Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia

Patagonia is often referred to as “the end of the world.” Yet John Soluri's history of the transformation of Patagonia's animals into commodities demonstrates that the region has been deeply enmeshed in global economic circuits and cultural developments since the late nineteenth century. Soluri takes what he calls a “ranch-to-rack approach” (2) to trace how settlers and foreign businessmen gained power over animals and territory in southern Patagonia. These animals included native species like fur seals and guanacos and those brought by Europeans, especially sheep.The book contributes to an animal studies approach, which insists on the socially and historically constructed nature of the distinction between people and other animals, by showing that the global market economy and settler colonialism enabled certain groups of people—mostly white men—to assume a considerable degree of power over animals at the turn of the twentieth century. The commodification of local and introduced species was predicated on horrific violence against Indigenous people that resulted in significant loss of Indigenous life, territory, and power. Throughout the study, Soluri reveals how different groups of people's behavior has affected animals, how animal behavior has impacted humans, and, where possible, how animals have related with each other.The story begins with the rise of commercial fur seal hunting in the late 1800s. Commercial hunters killed fur seals en masse, taking advantage of fur seals’ large group gatherings on land to mate and give birth. Hunters sometimes killed or raped Indigenous men and women and inadvertently spread disease among them. Despite efforts to restrict and then ban fur seal hunting in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the seal population has yet to recover from this slaughter. Some hunters invested their profits in livestock operations that further eroded Indigenous sovereignty and relationships with animals.The most heartbreaking chapter of the book documents the displacement of Selk'nam people from Tierra del Fuego, their enslavement and internment in Salesian missions, and the separation of Selk'nam children from their parents to make way for sheep ranching. Starting in the 1880s, the Chilean and Argentine governments took over Indigenous territory and sold or leased it to sheep ranchers, including the largest ranching operation in the world, the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego in Chile. Sheep ranchers and their government allies waged war on Indigenous people; animal predators of sheep, including puma, wild dogs, and fox; and guanacos who competed with sheep for grazing lands, spread diseases, and damaged fences. Sheep ranchers used fencing, imported breeds, and migrant laborers, along with the skilled labor of horses and dogs, to engineer new breeds that produced more wool. This “new social ecology” (8) of sheep ranching consumed Selk'nam hunting grounds and destroyed the guanacos whom Selk'nam depended on for food and clothing as well as the dogs who helped them hunt, and thus “devastated Selk'nam society” (69).Throughout the book, Soluri highlights the work that commodification entailed and the ensuing labor struggles. The most dramatic labor conflict was the “Patagonia Rebellion” of 1920–22 when ranch workers struck for better working conditions such as compensation for using their own animals and hiring preference for shepherds with families. In response, the government executed hundreds of unarmed striking workers. For Soluri, “the specificity of the demands related to sleeping quarters, meal provisioning, sociability, and basic health care” suggests that “the routine experiences of migrant workers” and “dignity” mattered as much as wages and anarchist influences (105).Perhaps most novel is Soluri's incorporation of US and European worlds of fashion into this environmental history. As in his 2005 book Banana Cultures, Soluri traces connections between production and the environment in Latin America to cultures of consumption in the Global North. As he convincingly shows, production and consumption of fashionable goods like furs and wools were deeply intertwined (sartorial metaphors abound). Associations of wool with good health and status both depended on and drove its production in Patagonia. So too with furs, whether of fur seals or newborn guanacos, whose numbers declined drastically as a result. When US and European consumers began to prefer synthetic materials, demand for wool fell, allowing the guanaco population to recover.The founding and growth of national parks such as Chile's Torres del Paine starting in the 1950s, the expropriation of sheep ranches in the 1970s under Allende in Chile, increasing tourism, and late twentieth-century environmental and animal rights movements in the United States and Europe also helped guanacos win grazing land back from sheep. Officials removed nonnative animals like cattle and sheep from Torres del Paine and placed “wild, native” animals like guanacos, guemals, pudus, and nandus (rheas) in the park (162). But this was no rewilding. Rather, Soluri argues, guanacos’ “place remained tightly knit to the power of nation-states, mass markets, international conservation organizations, and the people of Patagonia” (169). There was no going back. Yet there has been little acknowledgment among animal enthusiasts, as Soluri writes, that “livestock operations historically inflicted pain on Aonikenk and Selk'nam people while simultaneously displacing native fauna” (172).Creatures of Fashion beautifully weaves together histories of the environment, animals, imperialism, settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples, labor, commodities and markets, science, fashion, and conservation to tell the important story of how animal-derived commodities shaped Patagonia's integration into Argentina and Chile, global markets, cultural trends, and local and global conservation movements. While most of the sources he draws on (ethnographies, travel literature, scientific expedition reports, US consul reports, sealing logbooks, wool trade journals, maps, court cases, newspapers, and literature, among others) were produced by foreigners and settlers, Soluri ably puts Indigenous people, animals, and Patagonia's varied landscape at the center of the story. In so doing, he reveals how local social and environmental contexts have made and unmade animal lives, Indigenous sovereignty, labor relations, international trade, and global fashion. Understanding long-standing connections between Indigenous dispossession and animal commodification and decline is crucial to envisioning and building a world where diverse peoples and other animals can live and thrive together.