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HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS today are structured by patterns of behavior and modes of thought that have an early modern transatlantic history, as Marcy Norton’s recent book demonstrates. Her monograph assesses the interrelated ways in which European and Indigenous-American modes of interacting with and understanding animals came into contact after 1492. Her arguments are wide-ranging and complex, spanning topics as varied as animal husbandry and hunting practices, familiarization and the genesis of the pet, witchcraft and Mesoamerican sacrificial practices, as well as the influence of Indigenous knowledge of flora and fauna on the origin of a disenchanted natural history in Europe. These multifaceted topics are skillfully brought together and studied by Norton under the rubric of “modes of interaction,” her terminology for “the structures that organize how people relate to and think about other animals” (3). She goes on to define the various modes of interaction that arose prior to and in the wake of the European colonization of the Americas and assess their continuing impact on human-animal relations today.
The Tame and the Wild consists of eleven chapters divided into three parts, plus an epilogue and an introduction. Part 1, “Subject and Object,” is composed of three chapters that discuss primarily European modes of interacting with animals that were brought to the Americas in the wake of 1492. Chapter 1 gives an overview of European conceptions of hunting in medieval and early modern contexts. Focusing specifically on the noble hunt, Norton outlines the major types (caza de montería versus altanería or falconry) as well as the vassal animals and specialized attendants that participated in this aristocratic ritual, which “scripted a performance in which a ‘lord’ accumulated and maintained power by vanquishing enemies with the assistance of vassals who owed him obedience and allegiance” (30). Norton notes how, on the one hand, noble hunters and their party sought to kill their prey, but also how, on the other hand, they came to understand and even respect their nonhuman opponents through hunting (33). In chapter 2, Norton contrasts the hunt with the practices of animal husbandry, finding in the latter the root of European conceptions of animals as objects [End Page 165] and private property. The impact of animal husbandry is discernable in the conceptual and physical distances it creates between animals and their consumers: “animal husbandry created temporal and spatial distance between those who owned and managed living animals and those who taxed and consumed their corpses” (45). In chapter 3, Norton moves the discussion to the other side of the Atlantic as she assesses the role played by animals in the European colonization of the Americas. She notes the decisive contribution of vassal animals like dogs and horses as well as the importation of European livestock husbandry practices to advancing European colonization: “we see the former deployed in campaigns of terror, and the latter as essential for the ‘slow violence’ of on-going wealth extraction” (77). On the basis of this analysis, Norton urges scholars to move past the facile notion of a “Colombian Exchange” that bifurcates discussions of the impact of European colonization between biology or ecology and history. Rather, through the lens of extractivism, the author makes a compelling case for understanding the biological and social changes undergone by the Americas in the colonial period as interrelated processes that make evident the full impact of European livestock husbandry.
Part 2, “Tame and Wild,” assesses various Indigenous modes of interacting with animals (hunting, familiarization, and sacrifice) that existed in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans. In chapter 4, Norton discusses precontact hunting practices and notes how Indigenous approaches to hunting led to the observation and imitation of nonhuman animals and thus catalyzed an awareness of prey as subjects in their own right. In chapter 5, Norton discusses familiarization or the process by which indigenous peoples tamed and cohabitated with nonhuman animals. These familiars were given various names by Indigenous communities; a particularly resonant name was iegue, for etymologically it meant a creature that was to be fed by humans and thus not to be used as food for them (131). In chapter 6, Norton focuses her analysis on Nahua amoxtli, alternatively called...
