The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships … Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange MARCY NORTON ... l’objectivation,” in Bruno

The Chicken or the Iegue : Human-Animal Relationshipsand the Columbian Exchange

MARCY NORTON

Nhamacachi: Animals who come tame before them, whom they believe belongto their Gods, and whom they dare not kill.1

IN 1543, A TAINO MAN HAD BEEN living in the mountains in the central southern partof Hispaniola for twelve years. Though fluent in Spanish and familiar with Spanishways, he had fled to escape the oppressive exploitation of the encomienda. The mansurvived in the wilderness through a special relationship with three formerly feralpigs, 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-dospear. Once the prey was killed, the man would preside over the ritual distributionof the carcass, as was done in traditional hunts in Europe with dogs, “giving theinterior parts to his companions,” while he made a barbecue for himself and saltedthe flesh for several days’ consumption. When prey was not readily available, the manalso foraged for roots and plants, which he ate and shared with his porcine company.“At night,” wrote the conquistador-turned-chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez deOviedo, “the said Indian went to bed among that bestial company, petting for hoursone 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 mountainslooking for runaway slaves after a recent rebellion. Assuming that these were feralpigs 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, “Thosepigs gave me life and maintained me as I maintained them; they were my friends andgood company; one I gave this name, and the other was called so-and-so, and thefemale pig was called so-and-so.” Oviedo reported that “the deaths of these threeFunding 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, andNew 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 offeredinsightful critiques and suggestions: Luiz Costa, Ben Cowan, Lauren (Robin) Derby, Carlos Fausto, LynnHunt, Maya Koretsky, Rita Norton, Istvan Praet, David Sartorius, and Zeb Tortorici, as well as theeditors of and the anonymous readers for the AHR . I am also thankful for the research assistance ofRobert B. Stoner. And special thanks to Claudia Verhoeven for being such a good reader of so manydrafts, and to Paul and Lilly (“Shmaug”) for helping me think about intersubjectivity.

1 Raymond Breton, Dictionaire francois-caraibe (Auxerre, 1666), 20.

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animals brought much pain and suffering to the Indian, and that the soldiers reportedfeeling very bad for having slaughtered the companionable pigs.”2

Oviedo was amazed by “this great novelty” in which “pigs being hunted wereconverted into being hunters.” He credited the Indian, “being a rational animal andhuman man,” with impressive ingenuity for “teaching those beasts in hunting, bring-ing a trainable friendship to that occupation,” and convincing his pigs “to kill othersthey came across, because their master did not have love for these others.” Yet healso wrote scornfully of the choice to “fle[e] men and be content living with beastsand 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 debasementinto beastliness.

Prying open this sad encounter, we see central divergences between Europeanand Amerindian cultures’ ways of organizing inter-species relationships. Oviedo’saccount reveals the European principles of maintaining proper boundaries betweenhumans and beasts and adhering to a hierarchical taxonomy of kinds of animals. Inother words, for Oviedo and his European readers, the Taıno man mystified, at best,and erred, at worst, both by living in overly close proximity to “beasts” and so “beingbestial,” 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, withthe lowliest of livestock animals, the pig.3 For many Europeans, the human/animaland hunting/livestock binaries were organizing principles, and those who confusedor attempted to cross these boundaries were troubling.4 For Amerindians such as theunnamed Taıno man, the fundamental dividing line was between wild and tame be-ings. This divide bridged and superseded the human/non-human binary, groupinghuman 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, ofenemies into kin, of prey into “pets,” was a central and desirable pursuit.

The adoption and taming—or “familiarization”—of non-human animals wasubiquitous among Caribbean and lowland South American indigenous groups.5Some individuals of non-human species, ranging from parrots to peccaries, werehunted 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 humanchild. Likewise, the same logic organized many Caribbeans’ and South Americans’

2 Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias [hereafter HGN], ed. JuanPerez de Tudela Bueso, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Madrid, 1992), 1: 221–222. All translations from Spanish andFrench are my own unless otherwise noted.

3 I have argued that that “vassal” animals (horse, hound, and hawk) were deemed superior tolivestock (cattle, swine, poultry, etc.). Marcy Norton, “Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beingsin 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., Lexikonof 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 deemphasizesanthropocentrism and focuses on the “diversity” and “complexity” of “the Spanish cultural vision ofanimals” is Abel A. Alves, The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and HumanInteraction 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 tensein referring to the practices of indigenous groups, but as the table in the Appendix and the text makeclear, many of these practices continue into the present.

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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 wasto obtain captives who would be subject to either the regenerative death of predationor 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 accompaniedby cannibalization and/or “trophy-taking” (transforming body parts—heads, bones,teeth—into ritual objects), and so also incorporated in another fashion.

Iegue was a fundamental concept and structure that organized inter-species, aswell as intra-human, relationships in many parts of native America. Though thereis overlap with the concept of “pet,” a key difference is that the category iegue bridgesthe divide between humans and other animals. While Amerindian practices of cap-turing, taming, and socially assimilating wild animals have received some attentionfrom contemporary ethnographers working in lowland South America, historianshave not attended to these phenomena. However, a systematic investigation of theextensive, if scattered, ethnohistorical evidence of Amerindians’ predilection totame wild animals, found in the textual and visual accounts of explorers, soldiers,missionaries, naturalists, and indigenous writers, illuminates the importance of thesepractices and their vitality over the longue duree, as well as how they affected thereception of domestic animals imported from Europe.

In addition to the intrinsic significance of iegue, understanding the taming processforces us to rethink conventional narratives concerning the place of animal “do-mestication” in history. That the domestication of animals represents a necessarymilestone 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 ofprogress, including those of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.7 An early theorist of animaldomestication marked it as the pivotal phase in which man moved beyond “thethreshold of barbarism”—to which, “perhaps more than to any other cause, we mustattribute 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 animaldomestication 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 a l’approvisionnement: Chasse, alliance et familiarisation en Amazonie ameri-endienne,” Techniques & Culture 9 (1987): 105–140; and Philippe Descola, “Pourquoi les Indiensd’Amazonie n’ont-ils pas domestique le pecari? Genealogie des objets et anthropologie del’objectivation,” in Bruno Latour and Pierre Lemonnier, eds., De la prehistoire 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: ACritical Geography of Domestication,” Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 4 (1997): 463–485; TimIngold, “From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human-Animal Relations,” in AubreyManning 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 (IowaCity, 1987).

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tegrated into the domestic realm as property or prestige goods by controlling theirreproduction 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 processduring which the gene pool of subsequent generations of a population is alteredthrough human selection, with the ultimate result being animals that are capable ofdual identification [identifying with both humans and members of the same species—“conspecifics”] and that reproduce in an anthropogenic habitat.”11 Animal tamingshares some features with domestication, namely non-human animals’ “integrationinto 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 makessense to infer, as is common in the scholarship, that the taming of wild animals wasa necessary prelude to “domestication” in Eurasia. However, the converse does nothold: to apply the term “semi-domestication” to the taming of wild animals amongpresent-day “hunter-gatherers” is a distortion, as it implies a teleological and uni-versal trajectory that is not warranted. Jared Diamond makes this teleology (andEurasian-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’sthree 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 theydid not, and the answer he provides is that the native species of Africa, Australia,and the Americas were not suitable “candidates” for domestication. By assumingthat only “obstacles” would explain non-Eurasians’ failure to domesticate animals,Diamond furthers the ancient belief in a universal trajectory of human progressdependent 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 (butno reason to think “obstacle”) for why the trajectory of animal-human relationshipsdid not lead to Eurasian-style domestication in South America. Parrots, peccaries,

10 Guillermo L. Mengoni Gonalons 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, EveEmshwiller, and Bruce D. Smith, eds., Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and ArchaeologicalParadigms (Berkeley, Calif., 2006), 228–244, here 230. The standard general treatment of domesticationremains 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 AnimalDomestication,” Society and Animals 10, no. 3 (2002): 285–302.

11 Werner Muller, “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 Gonalons 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 processof 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.”





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monkeys, tapirs, and sloths, among others, appear eminently tameable.14 But in thecultural 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 theirown terms, placing them in the same category as other iegue, not that of Europeanlivestock. “Columbian Exchange” is the label applied to the intertwined ecologicaland social consequences of the cross-hemispheric transfer of previously isolated floraand 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 ofEurope, 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 wellas smallpox and influenza, in transforming American ecologies.15 Though Crosby’sseminal scholarship rightfully spotlighted the unintentional effects of hemisphericintegration, there was little attention to the extent to which important elements ofthe transfer depended on human knowledge, particularly non-European knowledge.Markedly absent in these environmental histories and others that followed in theirwake is a consideration of the cultural and social apparatus with which Amerindiansmediated their interactions with animals, or their responses to novel fauna and socialstructures (European-style hunting and husbandry) brought by colonizers.16 Somerecent studies have rectified the tendency toward biological determinism, yet thereis 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 whatabout the agency of non-human actors, the animals hunted and the iegue tamed? Thequestion of non-human agency and subjectivity is a vexing and fraught issue for therecent surge in scholarship that concerns human-animal relationships, as well ascontemporary debates about animal “rights” and “personhood.”18 But there is noagreement on how to approach non-human animal actors. In the field of environ-

14 Descola, “Pourquoi les Indiens d’Amazonie n’ont-ils pas domestique le pecari?,” 340. For a dif-ferent cultural explanation, see Philippe Erikson, “De l’acclimatation des concepts et des animaux oules tribulations d’idees americanistes en Europe,” Terrain 28 (1997): 119–124.

15 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30thAnniversary Edition (Westport, Conn., 2003), chap. 3; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The BiologicalExpansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986), chap. 8.

16 See, for instance, Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of theConquest 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 havebenefited from Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington, Ind., 2002); Tom Tyler andManuela 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 Levi-Strauss’s dictum that “animals are good to thinkwith,” there have long existed histories of human views about animals. On the difference between animals

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mental history, including the above-mentioned studies concerning the “ColumbianExchange,” animals often figure as one of many components of “nature,” alongsideother organisms and subsumed within larger ecological systems; non-human animalsare assigned agency, but not subjectivity.19 Other scholars, however, want to chal-lenge anthropocentrism and humans as privileged historical subjects by showing thatassumptions about a fundamental divide between humans and (some) other speciesare groundless. Many are inspired by the work of animal behaviorists, who haveshown that capacities once thought to be uniquely human are in fact shared withother 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 ofanimals. These thinkers, among them Cora Diamond and Jacques Derrida, contestthe Kantian subject organized around reason, and instead, in the words of CaryWolfe, 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 agendaof social history and subaltern studies, and see the fight against “anthropocentrism”and “speciesism” as the next frontier, following the struggles against sexism andracism.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 consciousintent) 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 EricaFudge, Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana, Ill., 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 distinctionbetween “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 inthe 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,” SubStance37, no. 3 (2008): 8–36, here 8. The Ur-text for many following this line is Jacques Derrida, “The AnimalThat 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 Historyof Animals,” in Rothfels, Representing Animals, 3–18. At the most politicized end of the spectrum, seethe website of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies: “ICAS believes that to eliminate the dominationand oppression of animals in higher education animal advocacy/rights/liberation/abolitionist scholarsmust 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 constructivelydebating theories, tactics, and strategies for the advancement of animal liberation and freedom.”“ICAS’s Core Belief,” http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/about/.





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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 inthese various traditions that emerge from European lineages (for example, “West-ern” philosophy, laboratory science, and social sciences), recent landmark studieshave sought to recover ideas of animal agency from non-European perspectives.Following the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we have begun to “moveout from the Amerindian world as an object of observation/study into an effort tolook to the world (including its non-human components) from an Indigenous pointof view. Not the return of the native, but the turn of the native.”25 As Abel Alvesin The Animals of Spain and the contributors to Centering Animals in Latin AmericanHistory 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 Taıno man and his three pigs.26 It isthen 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 occupya subject position in their dealings with humans.”27 Part of the value of recoveringAmerindian concepts of animal agency and practices concerning iegue, and thereforetrans-species notions of subjectivity, is that it avoids the universalization of specif-ically European notions of subjectivity and agency, particularly important in fraughtcolonial settings. It also reveals that there exist trajectories other than Europeantraditions 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 NeverBeen 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 andTortorici, “Introduction: Writing Animal Histories,” ibid., 1–27; Heather McCrea, “Pest to Vector:Disease, Public Health, and the Challenges of State-Building in Yucatan, 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 Anthropologybeyond the Human (Berkeley, Calif., 2013); and Istvan Praet, Animism and the Question of Life (NewYork, 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 CharlesDarwin. For these narratives, see Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of theWestern Debate (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); Stephen T. Newmyer, Animals, Rights and Reason in Plutarch andModern Ethics (New York, 2005); Thomas, Man and the Natural World; Peter Singer, Practical Ethics,3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2011).

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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 fromAmerindian communities who inhabited the Greater and Lesser Antilles; the littoralof northern South America, extending to Panama; the tropical forest and savannaregions of the Orinoco River Basin (modern-day Venezuela); intermediate areas inthe Guianas; and the coastal region south of the Amazon (Brazil).

The concurrence in the taming practices recorded in colonial-era texts and thosedescribed by ethnographers in the last 150 years is compelling and warrants thetemporal reach of the longue duree. However, we must be attentive to the importantcritiques of “upstreaming” (assuming that the practices and beliefs of contemporaryindigenous groups necessarily were those of their ancestors) and anthropologicalapproaches that have assumed an “ethnographic present” (for example, belief in anunchanging “primitive” society).30 Accordingly, it is important not to interpolateidentities, 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 thereis independent evidence for similar phenomena across time, they should be con-sidered comparatively and seen as support for the strength of a particular structurerather 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: Remarksand Uncertainties as to Data and Theory,” in Whitehead, ed., Wolves from the Sea: Readings in theAnthropology of the Native Caribbean (Leiden, 1995), 91–111, here 93, 96, 99. He also warns of earlierscholarship that failed “to perceive the past regional scale and supra-ethnic character of Amerindiansocial organization”; Whitehead, “Ancient Amerindian Polities of the Amazon, Orinoco and AtlanticCoast: 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: Europeand the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London, 1986), 4; Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua:The Mythological World of the Taınos (Albuquerque, 1998), 22–35.

30 In recent decades, ethnohistorians of Greater Amazonia have stressed that “European conquesteffected the transition from ancient chiefdoms to indigenous village societies or peasant communitiesthrough 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 NativeCaribbean,” 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 differentgroups 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 theseventeenth century, among those in the Orinoco region in the late seventeenth century, and amongother Amazonian groups within the last century. Whitehead, “Crises and Transformations of InvadedSocieties”; Franz Scaramelli and Kay Tarble, “Fundacion y desarrollo de la frontera colonial en elOrinoco Medio (1400–1930),” Antropologica 103 (2005): 87–118, here 94; Adelia Engracia de Oliveira,“The Evidence for the Nature of the Process of Indigenous Deculturation and Destabilization in theBrazilian Amazon in the Last Three Hundred Years: Preliminary Data,” in Roosevelt, Amazonian In-dians from Prehistory to the Present, 95–119.





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suggests that there was (and in some places is) a common core to practices acrossthe indigenous Caribbean and lowland South America is not incompatible with thefact that there were (and are) regional and local variations.

IEGUE NEEDS TO BE UNDERSTOOD in the context of “predation” and “familiarization,”as they mediated both intra-human and inter-species relationships in the Caribbeanand lowland South America. The Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto, followingEduardo Viveiros de Castro, has suggested that “warfare in Amazonia is to be seenas a particular form of consumption, inflected toward the appropriation of the vic-tim’s capacities and incorporeal constituents” or “the conversion of the enemy’sdestruction into the production of kin I call the mode of producing persons by meansof the destruction of persons.”32 If one objective of Amerindian warfare is to capturethe “vital capital” that is “contained in war trophies [and] bodily substances,” it “alsocomprises the capabilities of actual men and women—namely, the reproductivepower of female captives, the warring abilities of captive boys brought up as membersof their masters’ societies, and the labor force of slaves, servants, and tributaries whocontribute services or goods,” in the words of Fernando Santos-Granero. He is oneof several scholars who have explored the incorporation of captives into the hostcommunity as wives, children, and “slaves,” widespread practices across the nativeCircum-Caribbean and South America.33

These two facets of predation as a way to create “vital capital” or to produce new32 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 Shamanismin Amazonia, trans. Rodgers (Cambridge, 2012).

33 Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, 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 Villamarın and Judith Villamarın, “Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of‘Senorıos 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 Txicao du Bresil central,” Anthro-pologie et Societes 12, no. 2 (1988): 63–72; Arvelo-Jimenez and Biord, “The Impact of Conquest onContemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield,” 58. Primary source descriptions include PietroMartire d’Anghiera, De orbe novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d’Anghera, trans. Francis AugustusMacNutt, 2 vols. (New York, 1912), 1: 63, 71; Pierre Pelleprat, Relation des missions des Pp. de la Com-pagnie de Jesus dans les Isles, & dans la terre ferme de l’Amerique meridionale (Paris, 1655), pt. 2, 57–63.

The organizing logic of predation and familiarization still appears powerful among groups wherethere is no evidence for the physical consumption of enemies, such as the Taıno of the Greater Antilles.See, for instance, the origin stories reported by friar Ramon Pane, whom Columbus assigned on hissecond voyage in 1493 to investigate the “ceremonies and antiquities” of the local inhabitants. Panerecorded a Taıno origins story that is suggestive. Pane, ed., An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians,new ed., with an Introductory Study, Notes, and Appendices by Jose Juan Arrom, trans. Susan Griswold(Durham, N.C., 1999), 13–14. See also Stevens-Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua, chap. 6.

On mortuary endocannibalism as a form of predation among twentieth-century Wari’ and ritual serialkilling of kanaima in indigenous Guiana, see Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Can-nibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, Tex., 2001); Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaima andthe Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, N.C., 2002). Predation can also be manifest in realms that do notdirectly involve killing or death. For instance, Christine-Anne Taylor proposes that “we find a relationof violent capture” in twentieth-century Jivaroan marriage, explaining that there is “prestige linked tosuccessfully ‘domesticating’ a woman captured in warfare and turning her into a loving spouse, a definitesign of masculine achievement since this is a feat that can only be carried off, it is thought, by matureand 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

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subjects are well illustrated by captive warfare as practiced among the Kalinago ofthe 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 HisDictionaire caraibe-francois (1665) and Dictionaire francois-caraibe (1666) were asmuch ethnographic compendia as lexicons, and the dictionary “genre” may well allownative categories and points of view to percolate more readily than other genres ofEuropean sources used for ethnohistorical reconstruction.36 Captive warfare, andthe resultant adoptions and ritual anthropophagy, appear in several places in theDictionaire caraibe-francois. Under the entry for “caıman huetoucounou,” translatedas “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 theirhair, 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 malechildren, they keep them as slaves; if they are grown, they make them fast, becausethey don’t eat any fat, then they kill them.”37 In this concise passage, Breton describesthe two outcomes of predation.

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). Forinstance, 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 concerningproper names. After explaining that adults considered it dangerous to be called byproper 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 nameof the Arawak that they killed.”39 This process relates to what Fausto, in his studyof “familiarizing predation” over the longue duree in lowland South America, hasexplained as “the appropriation of an alien subjectivity through the transformationof 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 ofPeter Riviere (Oxford, 2001), 45–56, here 46–47.

34 Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies, 49–55, 175–177; Norton, “Going to the Birds,” 64–66. Kalinagohave also been known as “Island Caribs.”

35 Sybille de Pury, “Le Pere Breton par lui-meme,” in Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire caraıbe-fran-cais, ed. Marina Besada Paisa (Paris, 1999), xv–xlv.

36 Raymond Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois: Mesle de quantite de remarques historiques pourl’esclaircissement de la langue (Auxerre, 1665); Breton, Dictionaire francois-caraibe.

37 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 375. He describes a firsthand experience with an anthropo-phagic feast (216, 222). The practice of going to war to take captives to kill or adopt was so central thatit figured in the Kalinago foundation story (229–230). Other missionary accounts and testimony froma Spanish woman who was captured and enslaved offer corroborating evidence for these practices; seeCharles 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 generale des Antilles habitees par les francois, 2vols. (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-francois, 373.39 Ibid., 221–222.40 Fausto, “Of Enemies and Pets,” 947.





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bolically the two outcomes of warfare, adoption and consumption, were linked, bothgenerative of life.

If predation led to the “appropriation and familiarization of alien subjectivities”through both consumption and adoption among humans, it did so as well betweenhumans and other beings.41 Breton’s Kalinago hosts celebrated rites that articulatedthe proximity of consumption and adoption as twinned elements of predation.Breton described a feast, “one of their most solemn,” in which birds of prey heidentified as mansphoenix (a species of raptor, likely a kite) were forced to play astarring 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 raisefor this “mystere” (rite). On the day of the feast, the chief warrior crushed his birdagainst his head, letting the blood trickle down and leaving it there for the durationof 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 thecommunity were responsible for cutting boys with sharp pineapple leaves.43 At theend, each boy and man ate the heart of “his bird,” then swallowed a vomit-inducingtobacco infusion.44

These rites illuminate at least two significant characteristics of predation thatwere widespread across lowland South America. First, we see how the permeablebody—the openings of skin and mouth—led the predator/warrior/hunter to manifestthe qualities of who or what he had ingested.45 It is also likely that the agouti-teethdevice used to cut the flesh of the young initiates had a handle made from the boneof 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 andAmerindian Perspectivism,” 470.

42 Breton identified the “mansphoenix” as a millan, or kite; Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 37. Ref-erences to this bird are also on 21, 100, 231, 255, and 290. See also Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilleshabitees par les francois, 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 650CE” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2010), 183.

43 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 132. On this ceremony, see Tertre, Histoire generale des An-tilles habitees par les francois, 2: 377; on using agouti teeth in rituals generally, see 2: 297, 365, 373–375.

44 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 203. He also wrote of a gourd filled with the flesh of the raptormansphoenix “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 l’isle de Cayenne (Paris, 1664), 353, 435;Matıas Ruiz Blanco, Conversion de Pıritu: 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 NarcoticDrugs 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,” inRuben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, eds., The Gift of Birds: Featherwork of Native South AmericanPeoples (Philadelphia, 1991), 50–69, here 66–67; Peter T. Furst, “Crowns of Power: Bird and FeatherSymbolism 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, andConsumption 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.

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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 inwhich outer display and internal transformation were linked through the materialityof 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 onetook on its essential attributes was manifested in attitudes toward less prestigiousprey animals as well.47

A second characteristic of the rites of raptor sacrifice described by Breton wasthe “familiarization” of the sacrificial being. This is what Fausto calls “familiarizingpredation,” in which the captor/predator relates to the captive/prey as “betweenfather and adopted child or between master and xerimbabo (wild pet).” He findsequivalences between the way Tupinamba captors temporarily “adopted” their pris-oners of war as kin before killing them, and the way Jivaro warriors “adopted” pigsbefore killing them to mark successful raiding expeditions, rites very similar to thebird adoption and killings described by Breton.48 In ordinary life, one would not eata familiarized being—a human or non-human iegue. But in these liminal rituals, theceremonial adoption of a subject who was to be killed underscored the connectionscreating a subject through birth (or adoption) and appropriating a subject throughincorporation (or killing).

NON-HUMAN IEGUE ARE KIN who are fed, not prey whom one eats.49 Though a fewcontemporary ethnographers in South America—above all Catherine Howard (Wai-wai), Loretta Cormier (Guaja), Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden (Karitiana), and LuizCosta (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-francois, 191.47 Rochefort, The History of the Caribby-Islands, 2: 303; Andre Thevet, Les singularitez de la France

Antarctique (Paris, 1558), chap. 30. In surveying contemporary Amazonian ethnographies, Carlos Faustoargues 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, VanessaElisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva, eds., Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals,Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (New York, 2012), 96–112.

48 Fausto, “Of Enemies and Pets,” 937, 938. In this article Fausto identified them as peccaries, buthe has since communicated that they were, in fact, domestic pigs, possibly substituting for peccaries onceused. The original source is Rafael Karsten, The Head-Hunters of Western Amazonas: The Life and Cultureof 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 Guaja Foragers of Eastern Amazonia (New York, 2003); Felipe FerreiraVander Velden, Inquietas companhias: Sobre os animais de criacao entre os Karitiana (Sao Paulo, 2012);Luiz Costa, “Alimentacao e comensalidade entre os Kanamari da Amazonia Ocidental,” Mana 19, no.3 (2013): 473–504, translated into English as “Fabricating Necessity: Feeding and Commensality inWestern 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





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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 significantcultural 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 quintessentially male activity of hunting), outsidershad minimal exposure or access to it. Given these blind spots, the fact that colonialtexts (and a few images) do offer so many glimpses of animal adoption practicesamong native Amerindians is telling.

Among the most important evidence for the notion that the category of tamebeings was of primary importance to groups throughout the Caribbean and lowlandSouth America is linguistic. Breton defined the term iegue (male form; the femaleform he recorded was nillıguini) as “an animal whom one feeds” in his Carib-Frenchvolume and as “my animal” in the French-Carib volume, thereby emphasizing boththe nurturing and the proprietary aspects of the term. In another gloss, he furtherilluminated the concept by explaining that his Kalinago hosts did not raise animalsin 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 dogsfor their help in hunting pigs and agouti, for example. He concluded, “if they havechickens, they would die before eating them,” a proscription that extended to “evenan egg.” Breton understood that the Kalinago’s iegue was fundamentally differentfrom European livestock because the former were not supposed to be slaughteredby their guardians. He also provided the definition for another word, nhamacachi(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 thesame way as the Kalinago. Ethnographer Patrick Menget reported that Txica�o onthe Xingu River (an eastern tributary of the Amazon) defined egu as “a familiaranimal 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,” Timehri1 (1882): 25–43.

See also J. Christopher Crocker, “My Brother the Parrot,” in Gary Urton, ed., Animal Myths andMetaphors in South America (Salt Lake City, 1985), 13–47; Erikson, “De l’acclimatation des conceptset des animaux ou les tribulations d’idees americanistes en Europe”; Philippe Erikson, “The SocialSignificance of Pet-Keeping Amazonian Indians,” in Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth S. Paul, andJames 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’Amazonien’ont-ils pas domestique le pecari?”; 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 anAmazonian 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 CreswickMorey, “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 incontaveis: Tupis, europeus e aves domesticas naconquista no Brasil,” Journal de la Societe des Americanistes 98, no. 2 (2012): 97–140.

51 These definitions are from Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 290; Dictionaire francois-caraibe,19–20, my emphasis. For more on the feeding aspect of familiarization and making kin, see pp. 20, 22 below.

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from enemy cadavers, in particular flutes made of tibia, human teeth mounted intonecklaces.”52 This is clear evidence for the conceptual interrelatedness of predationand familiarization in captive warfare and interactions with non-human animalsalike. Among the nearby Kalapalo, another Carib-speaking group on the UpperXingu, 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 parentsand 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 althoughitologu can belong to species considered edible, “they themselves are never eaten, norare they supposed to be killed,” and they should receive burials upon death. Similarconstellations of meanings exist in the other major South American languages.54

Beyond this linguistic evidence, colonial chroniclers and missionaries have leftus fleeting but suggestive remarks about familiarization. Jose Gumilla and FelipeGilij were part of the group of Jesuits who founded missions and lived among thenative inhabitants of the area along the Middle Orinoco and its tributaries (Ven-ezuela) in the early and middle eighteenth centuries. Their mission settlements weremultiethnic, attracting Arawak- and Carib-speaking groups seeking protection fromDutch and Carib slaving expeditions, including the Otomac, Saliva, Maypure, andTamanaco peoples.55 Based on his experience with mission Indians on the Orinocobetween 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 theOrinocoans, there are nevertheless domesticated ones to whom the savage nation

52 Menget, “Note sur l’adoption chez les Txicao du Bresil 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 hina 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 Arawete (a Tupi-Guarani people), there is a linguistic prefixthat “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 categorythat includes not just the pets of the gods, but everything that has a relationship to Divinity”; From theEnemy’s Point of View, 73. See also Fausto, “Of Enemies and Pets,” 938, 950 n. 6. For Jivaro terms, seeDescola, 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 andPortuguese America (New York, 2015), 155–181; Arvelo-Jimenez and Biord, “The Impact of Conqueston Contemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield”; Jose del Rey Fajardo, ed., Misionesjesuıticas en la Orinoquıa (1625–1767), 2 vols. (San Cristobal, 1992); Morey, “Ethnohistory of the Co-lombian and Venezuelan Llanos.”

56 Jose Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido: Historia natural, civil y geographica de este gran rioy 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).





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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.” Hemarveled 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.

FIGURE 1: “Histoire naturelle des Indes,” ca. 1586, fol. 114r. The fates of these birds are the two possibleoutcomes of predation: consumption as prey or adoption as kin. In this image the deer has been killed, butelsewhere 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.

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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 subsetof animals most commonly and pervasively familiarized.58 From the very earliest daysof exploration, Europeans enthusiastically noted Amerindians’ readiness to supplytamed parrots. During his exploration of Hispaniola, Columbus acquired “as many[parrots] as were asked for,” at least forty.59 Portuguese and French explorers andcolonists 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 timesa 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 theOrinoco 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 theirinterest in their feathers, which adorn their headdresses.”61 Though parrot specieswere particularly attractive for their speaking ability and brilliant feathers (whichcould be plucked without killing the bird), many other varieties of birds were tamedas well. Everard Ferdinand Im Thurn, a missionary with ethnographic inclinations,visited indigenous communities along the Essequibo River and tributaries in BritishGuiana in 1878 and remarked on at least five different species of birds as well asvarious kinds of parrots in one village alone.62 “Among the commonest tame animalsin Indian houses,” according to Im Thurn, 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 Loven, Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2010), 631; Louis Allaire, “Archaeology of the Caribbean Region,” in Salomon andSchwartz, South America, 668–733, here 705–706. For faunal remains in Tobago, see David W. Steadmanand 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, WestIndies,” 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 passe au voyage que Monsieur deBretigny 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, fols. 92v–93v; Jean de Lery, History of a Voyageto 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: Tupinamba 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 Regionsof 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, “Apendice 2: Bio-bibliografıa de los jesuitas que laboraron enlas misiones del Casanare, Meta y Orinoco,” in Rey Fajardo, Misiones jesuıticas en la Orinoquıa, 1:463–630, here 588–590. See also Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en l’isle de Cayenne, 343; NicholasGuppy, Wai Wai: Through the Forests North of the Amazon (New York, 1958), 234; Antonio Caulın,Historia coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucia, provincias de Cumana, Guayana yVertientes del Rio Orinoco (Madrid, 1779), 50; Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva coronica y buengobierno (1615), fol. 177, http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/titlepage/en/text.

62 Im Thurn, “Tame Animals among the Red Men of America,” 29. These included trumpet birds,





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their heads stroked and “follow[ed] their masters . . . like dogs,” even “some distancefrom home.” Sometimes “an exuberance of good spirits” prompted the birds to turnsomersaults on these jaunts.63

Amerindians in the islands extended adoption practices beyond the ubiquitousparrots to include iguanas and manatees.64 In the first decade of the sixteenth cen-tury, before the Spanish conquest was complete, a Taıno chief caught a young man-atee in his nets and opted not to kill him for food (manatee were prized for theirsucculent meat among native Caribbean and invading Spaniards alike).65 Instead, thecaptive was brought to an estuary, fed with human staples (yucca, cassava bread),and named Matu (“meaning generous or noble”). Anghiera exclaimed that “fortwenty-five years this fish lived at liberty in the waters of the lake, and grew to anextraordinary 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 wasknown to carry riders on his back as he swam across the estuary.

On the mainland, the variety of animal candidates for adoption reflected theunrivaled faunal diversity of South American tropical habitats. Monkeys, not sur-prisingly, feature almost as prominently as parrots, as suggested by a drawing by thenative Andean author and artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. (See Figure 2.) Hedepicted the female ancestor of the peoples of the Eastern Amazon flanked by aparrot and a monkey, likely among the things/beings that lowland groups traded inreturn for highland goods such as precious metals.66 Oviedo recalled tamed monkeysso abundant that “every day they are brought to Spain.”67 Gilij noted especially themico monkeys, “who seem to even understand one’s very thoughts.”68 In addition tothe monkeys and parrots, Oviedo wrote about various tamed creatures—a sloth, afox, and a bivana—who came into European settlements as a result of trades withmainland Amerindians. Oviedo acquired the tamed fox (“they are great jesters andmischievous”) from Caribs, 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 Thurn, 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 Thurn, “Tame Animals among the Red Men of

America,” 39.65 Anghiera, De orbe novo, 1: 373–374; Miguel de Asua and Roger French, A 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 fishin the world, and that which most resembles meat”; HGN, 2: 64–66.

66 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (1615), fol. 177, 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; Lery, History

of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 6; illustration in Histoire naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript inthe Pierpont Morgan Library, introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, translations by Ruth S. Kraemer (NewYork, 1996), fol. 107r, http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes; Biet, Voyagede la France equinoxiale en l’isle 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).

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procured on the mainland (Paria), to a domestic cat and described how it nestledin the folds of his clothing.70 In the eighteenth century, Gumilla wrote of a creatureknown as cusicusi (perhaps a species of olingo) that was known for its nocturnalhabits and long tongue, used for investigating small crevices, and “when it arrivesat the bed of its master, it does the same with his nostrils, and if it finds his mouthopen, that too.”71 Gilij described Amerindians’ facility for taming a wide range ofanimals, marveling in particular at the affectionate nature of deer and referringfondly to his own “little tapir.”72 Im Thurn mentioned two kinds of deer (one ofwhom “made great friends with me, so that when I was sitting on the ground, it usedto 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 openwith its nose and eating the contents,”), peccaries (who “become very tame—toomuch so sometimes, for they follow their master wherever he goes and sometimeseven 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 whotraveled in Amazonia in the nineteenth century, recorded “twenty-two species ofquadrupeds 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,Mamıferos de Venezuela (Caracas, 1998), 139–141.

71 Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido, 299. He wrote that it was tailless, but Caulın wrote thatthe animal in question does have a tail, making it fit the description of the genus Bassaricyon; Historiacoro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucia, 36.

72 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana, 1: 209, 229, 252, 227.73 Im Thurn, “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, seePersonal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 2: 270; James Serpell, “Pet-Keepingand Animal Domestication: A Reappraisal,” in Juliet Clutton-Brock, ed., The Walking Larder: Patternsof Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation (London, 1989), 10–21; Serpell, In 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 Roth, An 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 itis difficult to disentangle pre-conquest and colonial indigenous practices concerning dogs. Many, if notall, Amerindian groups in the Caribbean and South America interacted with dogs prior to Europeancontact. 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 CienciasNaturales La Salle 27, no. 77 (1967): 83–86. But see also Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the EarlyAmericas (New Haven, Conn., 1997). Whatever the pre-contact situation, many groups were quick toadopt European hunting dogs (both the breeds and the methods). European influence on Kalinagohuman-canine relationships is suggested by the terms related to dogs in Breton’s dictionary that in-corporate chien; Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 113, 154; Dictionaire francois-caraibe, 70, 73. See also Ter-tre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitees par les francois, 246; Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit, 42.My speculative hypothesis is that dogs were seen like any other species of animals—with some individualsfit 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). Thesimilarities in the familiarization process for hunting dogs compared to that of other animals can be seenbelow in Gilij’s description. For parallels with contemporary human-canine relationships among theAmazonian Achuar, see Eduardo Kohn, “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics ofTransspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–24.





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AGGREGATING EVIDENCE FROM DIFFERENT accounts reveals that taming, far from beingaccidental or incidental, entailed a series of ritualized activities. The first step, ofcourse, was the procurement of the individual animal. Sometimes these were theorphaned young of prey animals, but from the earliest sources it is also evident thatthere were intentional efforts to capture wild animals to make iegue. An illustratedsixteenth-century manuscript titled “Histoire naturelle des Indes” devoted signifi-cant space in text and image to animal adoption practices, including “the manner

FIGURE 2: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, “Nueva coronica y buen gobierno,” fol. 175 [177]. The authoridentifies this woman as a representative of “Andesuyo,” the eastern region of the Inca Empire in westernAmazonia. 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 ofDenmark, Copenhagen.

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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 withhis cries of distress.76 The eighteenth-century missionary Gilij described how Am-erindians of the Orinoco basin captured baby monkeys. The appearance of a mothermonkey with her babies clinging to her back offered an “opportune moment for thehunter. He directs a spray of poisoned arrows at the mother, and she falls to theground 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 backin order to raise them.”77 Anticipating their featured role as animal-tamers, womenparticipated in at least some of these expeditions; during peccary hunts, accordingto Gilij, “the women take part in order to bring back piglets.”78

The next stage was taming, a process subsumed into endowing an other withpersonhood, be it an infant, a wild animal, or a captive animal. The most centralactivity was feeding, as suggested by the linguistic equivalence between taming andfeeding: for example, Breton defined the term iegue as “an animal that one feeds”and included a related term, aguennematina, which translated as both “I don’t havean animal,” and “I don’t make any food”—in other words, there is no animal tofeed.79 Feeding was often gendered; women, for the most part, were in charge offamiliarization and socialization, linked to their role as mothers.80 Matıas RuizBlanco, a Franciscan who evangelized among Carib-speaking groups (Cumangoto,Palenque) along the South American littoral in the mid-seventeenth century, wrotein the context of discussing child-rearing practices, “the women have a gift for raisingthe little animals [animalejos] that they capture,” and noted that if baby animals “donot eat, [mothers] give them their breasts.”81 As this suggests, newly incorporatedanimals 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 anarrow 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 generale des Antilles habitees par les francois, 2: 249; Antoniode Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas i tierra firme del MarOceano, 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 RedMen of America,” 39.

77 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana, 1: 252. See also Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en l’islede 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; aguennematina appears in Breton,

Dictionaire francois-caraibe, 20. The term for familiarized animals among the Huaorani in AmazonianEcuador is queninga, which means “it receives food from humans”; Laura M. Rival, Trekking throughHistory: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (New York, 2002), 98. Naming also appears to be animportant aspect of endowing a being in formation with subjectivity, as suggested by Vander Velden’sethnography, Inquietas companhias, scattered ethnohistorical references (again the manatee), and Lery,who reported in History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil that a Tupinamba woman referred to her parrotas “her cherimbaue, that is, ‘thing that I love’” (89).

80 For instance, Lery, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 88; Thevet, Les singularitez de la FranceAntarctique, 92. Twentieth-century ethnographers have likewise observed the gendered aspect of fa-miliarization: Howard, “Feathers as Ornaments among the Waiwai,” 50, 60–61; Howard, “WroughtIdentities,” 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 Pıritu, 33. On Ruiz Blanco and missionary activity, see Fernando





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FIGURE 3: “Histoire naturelle des Indes,” fol. 83r. The significance of animal familiarization as a central culturalactivity 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.

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process less laconically: “It is the duty of the Indian women to feed the livestockbelonging to the settlement . . . These are fed with cassava bread chewed by thewomen. Among some tribes, especially the Warrausm, the women suckle the youngmammals as they would their own children.”82 When Bates, the English naturalistwho 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 tothe practice of feeding infants pre-masticated food.83 Nursing and pre-masticatingfood brought together biological birth and, in the words of ethnographer CatherineHoward, the “social birth” of adoption.84 Ethnographers Carlos Fausto and LuizCosta write that “commensality for the Kanamari is part of a continual process ofmaking kin. It is what happens to the feeding bond between a woman and her petwho, in time, come to ‘love’ (wu) each other, and who thus see their relation offeeding veer towards commensality.”85 Antonio Caulın, who was a missionary amongCarib and Cumangoto groups in Venezuela in the early eighteenth century, alsodetected this emphasis on commensality and shared intimacies when he wrote offamiliarized birds that “they eat at the table and clean [people’s teeth] with theirbeaks, and remove dandruff, and do a thousand other cute things.”86 Another aspectof the special connection between familiarized animals, feeding, and commensalityis revealed by Laura Rival’s emphasis that among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ec-uador, “pets . . . complete the process by which longhouses are turned into feedingplaces that cannot be abandoned or left empty,” a connection also made in the visualmaterials of the sixteenth-century “Histoire naturelle des Indes” and Andre Thevet’saccount of his time among the Tupinamba in coastal Brazil.87

Another way in which wild animals—human and non-human—became iegue wasthrough the application of the red plant dye achiote (annatto). Without this red bodypaint, Amerindians across the Caribbean and South America felt exposed and unfitfor public presentation, and contemporary ethnographies suggest a connection be-

Arellano, Una introduccion a la Venezuela prehispanica: Culturas de las naciones indıgenas venezolanas(Caracas, 1987), 238–240.

82 Im Thurn, “Tame Animals among the Red Men of America,” 40. On nursing, see also Brett, TheIndian Tribes of Guiana, 185; Richard Schomburgk, Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in British Guiana,1840–1844, trans. and ed. Walter E. Roth, 2 vols. (Georgetown [British Guiana], 1922), 1: 128–129; PabloJ. Anduze, Shailili-Ko: Relato de un naturalista que tambien llego a las fuentes del Rıo Orinoco (Caracas,1960), 255; James Barker, Memoir on the Culture of the Waica (New Haven, Conn., 197?), 14 (translationof “Memoria sobre la cultura de los Guaika,” Boletın 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. Onpre-mastication, see also Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View, 131; Crocker, “My Brotherthe 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 deScaramelli, “The Roles of Material Culture in the Colonization of the Orinoco, Venezuela,” Journal ofSocial Archaeology 5, no. 1 (February 2005): 135–168, here 151–155.

85 Fausto and Costa, “Feeding (and Eating),” 157; see also Costa, “Alimentacao e comensalidadeentre os Kanamari da Amazonia Ocidental.”

86 Caulın, Historia coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la Nueva Andalucia, 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, Lessingularitez de la France Antarctique, fol. 85v (a parrot on a rafter), fol. 88v (a macaw and a monkey ona rafter; see Figure 4).





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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 redpigment used by the Indians for their own bodies—in order to show the poor victimthat its captors are ‘good people and kind.’”89 Gilij described how dogs selected forhunting 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 astheir “chemise blanche,” an essential garment that protected the wearer from the sun, ocean water, andinsects, as well as offering adornment. For examples, see Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 79; Oviedo,HGN, 3: 230; Rochefort, The History of the Caribby-Islands, 254–255; Ruiz Blanco, Conversion de Pıritu,32; Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido, 146–147. The connection between “painting” a newbornwith achiote and his or her vitality among the Urarina today is suggested by the ceremonies and chantsanalyzed by Harry Walker, “Baby Hammocks and Stone Bowls: Urarina Technologies of Companionshipand Subjection,” in Fernando Santos-Granero, ed., The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theoriesof Materiality and Personhood (Tucson, Ariz., 2009), 81–102, here 84–85. Contemporary Kashinawa applygenipap (another plant dye) to infants as part of the process of making them into persons. CeciliaMcCallum 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.

FIGURE 4: Andre Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1558), fol. 88v. The inclusion of themonkey and macaw who sit on a rafter watching a healing rite corresponds to ethnographic observations thatresidences were shared with familiarized animals whose presence anchored community. Shelfmark: E558T416sp. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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plucked and the follicles treated with achiote as well as other ointments.91 Twentieth-century ethnographers have also remarked on familiarized animals “beautified withhuman adornments,” including feather headdresses and anklets of glass beads, andbeing sung to with anent—“magical thought songs,” a practice shared by new spousesintent 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. Witnessesaccustomed to European practices were impressed with the liberty granted to theadopted animals. Of the Panamanian Cuna Indians and their macaws, Lionel Waferwrote in the seventeenth century, “The Indians keep these Birds tame, as we doParrots, or Mag-Pies: But after they have kept them close some time, and taughtthem to speak some Words in their Language, they suffer them to go abroad in theDay-time into the Woods, among the wild ones; from whence they will on their ownaccord return in the Evening to the Indian’s Houses or Plantations.”93 Gilij, de-scribing the animals familiarized by Orinoco Amerindians, wrote: “even though theyalways have their former forests before them, they never . . . abandon their love fortheir masters.” Philippe Descola noted that the tamed wild animals of the Achuaramong whom he conducted fieldwork “roamed freely.”94 When we consider theseobservations alongside the fact that Breton recorded that the Kalinago had the termnhamacachi for animals who chose to present themselves as tame before humans,it seems that an important aspect of familiarization included the idea of volitionamong tamed subjects.

Not all familiarized animals spent their lives among their initial “captors.” InGilij’s succinct statement, Amerindians familiarized animals “for their children orin order to trade with other nations.”95 That Europeans were the recipients of tamedanimals 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 andOviedo’s receipt of various tamed animals described above—attests that there werealready well-developed trading networks for familiarized animals among indigenousgroups.96 Howard proposes that a central reason why her Waiwai hosts exchangedfamiliarized animals was to create “social ties” between families and villages. In a

91 Buono, “Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances,” 113–118; Im Thurn, “Tame Animalsamong the Red Men of America,” 28; Rivero, Historia de las misiones de los llanos de Casanare y losrios Orinoco y Meta, 9. This process, observed among Amazonian and Orinoco Amerindians since theearly colonial period, was known as tapirage and resulted in parrots producing feathers colored yellowrather than green. Most accounts of tapirage ascribe its purpose as producing beautiful yellow feathersthat were then incorporated into ritual headdresses and objects. However, given that it was more or lessthe identical treatment—remove feather or hair, apply achiote (minus the toad extract)—applied toother 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 Orinocoilustrado y defendido, 299.

94 Gilij, Ensayo de historia americana, 1: 252; Im Thurn, “Tame Animals among the Red Men ofAmerica,” 33–34. See also Alfred Russel Wallace, A 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 ofthe 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





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Waiwai village, a baby bird or puppy might be offered as a gift to an unrelated familyas a way of creating a relationship to be sustained over time, so that “portions of gamecaught 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 “dogsand parrots are exchanged with trade partners living in different Waiwai villages, andthence to those of other groups.” “The behavior surrounding the barter of dogs andparrots is literally an exercise in international diplomacy,” explains Howard.97

In this way, the exchange of animals functioned in similar ways to marriage andtraditional forms of slavery in Greater Amazonia. Neil Whitehead argues that “in-digenous forms of warfare and marriage . . . are usually seen in active thought asanalogous mechanisms for the exchange and flow of persons between groups.” “Tomake the prestation of a woman in marriage created a debt on the part of thosereceiving wives such that this, a fundamental social fact, became an idiom throughwhich many forms of imperial tribute systems and their associated labor regime wereunderstood,” according to Whitehead.98 In their investigations of indigenous “slav-ery,” both Santos-Granero and Whitehead emphasize that “animal pets . . . are usedto picture the status of the human captive.”99 Yet “pets” were more than metaphorsfor captives and wives; their “prestation,” too, created bonds of reciprocal obligation.In fact, Howard noted that in negotiating the exchange of familiarized animals, herhosts made use of a formal kind of discourse, “the same that is used in marriagenegotiations, sorcery charges, and work recruitment.” Likewise, “mothers wouldgrieve over the loss of their pets in the same standardized vocabulary as theymourned 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 earlymodern European forms of servitude organized around commodification. For thoseparticipating in the European slave trade, the captive was “alienable for monetarygain,” whereas for participants in traditional Amerindian captive warfare, “that laborremained invested in the social person, because the servility of labor was enforcedby kinship or ritual obligation, not the institution of law.”101 The same was true ofnon-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 andScaramelli, “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 sameas 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 transactionof marriage partners between families and villages” (252).

101 Whitehead, “Indigenous Slavery in South America,” 249; see also Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.

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between groups. From initial capture to familiarization to exchange, the life cyclesof 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 animalspecies and livestock husbandry.102 Across time and space in the Caribbean andSouth America, Amerindians responded to the poultry introduced by Europeans asiegue. One of the earliest descriptions of South Americans’ integration of Europeanpoultry is from Jean de Lery’s sixteenth-century account of life among the Tupi-namba. First, as with adopted parrots, the local people appreciated the chickens fortheir plumage and treated them with achiote (“they set great store by the white onesfor their feathers, which they dye red and use to adorn their bodies”). Second, theywere 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] insteadof having the patience to let them hatch, they were astonished, and would say ‘Youare 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 nomore reckoning of their hens than of wild birds, letting them lay wherever theyplease; the hens most often bring their chicks from the woods and thickets wherethey have brooded them, so the savage women do not take the trouble that we doover here, raising turkey chicks on egg-yolks.”103

These features are echoed by later accounts of assimilation of chickens. Breton’sobservation of the Kalinago—“if they have chickens, they would die before eatingthem, not even an egg, maybe they are less disgusted by this now”—corroborates theproscription against eating familiarized animals, while also suggesting its looseningas a result of colonial interaction.104 The Spanish naturalist and explorer Jorge Juancommented on how the women “conceive such a fondness for [domestic fowl], thatthey will not even sell them” and documented the dismay (“shrieks,” “tears . . . asif it had been an only son”) he evoked when he devoured his host’s chicken whilestaying in a village in western Ecuador in the first half of the eighteenth century.105

Like the Taıno man with his companion pigs and Breton’s hosts, Ulloa’s landladytreated “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. Similarto Lery, the French missionary Antoine Biet, who explored the region around themouth 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 TupinambaIndians’ reactions to poultry. He argues that they were thought to belong in an “intermediate” categorybetween their preexisting category of tamed animals and European-style domesticated animals; VanderVelden, “As galinhas incontaveis.” While over time it seems certain that Amerindians created a widerange 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 Lery, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 86.104 Breton, Dictionaire caraibe-francois, 290–291; see also Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitees

par les francois, 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, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 248.





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Galibi “don’t take the trouble to make [chickens] lay eggs, but they [the hens] hatchtheir eggs in some hole in the woods, they incubate them there and bring back theirlittle ones to the house.”106 What the European observers ascribed to laziness—thewomen’s lack of involvement in the chickens’ reproductive life—was more likely aproduct of their already developed habits and proclivities with “undomesticated”animals, which put a premium on allowing iegue a degree of liberty at odds withEuropean livestock practices.

If prolonged contact with Europeans and disruption caused by colonialismeroded these cultural values, as Breton suggested, there was also notable longevity.The early-twentieth-century ethnographer William Farabee wrote that the GuianaCarib valued chickens as “song birds” and refrained from eating them, and JohnGillin reported that “chickens are kept simply as luxury pets, and much time is spentin admiring and boasting of the form, color, and feathering of the bird.”107 Othergroups responded similarly. Napoleon Chagnon, the infamous ethnographer wholived among the Yanomamo 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 afterhaving attempted to introduce chickens at mission posts. The Yanomamo liked theroosters because they crowed at dawn, and kept them essentially for this aestheticreason 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 Eurasiandomesticates by non-Eurasian peoples” proves that “the explanation for the lack ofnative mammal domestication outside Eurasia lay with the locally available wildmammals themselves, not with the local peoples.”109 Rather, native groups assim-ilated domesticates such as chickens on their own terms—they appreciated them asideal 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 therewas one against killing an animal that one had personally raised.

THE AMERINDIAN STRUCTURE OF IEGUE is essential for understanding processes suchas domestication and the Columbian Exchange. Domestication has for too long func-

106 Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en l’isle 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, Yanomamo, 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 somehowdifferent, for it is then part of Culture. For this reason, they do not eat their otherwise edible pets—suchas monkeys, birds and rodents—it is similar to cannibalism: eating something ‘cultural’ and thereforehumanlike.” 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 aCultural 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, Ill., 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.

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tioned as a Eurocentric (or Eurasian-centric) modernization narrative. Oviedo’s dis-dain for the Taıno’s adoption of pigs is part of a colonial tradition that still hauntsus. It “is impossible to think” about political modernity, writes Dipesh Chakrabarty,“without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deepinto the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.” “Domestication” isanother 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 speciesappears to be universal (and hardly unique to humans), the contexts in which theserelationships occur differ considerably among societies, just as “companionate mar-riage” is only one of many structures that have emerged for organizing intra-humanrelationships over time. “Pet” is far from a trans-historical category; as we have seen,before the nineteenth century, Europeans traveling in native America and lackingthe 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. Thefirst appearance of “pet” to denote “an animal (typically one which is domestic ortame) kept for pleasure or companionship” was in 1710, according to the OxfordEnglish Dictionary, and similar terms in other modern European languages are alsoof recent vintage.111 There are crucial differences between pets and iegue. Whereasthe term “pet” is reserved for non-human animals, terms such as iegue straddle thespecies divide and denote human adoptees as well as familiarized non-humans. Arelated and essential difference concerns the animals eligible for killing and con-sumption. Today, the animal species most eligible for pethood—dogs and cats—areineligible 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 purposeof killing them. In Caribbean and South American communities, the proscriptionswere very different. Most types of animals—including human ones—were eligible foradoption or consumption.112 However, once an individual animal from any specieswas fed and tamed (unless that animal was specifically prepared for sacrifice), theidea of eating him or her was anathema. Europeans’ revulsion at the idea of eatinga person’s flesh (human or otherwise) was matched by Amerindians’ horror at theidea 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 conceptand 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—ananimal 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’idees americanistes en Europe.”113 For the universal argument, see Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 72.





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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 ornoble court)—was. Might not Europeans’ extensive exposure to iegue, as the importationof parrots and monkeys began in the fifteenth century and expanded throughout theearly modern period, have contributed to its emergence alongside the other proposedcatalysts (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 spaceto consider the ramifications of these findings for contemporary debates about non-human animals’ “rights” and “personhood”—as well as those of human animals. Adominant 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 GaryFrancione, is that, given that many of the “capacities” or “interests” on which humanpersonhood is based are also shared with some or many non-human organisms, theseother species should likewise be recognized as persons. (Whether the line should bedrawn at certain cognitive or emotional capacities or at sentience is a matter of hugedebate.) Either explicitly or implicitly, these theorists assume that some essentialtruth can be known about animals, so that once there are agreed-upon criteria, anaccurate line can be drawn; they therefore turn to scientists for determining thethresholds 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 ofdolphins”; nor is “the biological fact that we and dogs and rats and titmice andmonkeys are all species of animal” sufficient.116 In different though complementaryways, she and Donna Haraway point to the notion that there can be no separationof subjectivity and intersubjectivity, whether it is Diamond’s recognition of a “fellowcreature” or Haraway’s interest in how humans and their “companion species”“make each other up.” The recognition of an other’s subjectivity emerges becauseof 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, seeNorton, “Going to the Birds,” 71–76. On parrots in Europe, see Boehrer, Parrot Culture, chaps. 3 and4; 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 animalsgenerally, see Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore, 2002). For other interpretations of pethood, see Thomas, Man and the NaturalWorld; Shell, “Family Pet”; Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-CenturyParis (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).

115 For instance, Singer, Practical Ethics; Steven M. Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case forAnimal 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 preferredcriteria 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 ofNonhuman 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, here470, 474.

117 Haraway’s commitment to intersubjectivity is suggested in the very title of her book, as well asthe 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. I benefited

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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 sameas the human orientation . . . it is nonetheless clear that we can have meaningfulinterrelationships with apes.”118 Rather, as Haraway has made clear, it is becauseprimatologists have meaningful interrelationships with apes that they can appreciatetheir linguistic abilities.119 History and anthropology might have more to teach usthan do the biological sciences about what conditions and frameworks offer the pos-sibility for intersubjective experiences between and among species. This emphasis onintersubjectivity, too, allows for the agency of the non-human, for this is what itmeans to experience the cusicusi probing his human’s nostril, the parrot talking toher human, the deer emptying out the tobacco pouch, or the animal who choosesto “come tame.” In this way, we experience their recognition, as well as our own. TheKalinago appreciated this intersubjectivity with their term for “animals who cometame before them.”

The present-day paradox of cooking some of our animals and cooking for othersof them will not be resolved by discovering which ones have sufficient emotional orcognitive abilities. Rather, these findings suggest that the practices that constituteanimal husbandry or experimentation on animals forestall recognition and limit in-tersubjective experience, whereas the practices of taming iegue, caring for pets, andperhaps 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 harmor 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 recognitionthat “rights” should be extended to an expanding circle of beings. And, indeed, itmight be that in the European and Euro-American context, this has often been thecase. But in the system in which iegue flourished, a fellow subject could be fed, orcould be made food, but the same being could not be fed and made food, as inEurasian-originating livestock husbandry.

from the gloss of Haraway and Derrida in Wolfe, “Flesh and Finitude”; their views align well with KariWeil’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 LatinAmerica 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-animalrelationships in the early modern Atlantic world.





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APPENDIXAnimal 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 theinformation is unknown.

People LocationLanguage

GroupDate of

Observation(s) SourceFamiliarized

Animals

Taıno Bahamas Arawak 1492 Columbus BTaıno Hispaniola Arawak 1492 Columbus BTaıno Hispaniola Arawak 1510s Las Casas BTaıno Cuba Arawak 1510s Las Casas BKarina Curiana, “Pearl

Coast”(Venezuela)

Carib 1499 Anghiera B, P

Cumangoto Paria (Venezuela) Carib 1508 Anghiera BTaıno Hispaniola Arawak 1510s Anghiera B, MKaripuna Guadeloupe Arawak 1510s Anghiera BTaıno Cuba Arawak 1511 Herrera y

TordesillasB

Cumangoto Paria (Venezuela) Carib 1510s–1520s Oviedo MDarien

(Colombia)1513–1525 Oviedo P, M

Tierra FirmeCartagena(Colombia)

1513–1525 Oviedo M

Calamari/Cuna? Tierra FirmeCartagena(Colombia)

1514 Anghiera B

Tupinamba Rio de Janeiro(Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1555–1556 Thevet B, P, M

Tupinamba Rio de Janeiro(Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1556–1558 Lery B, P

South Americanlittoral

1580s Drake ms. M

Yao? Trinidad Carib 1580s Drake ms. BCuna (Cueva)? Chagres River

(Panama)1580s Drake ms. B, P, M

Nicaragua 1580s Drake ms. BAndesuyu, Upper

Amazon (Peru)ca. 1600 Guaman Poma de

AyalaB, P

Kalinago Dominica Arawak (withCarib loanwords)

1630s Breton B, M

Kalinago Guadeloupe andLesser Antilles

Arawak (withCarib loanwords)

1640s–1650s Tertre B, M

Kalinago Lesser Antilles Arawak (withCarib loanwords)

1640s–1650s Tertre M

Galibi Cayenne (FrenchGuiana)

Carib 1643 Boyer B, M

Galibi Cayenne (FrenchGuiana)

Carib 1651–1652 Biet B, P

Galibi Guarapiche River(Venezuela)

Carib 1653 Pelleprat M

Pıritu, Cumangoto,Palenque

Cumana(Venezuela)

Carib 1670s Ruiz Blanco B, M

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GroupDate of


Animals

Cuna Panama Chibchan 1680s Wafer B, MAchagua/various Middle Orinoco

(Venezuela)Arawak 1720s Rivero B

Various (e.g.,Saliva, Achagua,Mapoy)

Middle Orinoco(Venezuela)

Arawak/Carib/Saliva

1720s–1730s Gumilla B, M

Upper Amazon(Ecuador)

1730–1740s Ulloa B, M

Carib, Cumangoto,Palenque

Pıritu River, Gulfof Paria, etc.(Venezuela)

Carib andArawak

1740s–1750s Caulın B, M

Various Middle Orinoco(Venezuela)

Carib, Arawak,various

1750s–1760s Gilij B, P, M

Tamanaco Middle Orinoco(Venezuela)

Carib 1750s–1760s Gilij B, P, M

Guahibo, Piaroa,and Maypuregroups

Upper and MiddleOrinoco(Venezuela)

Arawak andSaliba

1800 Humboldt B, P, M

Various (esp.Arawak, Carib,Warao)

Br. Guiana Arawak andCarib

1840–1850 Brett B, P, M

Arawak Pomeroon andMoruca Rivers(Br. Guiana)

Arawak 1840–1851 Brett P

Warao Camaka, Honobo,Barima Rivers(Br. Guiana)

Warao 1841 Schomburgk B, P, M

Wapishana andothers

Rupununi River(Br. Guiana)

Arawak andothers

1842 Schomburgk B

Taruma andMaopityans

Rupununi River(Dutch Guiana)

Arawak 1843 Schomburgk B, M

Mundurucu Tapajos River(State of Para,Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1852 Bates B

Upper Amazon 1850s Bates P, MRio Negro

(Brazil)1850s Wallace B

Carib Rupununi andEssequiboRivers (Br.Guiana)

Carib 1870s Im Thurn B, P

Carib, Warao,Macusi, Arawak,

Essequibo River(Br. Guiana)

Carib, Arawak,Warao

1870s Im Thurn B, P, M

Diau, and otherCarib groups(Macusi)

Br. Guiana andnorthern Brazil

Carib 1913–1916 Farabee B

Jivaro Eastern Ecuadorand Peru

Jivaro 1916 –19191928–1929

Karsten P

Caribs Barama River (Br.Guiana)

Carib 1930s Gillin B, P, M

Nambicuara Mato Grosso,Brazil

[Nambicuara] 1938–1939 Levi-Strauss B, P, M

Cubeo Vaupes River(Colombia)

Tukano 1939–1940 Goldman P, M





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GroupDate of


Animals

Waika andMakiritare

Upper Orinocolowlands(Venezuela)

Yanoama andCarib

1950 Anduze B, M

Waika Upper Orinocolowlands(Venezuela)

Yanoama 1951–1953 Barker B, P, M

Waiwai Upper EssequiboRiver (Br.Guiana)

Carib 1952 Guppy B, P, M

Mundurucu Tapajos River(State of Para,Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1952–1953 Murphy andMurphy

B, M

Yanomamo Upper Orinoco(Brazil andVenezuela)

Yanoama 1960s–1970s Chagnon B, P, M

Bororo Paragrau River(Mato Grosso,Brazil)

Bororo (MacroGe)

1964–1965,1967

Crocker B, M

Kalapolo Upper XinguBasin (MatoGrosso, Brazil)

Carib 1966–1968 Basso B, P, M

Txicao Xingu River(Mato Grosso,Brazil)

Carib 1967–1980 Menget B, P, M

Tukano Vaupes region,Central area(Colombia)

Tucanoan 1968–1970 Jackson B

Yanomamo Parima highlands(Venezuela)

Yanoama 1970 Smole M

Achuar Pastaza River(Ecuador)

Jivaro 1976–1978 Taylor, Descola B, P, M

Arawete Middle XinguRiver (Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1980s Viveiros deCatstro

B

Waiwai Essequibo River(Brazil)

Carib 1982–1986 Howard B, M

Huaorani Curaray River,WesternAmazonia(Ecuador)

Huaroani 1988–1982 Rival B, P, M

Guaja WesternMaranhao,EasternAmazonia(Brazil)

Tupi-Guarani 1996–1997 Cormier B, P, M

Kanamari Itaquaı River,WesternAmazon (Brazil)

Katukina 2002–2006 Costa B, P, M

Karitana Rondonia (Brazil) Ariken (Tupi) 2003 Vander Velden B, P, M

NOTE: FULL CITATIONS ARE IN THE TEXT.

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Documents

The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships … Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange MARCY NORTON ... l’objectivation,” in Bruno