The Tame and the Wild

Relationships—between animals and humans, and between humans and other humans—are at the heart of Marcy Norton’s original and ambitious The Tame and the Wild. -- Alexander Bevilacqua * London Review of Books * [Norton] argues that biology cannot be separated from culture — a stance that allows her to reconsider why animals were treated in a certain way in the past and how they could be treated in the future… A fascinating book. -- Henry Mance * Financial Times * A meticulous and profound reckoning with human–animal relationships. Illuminating for anthropologists, ecologists, biologists and historians alike. -- Surekha Davies * Nature * [An] erudite, interdisciplinary study…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. -- Richard Feinberg * Foreign Affairs * Through historical and anthropological scholarship, including close readings of indigenous American art and writing, Norton demonstrates that indigenous modes of relating to animals, including taming wild creatures and thereby transforming them into kin, had profound ramifications for European culture. -- Daniel Kraft * Hedgehog Review * [An] ambitious and absorbing exploration of Indigenous American beliefs and practices with regard to animal life before European – here exclusively Spanish – colonisation…[this] is a capacious and richly rewarding book. -- Mathew Lyons * History Today * Offers a much-needed corrective to biological explanations of ‘conquest’ that often strip Indigenous actors of power while downplaying the role of cultural practices and systematic violence…will feed scholarship on people and animals for years to come. -- John M. Soluri * H-Net Reviews * Exemplifies grounded and mindful interdisciplinary scholarship…an important milestone in ethnohistory, Atlantic history, intellectual history, human-animal studies, and more. -- Christopher Valesey * H-Net Reviews * A powerhouse of ideas on historical transformations that are highly relevant today…an important contribution to history. -- Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra * Evolutionary Anthropology * The Tame and the Wild reads like a revelation. Norton’s groundbreaking work compellingly shows how the history of nonhuman animals in the Atlantic world, and their transformation from beings to things, is intrinsically entangled with the history of the early-modern European extractivist and genocidal colonial project in the Americas. At the same time, it luminously recovers and foregrounds early-modern American Indigenous ways of being in the world and knowing it that emphasize the shared nature of human and nonhuman flesh and subjectivity. Her book shows us new ways for writing both our histories and those of our ‘fellow creatures.’ -- Pablo F. Gómez, author of <i>The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic</i> Marcy Norton offers an erudite and innovative perspective on the relationships between humankind and animals in the context of the European colonization of Mexico and South America. By analyzing the history of the clash between Indigenous and Western conceptions of hunting, domestication, and coexistence with pets, this book reveals the origins of consumption practices and objectification of the animal world, as well as the struggles to recognize animal rights. -- Guilhem Olivier, National Autonomous University of Mexico Norton revolutionizes our understanding of the world after 1492. Until now theories of ecological imperialism have conceived of animals a lot like diseases: as biological forces undermining colonized societies. She refutes that determinist story by showing animals as subjects in relationships—sometimes tender, sometimes violent, sometimes extractivist—with Indigenous people and Europeans in the Americas. The Tame and the Wild puts animals and human relationships at the center of the history of contact. -- Nancy J. Jacobs, author of <i>Birders of Africa</i>