The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492

“One of the things that she fixes on is that in Western Europe there was a distinction between wild and domesticated animals. That simply didn’t exist in the regions of the Americas that she is studying. What did exist was the difference between the predatory and the familiar. The basic misunderstanding was that for the indigenous Americans, if you feed an animal, it’s horrific to then kill it and eat it. It’s the worst thing you could do. Whereas for the Europeans, that’s what domestication is about. You feed animals, then you kill them and eat them…The other division she points out was that for the indigenous Americans at the time, the dividing line between the human and the non-human didn’t exist in the way that we think of it…So some people thought they were descended from plants. Others thought that they would become plants, or that they were descended from birds, or that they would become birds.” Read more...

The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Charles Tripp, Political Scientist