ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ignavus in Circulation: Sloth-Keeping, Colonial Misinterpretation, and the Erasure of Indigenous Knowledge in Early Modern Zoology

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 1

English Abstract

This paper takes a short-lived episode of animal keeping in a colonial household to examine how knowledge about the sloth emerged, circulated, and transformed within early modern global networks. André Thevet’s account of a sloth kept alive for 26 days, refusing food, languishing in confinement, and ultimately killed by the household’s dogs became pivotal in shaping European zoological interpretations. What was in fact a product of inappropriate captivity and environmental displacement was reinterpreted as a natural property of the animal. The absence of observed feeding was taken as “evidence” that the sloth “lives on air,” a claim later embedded in theological or paradisiacal frameworks. The episode illustrates how peripheral sites of interaction, domestic spaces and improvised menageries, functioned as laboratories of knowledge production structured by violence, coercion, and asymmetry. Indigenous knowledge appears only in fragments, filtered through terminology that marks local informants as “savages” and frames their observations as naïve curiosities. Their insights into the animal’s diet and behavior are dismissed until validated by Europeans or overwritten by wondrous interpretations, while Indigenous labour, tracking expertise, and ecological familiarity remain concealed despite being foundational for capturing and transporting animals. Tracing how this anecdote traveled across texts, languages, and natural history compendia shows how misinterpretations solidified into authoritative knowledge. The sloth became a symbol of moral laxity, exotic strangeness, and ontological anomaly because its representation emerged from colonial encounters rather than systematic observation. The case demonstrates how forced animal mobility and uneven knowledge exchanges shaped early modern zoology, revealing plural worlds in which Indigenous expertise, colonial violence, and European classification intersected—though rarely on equal terms.

Author

• Jenny Merker, University of Jena