Dr. Marcy Norton, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

Almost every day a new scientific report demonstrates that nonhuman animals are thinking, feeling, even talking subjects who share many capacities with humans and exceed them in others. The question I pose in my talk is what has made this kind of knowledge obvious to Indigenous groups for centuries? And why has this understanding been so difficult for Europeans and settler colonists to apprehend until recently?  I suggest that deeply rooted livestock practices have shaped Western views of animals more deeply and profoundly than any philosophical or religious tradition. And, focusing on early modern Amazonia and Mexico, I will show how traditional Indigenous ways of being with animals—or rather “modes of interaction” —center the shared subjectivity of all kinds of animals. Moreover, these Indigenous modes may have played a role in the Western shift towards recognizing animal subjectivity more widely.

Image source: Manuel Maria Albis, "Cusiositá della foresta d’amazzonia e arte di curar senza medico,” Biblioteca Nazionale Universitariadi Torino