Distinct entanglements—Human–nonhuman animal interactions and the Atlantic Divide. A review of 'The Tame and the Wild' by Marcy Norton, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2024. pp. 448. $37.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978‐0‐674‐73752‐5

The creation stories that have dominated European history for many centuries contrast sharply with those typical of Indigenous cultures. In the Bible, God created different elements of fauna and flora on different days, with humans being created last, in His image. In contrast, Indigenous creation stories from the Americas revolve around transformation and dynamics, where humans are just one among many. While Genesis depicts the creator as singular and anthropomorphic, Indigenous people's stories describe the creating force as zoomorphic and multiple, with no clear‐cut divide betweenpeople and other beings. These divergent stories reflect different relationships between humans and other kinds of animals, resulting from different ontologies or cosmovisions. Marcy Norton's “The Tame and the Wild” explores what happened when these cosmovisions confronted each other after 1492 and eventually became integrated into cultural developments on both sides of the Atlantic. More fundamentally, as explicitly and powerfully stated in the introduction and epilogue, this book, written by a historian, aims to understand the historical roots of contemporary practices such as industrialized food production, meat packing companies, and global supply chains, including the livestock operations that characterized settler colonialism and the interactions between Indigenous people from the Americas and conquistadors. Because of this continuity, the book is not merely an arcane academic exercise but a powerhouse of ideas on historical transformations that are highly relevant today. It demonstrates how humanity can coexist with nonhuman animals under different assumptions and conceptualizations. Some of these relationships can lead to extractivism and the modus operandi that have contributed to the current environmental crises. This synthetic and original book is essential for reconstructing the past of some of humanity's most fundamental cultural aspects, demonstrating how the integration of various fields of inquiry and evidence serve this purpose. The book is based primarily on archival work from early colonial writings, combined with theory and data from anthropology. Spanning 11 chapters and 448 pages, its scope is broad, focusing on universals—the commonalities in cosmovisions across vast areas of the Americas—to build its argument. The boundary between “civilized peoples” and “primitive barbarians” has been a persistent theme in European history, and since medieval times, human civilization was virtually synonymous with “the conquest of nature.”1 A fundamental aim of this book is to challenge the notion that livestock husbandry—a hallmark of civilization—has been a necessary and inevitable part of “human progress.” In this, it diverges from Crosby's 2 “The Columbian Exchange” and certainly from Jared Diamond's3 “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” The book presents dichotomies and concepts that differ from the traditional wild/domestic distinction of European tradition, providing numerous examples to illustrate them. On both sides of the Atlantic, people were accustomed to eating animals, but they had different ways of addressing the fact that these animals could develop feelings or affective relationships with humans. The European solution was to prohibit eating certain beings and to objectify those consumed. The Indigenous solution was to classify beings according to their contingent condition of their wildness. “Familiarization” was and still is practiced by Indigenous people; it refers to the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals that result from feeding creatures that are not intended to be eaten. The tamed creature becomes a companion animal, one for which humans do not seek to control its movements or its ability to reproduce, differing from what is typically called domestication or pet keeping. The Carib term “iegue” denotes a tamed animal or an adopted human child. There is no English word that fully captures this concept, which relates to the taming practices of Indigenous communities in Amazonia. The book highlights the important distinction between European livestock and iegue. In Europe, livestock were fed to be eaten, whereas in the case of iegue, they could not be eaten precisely because they were fed. Hunting and husbandry create different types of relationships between humans and other animals. Whereas hunting leads to the recognition of animals as subjects, livestock husbandry results in an understanding of humans as subjects and animals as objects—simply as food. For Indigenous people, hunting involved a direct relationship with the prey, unmediated by vassal animals (e.g., certain dogs, horses, and raptors used in hunting and warfare), unlike much of hunting in Europe. The introduction of dogs into Amazonia in recent centuries4 has led to their use in hunting.5 Regarding hunting, another recent book, "L'Animal et la Mort" by anthropologist Charles Stépanoff,6 provides insights that, while informed by other sources and geographies (e.g., France, Siberia), complement those of Norton. Stépanoff discusses how, in hunting, violence is not industrialized or dissimulated; rather, it is socialized, exhibited, ritualized, and central to rural communal experiences— quite a contrast to the extractive exploitation of livestock. Hunting is a voluntary act of confronting a wild animal capable of resisting the hunter. This definition implies the perception of the animal not just as a material resource but as an agent with certain behaviors within its environment, with the capacity to feed itself, reproduce freely, and defend itself. Marcel Mauss's Manuel d'Ethnographie (1926) is quoted by Stépanoff: “L'individu ne va pas ‘à la chasse,’ il va à la chasse au lièvre; et non pas à la chasse au lièvre mais à la chasse de tel lièvre, qu'il connaît bien” (The individual doesn't just go “hunting”; he goes hare hunting, and not just any hare, but a specific hare that he knows well). Stépanoff defines two generalized treatments of animals in recent times. On the one side, animals confined to an industrial environment are reduced to products—this is the “animal‐matière.” On the other side, pets are fed, integrated in human families, their hygiene needs are managed, they receive medication, and they lack social or sexual relations with their own kind: the “animal‐enfant.” Hunting conceptualizes animals neither as “animal matière” nor as “animal enfant.” Herd animals brought by Europeans to America jeopardized the ability of Indigenous people to feed themselves by damaging or destroying their agriculture and by producing certain economical relations: a system of land transfer that, inadvertently or unintentionally at first, contributed to the creation of the so‐called “baldíos,” a kind of “vacant” land that existed in Spain at the time. Fields of maize and of other crops were taken from Indigenous people and transformed into lands used for a grazing livestock, cows and sheep. These animals were introduced and transformed lands previously managed by Indigenous people in ways that made possible for colonists thereafter to claim that these lands were vacant and could be taken under European laws. This and other issues of settler colonialism are discussed at length in Norton's book. Livestock had an essential role in extractive industries being much integrated with a slave trading and mining. Livestock was also indirectly an instrument of dispossession of land. They affected epidemic disease of course, although the importance of diseases has been sometimes exaggerated in discussing the genocide of Indigenous people in early colonization.7 Norton presents an interpretation of practices that she considers mislabeled as sacrifice in Mesoamerican cultures. These activities were not based on the objectification of the animals being killed; rather, the subjectivity of the captive and killed animals was celebrated, and the reciprocity in which everything was both food and being fed was emphasized. This idea would require further examination in the context of studies on Aztec thought.8 Both turkeys and dogs were important in the diets of some Mesoamerican cultures, as evidenced by archeological findings. From the arrival of Europeans and the exchanges that followed, there was a transformation of the iegue into commodities. Some of these animals acquired value, they were sold and exchanged, sometimes for large prices. Norton relates several stories of transportation and adoption and exchange of parrots and other animals. In Europe, there was already since medieval times an obsession with exotic animals in courts, already common at the time. A court animal's purpose was to elicit wonder and convey power. After contact with Indigenous people, the practice of having pets in Europe became more widespread, with pets becoming providers and receivers of affection as if they were family members. Norton makes a distinction between pets and vassal animals such as hunting dogs, which had a utilitarian function. According to Thomas,1 in his magisterial work about the relation of humans to animals in Europe in the 18th century, pets were given human names and were not eaten. The observation of pets gave support to the view that pets can be sensitive, responsive and intelligent, helping to break down the gap between animals and humans. Norton's book highlights the influence of Indigenous peoples on this historical change in the lives of Europeans. Norton describes how Indigenous people had an understanding of animal behavior and natural history that much impressed and was used by Europeans, a knowledge tied with the activities of hunting, taming and spiritual practices. Europeans learned from observations and descriptions of the life of animals and plants in ways that affected the development of natural history and sciences of following times. An example is the influential work of Hernandez' “Historia Animalium,” a fundamental work from the XVII century to under