Centering Animals in Latin American History edited by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (review)

This edited volume boldly identifies the challenges and problems inherent in a project that seeks to center animals in Latin American history, in human history, and in political movements seeking the protection of “animal rights.” The critically engaged activist scholars who contributed to the volume are by no means naive; they are clearly aware of how, as Neil Whitehead’s brilliant concluding essay points out, “the uncritical call for ‘animal rights’ can become a disguised form of neocolonial control,” not unlike the ways in which “human rights” discourse has been welded to the exercise of global domination by Western governments (330).

Few and Tortorici cogently explain how the more robust, though still relatively new, literature for Europe and North America has been essential to the task of critically interrogating the exclusivity often taken for granted by the category of “human.” This volume advances such an intellectual and political project via historical vignettes that examine the effects of the Columbian exchange; the consequences of European conquest and colonialism; competing Mesoamerican, Andean, and other indigenous conceptions of animals in the natural world; and the increasing pressures in Latin America to comply with growing international demands for animals and animal parts as commodities. The book highlights the experiences shared by humans, animals, insects, and microbes in ways that have challenged, broken down, rendered ambiguous, or at times reified the species-categorical boundaries constructed in the modern period (3–5). Each of the contributors to Centering Animals in Latin American History offers methodologically distinct ways of to “think with animals.”¹

Part I emphasizes the charged symbolic dimensions of animal–human relations in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Mesoamerican colonial culture. León García Garagarza weaves together Nahuatl manuscripts, archeological data, and contemporary ethnography in his microhistorical analysis of the 1558 apostasy case brought against Juan Teton, a respected Otomi religious leader, whose proscriptions on consuming the flesh of animals reveal how a Mesoamerican “cosmovision” confronted the devastating effects of early European colonialism. Few’s innovative reading of accounts by political officials, Indian elites, farmers, priests, and European travelers about the campaign in Guatamala to eradicate locusts—ambiguously supernatural and human-like devourers of human food and lucrative export products—shows that controlling the environment and the species that populated it was as much a part of the colonial project as was asserting control over subject peoples and extracting resources. Tortorici’s study of carnivalesque canine sacraments, the human perpetrators of which were brought before the Inquisition, underscores the difficulty that anthropocentric historical sources pose for “centering animals.” Although we do not learn much about the specific animals involved, we nevertheless gain a better understanding of how late eighteenth-century dog owners among the elite in Mexico City turned to animal-centered humor as they negotiated the status-conscious colonial community to which they belonged.

Part II turns to the role of animals and animal parts in practices of popular healing, public-health campaigns, and scientific research. Adam Warren analyzes the home medical guides written by Martín Delgar, an eighteenth-century Peruvian surgeon, by comparing them with representations of Andean medical knowledge in seventeenth-century natural histories and in contemporary anthropological studies about the Kallawaya, traditional itinerant Andean healers. He demonstrates the ways in which Andean healing practices involving the use of animals have been translated, transformed, and integrated into a modernizing European medical taxonomy.

Heather McCrea, drawing on a vast array of sources, including popular novels; newspapers; travel narratives; Rockefeller Foundation archives; and diplomatic, state, and church archival materials, juxtaposes disparate “diseased moments” that encompassed—and, through national and international public-health campaigns, often blurred distinctions between—humans, animals, insects, and microbes in the nineteenth-century frontier zone of the Yucatan. Neel Ahuja examines the contradictory discourses about rhesus and patas monkeys imported to Puerto Rico during the twentieth century as “on the one hand, figures of progress and aligned with modern biomedical technology, and...