The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492

"1492 was the fateful encounter between the new world and the old with Columbus and those who followed him. This is an extraordinarily interesting book about what the indigenous Americans and the Europeans brought to that encounter in terms of thinking about animals. You wonder, ‘Why animals?’ And you realize that it opens out a wide terrain to think about the nature of the conquest of the Americas and their transformation. One of the things that she fixes on is that in Western Europe there was a distinction between wild and domesticated animals. That simply didn’t exist in the regions of the Americas that she is studying. What did exist was the difference between the predatory and the familiar. The basic misunderstanding was that for the indigenous Americans, if you feed an animal, it’s horrific to then kill it and eat it. It’s the worst thing you could do. Whereas for the Europeans, that’s what domestication is about. You feed animals, then you kill them and eat them. Because of the imbalance of power, when Columbus and the conquistadors came along, they looked at these regions and said, ‘This looks like a great place for sheep and cattle. Oh! They haven’t got any, we’ll bring them across.’ So they brought them across, and devastated whole swathes of the continent. That still goes on in Amazonia in Brazil. You bring down whole areas of rainforest in order to raise more and more cattle. The other division she points out was that for the indigenous Americans at the time, the dividing line between the human and the non-human didn’t exist in the way that we think of it. For the Catholic conquistadors and Western Europeans generally, there’s a Genesis myth: God created man to have dominion over animals, making a clear dividing line between mankind and the non-human. That didn’t exist in the Americas. So some people thought they were descended from plants. Others thought that they would become plants, or that they were descended from birds, or that they would become birds. The fluidity of those divisions was really extraordinary and informed, to some extent, this notion of the predatory and the familiar. The problem is that the Europeans arrived believing that a mark of civilization is the domestication of animals (which still endures). Europeans came with a strong sense of civilizational hierarchy and their first mission was to ‘civilize’ the people they found in the Americas, which meant, of course, enslaving them, often, because suddenly they were lesser people, regarded as ‘uncivilised’. The other thing she brings out is that the conquistadors brought scholars with them, particularly priests and others who wanted to try to understand the flora and fauna of the new world. They had to enlist the help of indigenous scholars and, to some extent, they respected that indigenous scholarship. In the works that they began to publish and to present to Philip II of Spain, she can see very clearly the influence of local ways of thought on the ways in which animals and plants were being categorized. Local, indigenous scholarship was beginning to inform zoological categories in Western Europe. Yet it was completely without acknowledgement—instead it was seen as the work of some Spaniard, and the five or six indigenous scholars who had actually fed into the work were not given public recognition, although she discovers them in the archive of letters exchanged. Indeed, there’s collegial correspondence between them, but it disappears from the pages of history. Again, it reminds us that things that we think are the product of Western civilization may not be that Western after all, and not that civilized either. It’s a powerful book, of extraordinary scholarship and depth and richness. It makes you think otherwise about the things you’ve taken for granted. It might be birds that you capture, and then feed. You can kill a bird in the wild, but if you start feeding it, you can’t kill it and eat it. What you can do is sacrifice it to the earth. So it doesn’t mean that those animals you feed have a charmed life. They might well be seen as a suitable kind of propitiation. And that, of course, applied to human beings too: as demonstrated in the grisly stories—which the conquistadors sometimes tended to exaggerate—about human sacrifice across the Americas. Part of that was due to the fact they were seen as part of the same continuum. They weren’t seen as different because they were human. The conquistadors found that really difficult to cope with. Human sacrifice was somehow far worse than bird or animal sacrifice—but for many of the indigenous cultures in Mesoamerica, particularly, there wasn’t that much difference. It depended on how you treated them before and after and what you were doing with them. They are very strong, very powerful books—and varied, too, in terms of the topics, the approaches, the authors."