Review: The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton
A rich and provocative study of pre-Colombian Indigenous attitudes to the natural world in South and Central America
Sometime in 1543 on the island of Hispaniola, a group of Spanish soldiers searching for runaway slaves came across three seemingly feral pigs in the wilderness. The Spanish slaughtered them without a thought. But then they met an Indigenous man. He was distraught. He had been living in the wild for 12 years, and had trained the pigs to hunt with him: together they used to track down other wild pigs, which the man killed with a spear. He fed the innards of the kill to his pigs, and kept the rest for himself. ‘These pigs have given me life and have maintained me as I maintained them’, he told the soldiers. ‘They were my friends and good company.’
The soldiers later told their story to the conquistador Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, author of Historia general y natural de las Indias. It puzzled and fascinated him. Oviedo admired the man’s resourcefulness and skill in taking a hunted animal and turning it into a hunter: his ability as a trainer, ‘teaching [the pigs] in hunting, bringing a trainable relationship to that occupation’, was a mark of his higher human intelligence, Oviedo thought. But he didn’t understand why the man was ‘content living with beasts and being bestial’ – that is, on a kind of parity with the animals. Was the man superior to them, or not?
That clash of ideas is at the heart of The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton’s ambitious and absorbing exploration of Indigenous American beliefs and practices with regard to animal life before European – here exclusively Spanish – colonisation. (Norton confines her discussion to the peoples of Greater Amazonia and Mesoamerica.) In Europe, she argues, human relationships with animals were governed by the scriptural authority for human dominion over the natural world. There were ‘vassal animals’ – dogs, horses and so on – who undertook labour and who were often individuated, and ‘livestock animals’, who were viewed to a greater or lesser degree as objects. The latter were eaten; the former were not.
Mmm. Not one I'll be adding to my to-read list, for an entirely petty reason: these days the word "colonisation" makes me wince. Why? Because, like it or not, we're a colonising species, and today's tendency to engage in moral grandstanding about the misdeeds of colonisers makes me wonder why we - as individuals - don't pause to think about how much we're a product of the very thing we deplore. OK, I'm not suggesting that the book engages in such grandstanding; just that the colonisers and the colonised may not be so distinct from each other as we like to think.