Upper and Middle Arawak and 1800 Humboldt B, P, M
and Maypure Orinoco Saliba
groups (Venezuela)
Various (esp. Br. Guiana Arawak and 1840-1850 Brett B, P, M
Arawak, Carib, Carib
Warao)
Arawak Pomeroon and Arawak 1840-1851 Brett P
Moruca Rivers
(Br. Guiana)
Warao Camaka, Honobo, Warao 1841 Schomburgk B, P, M
Barima Rivers
(Br. Guiana)
Wapishana and Rupununi River Arawak and 1842 Schomburgk B
others (Br. Guiana) others
Taruma and Rupununi River Arawak 1843 Schomburgk B, M
Maopityans (Dutch Guiana)
Mundurucu Tapajós River Tupi-Guarani 1852 Bates B
(State of Para,
Upper Amazon 1850s Bates P, M

Brazil)
Rio Negro 1850s Wallace B

(Brazil)
Carib Rupununi and Carib 1870s Im Thum B, P
Essequibo
Rivers (Br.
Guiana)
Carib, Warao, Essequibo River Carib, Arawak, 1870s Im Thum B, P, M
Macusi, Arawak, (Br. Guiana) Warao
Diau, and other Br. Guiana and Carib 1913-1916 Farabee B
Carib groups northern Brazil
(Macusi)
Jivaro Eastern Ecuador Jivaro 1916 -1919 Karsten P
and Peru 1928-1929
Caribs Barama River (Br. Carib 1930s Gillin B, P, M
Guiana)
Nambicuara Mato Grosso, [Nambicuara] 1938-1939 Lévi-Strauss B, P, M
Brazil
Cubeo Vaupés River Tukano 1939-1940 Goldman P, M
(Colombia)
60 Marcy Norton
Waika and Upper Orinoco Yanoama and 1950 Anduze B, M
Makiritare lowlands Carib
(Venezuela)
Waika Upper Orinoco Yanoama 1951-1953 Barker B, P, M
lowlands
(Venezuela)
Waiwai Upper Essequibo Carib 1952 Guppy B, P, M
River (Br.
Guiana)
Mundurucu Tapajós River Tupi-Guarani 1952-1953 Murphy and B, M
(State of Para, Murphy
Brazil)
Y§nomamö Upper Orinoco Yanoama 1960s-1970s Chagnon B, P, M
(Brazil and
Venezuela)
Bororo Paragrau River Bororo (Macro 1964-1965, Crocker B, M
(Mato Grosso, Ge) 1967
Brazil)
Kalapolo Upper Xingu Carib 1966-1968 Basso B, P, M
Basin (Mato
Grosso, Brazil)
Txicao Xingu River Carib 1967-1980 Menget B, P, M
(Mato Grosso,
Brazil)
Tukano Vaupés region, Tucanoan 1968-1970 Jackson B
Central area
(Colombia)
Yąnomamo Parima highlands Yanoama 1970 Smole M
(Venezuela)
Achuar Pastaza River Jivaro 1976-1978 Taylor, Descola B, P, M
(Ecuador)
Araweté Middle Xingu Tupi-Guarani 1980s Viveiros de B
River (Brazil) Catstro
Waiwai Essequibo River Carib 1982-1986 Howard B, M
(Brazil)
Huaorani Curaray River, Huaroani 1988-1982 Rival B, P, M
Western
Amazonia
(Ecuador)
Guaja Western Tupi-Guarani 1996-1997 Cormier B, P, M
Maranhão,
Eastern
Amazonia
(Brazil)
Kanamari Itaquai River, Katukina 2002-2006 Costa B, P, M
Western
Amazon (Brazil)
Karitana Rondônia (Brazil) Ariken (Tupi) 2003 Vander Velden B, P, M
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Human-Animal Relationships and The Columbian Exchange Norton M 2015

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The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange

Author(s): MARCY NORTON

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

Iegue needs to be understood in the context of "prédation" and "familiarization,"

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

The centrality of familiarization to Amerindian life is evident in the ways it me-

American Historical Review February 2015

The Amerindian structure of iegue is essential for understanding processes such

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at George Washington Uni-

American Historical Review February 2015

Language Date of Familiarized

Cuna (Cueva)? Chagres River 1580s Drake ms. B, P, M

Andesuyu, Upper ca. 1600 Guarnan Poma de B, P

American Historical Review February 2015

Upper Amazon 1850s Bates P, M

Rio Negro 1850s Wallace B

American Historical Review February 2015

American Historical Review February 2015

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