The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492

In her erudite interdisciplinary study, Norton draws attention to the important roles played by animals during the early contacts between European settlers and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Norton discards the traditional “conquistador” interpretation of one-way European domination in favor of a more complicated “entanglement” of cultures. Europeans introduced horses and large attack dogs to the Americas, as well as cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens that were cultivated in large-scale livestock husbandry, which dispossessed the indigenous of their lands. Indigenous cultures exported parrots and monkeys and the notion of cherished household pets to Europe. More important, perhaps, indigenous attitudes regarding the relationships between humans and the natural world influenced European philosophies. Norton rejects the anthropocentrism that separates humans from animals in the biblical myths; rather, she prefers indigenous epistemological systems in which “animals and plants were relations, not resources.” More radically, she would replace the divisive European categories of “human” and “animal” with indigenous understandings of “wild and tame,” which honor the personhood of all creatures. Consequently, Norton decries contemporary agribusiness practices—but without suggesting how the planet might otherwise feed its eight billion human inhabitants.