Centering Animals in Latin American History: Writing Animals into Latin American History

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The individuals who have contributed to this project in its various states are numerous. Centering Animals in Latin American History began as a conference panel titled ‘‘Animals, Colonialism, and the Atlantic World’’ for the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, which took place in Williamsburg, Virginia. We are grateful to the participants and audience members for their questions and especially for their enthusiasm. As the edited volume slowly took shape over the years, a number of individuals influenced the directions the project took. We are especially grateful to Roger Gathman, for his perceptive comments and feedback, and to Erica Fudge, for graciously offering to write the foreword to the volume. In the broader fields of critical animal studies and sexuality studies, Zeb Tortorici and Martha Few want to thank the following individuals for their encouragement and support: Margo DeMello, Robin Derby, Georgina Dopico Black, Gabriel Giorgi, Susan Kellogg, Marcy Norton, Pete Sigal, and Neil L. Whitehead. Research for Tortorici’s chapter in this volume was made possible by generous funding from the Animals and Society Institute (http://www .animalsandsociety.org), where he was a visiting fellow at North Carolina State University in the summer of 2007. Ken Shapiro and Tom Regan were absolutely crucial to the success of this summer institute. For pushing him to think more critically (in both theory and practice) about the relationships between humans and other animals, and for sharing wonderful conversation over countless vegan meals, Zeb is especially grateful to Osvaldo Gómez, Joanne Lin, Scott Lucas, Jennifer Ly, Yuki Maeda, Tom and Nancy Regan, Frederico Santos Soares de Freitas, Su Anne Takeda, Danielle Terrazas Williams, Richard Twine, and Tom Tyler. Research for Few’s chapter in this volume was made possible with funding from the History Department and the Social and Behavioral Sciences xiv • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research Institute at the University of Arizona. Few drafted her chapter while a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin America Studies, during spring 2009, where she benefited from ongoing conversations about insects, especially with Paul Scolieri and Edwin Ortiz. She would also like to thank Bert Barickman, Alison Futrell, Kevin Gosner, Keisuke Hirano, Katrina Jagodinsky, Steve Johnstone, Fabio Lanza, and Neil Prendergast for reading the chapter and for their helpful suggestions. Thanks also to Alex Hidalgo, co-translator of Reinaldo Funes Monzote’s essay. In our effort to ‘‘center animals’’ through scholarship, we have decided to donate the proceeds of this volume to animal-welfare organizations in Latin America. There are a number of nonprofit organizations and ngos throughout Latin America—spaying and neutering programs, animal shelters, humane societies, animal sanctuaries, free veterinary clinics, anti-bullfighting and anti-circus campaigns, and more—that do important political work with animals. For a few examples in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico , see the following websites: http://www.uipa.org.br; http://www.arca brasil.org.br; http://www.greatapeproject.org/pt-BR; http://www.pea.org .br; http://www.ranchodosgnomos.org.br; http://www.adda.org.ar; http: //www.adacolombia.org; http://www.gepda.org; http://www.animanatur alis.org; and, http://www.amigosac.org. We want to thank Frederico Santos Soares de Freitas and Gerardo Tristan respectively for information on Brazilian and Mexican organizations. It should be noted that many such organizations espouse a discourse of ‘‘animals rights’’ (derechos de los animales in Spanish; direitos dos animais in Portuguese), and that despite one’s affinity or revulsion to such terminology, these organizations unquestionably improve the living conditions of animals throughout Latin America. Please contact the editors in order to find out more information about the organizations to which we have donated, or to suggest other animal-welfare organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Finally, Neil L. Whitehead, in particular, pushed us to think about the cyclical relationship between animality, humanity, and divinity in the early stages of this project. Neil’s initial and sustained enthusiasm helped Centering Animals in Latin American History come to fruition, and his brilliant concluding essay to this volume, ‘‘Loving, Being, Killing Animals,’’ is testament to the type of radically innovative scholarship to which he was dedicated. We dedicate this book to Neil L. Whitehead—a phenomenally creative, incisive, prolific, and supportive scholar and colleague, who is sorely missed. ...