Domination vs Interdependence: Gender and Animals in Early Modern Europe and Amazonia

• In Event: Ecofeminism, Reproductive Labor, and Gender in the Human and non-Human World: Merchant's Enduring Legacy

Abstract

Carolyn Merchant’s scholarship was and is foundational for environmental history for many reasons. Among other things, she showed that Europeans’ way of interacting with “nature” was (and is) inextricably tied to their understandings of gender, and she revealed the fundamental importance of the early modern period as an originating moment for the contemporary global ecological disaster. Taking the primordiality of gender and early modernity as a starting point, this paper will explore the connections between gender and modes of interaction—my term for the structures that organize human-animal relationships—in early modern Europe and Greater Amazonia. I believe that the present-day crisis—in particular climate change and extinction events—is only explicable, and therefore, solvable, by attending to these modes of interaction. In particular, this paper will explore how normative ideas about patriarchy naturalized livestock husbandry—a central mode of interaction in Europe and its settler colonies—and vice versa. The concepts and practices produced by patriarchy and husbandry assumed, reinforced, and naturalized gender and species hierarchies. In contrast, in Greater Amazonia, Indigenous people’s way of interacting with nonhuman animals did not depend on notions of hierarchy. The interlocking Indigenous modes of interaction in Greater Amazonia were predation and familiarization. While these modes overlapped with and buttressed notions of gender, they emphasized interdependence rather than hierarchy.

Author

• Marcy Norton, University of Pennsylvania