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Conversation
The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492: an interview with Marcy Norton
Marcy Norton*†
,
marcynorton@gmail.com
in conversation with Josh Milburn‡
Abstract
In this interview, Josh Milburn speaks to Marcy Norton about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492. The book explores the contrasting human–animal ‘modes of interaction’ developed in Europe and Native America, and how these modes of interaction impacted, and were impacted by, the 1492 arrival of Europeans in America. The conversation starts with the differences between European hunting and Native American predation, before turning—via a discussion of witchcraft and demonology—to European livestock farming and Native American familiarisation, the latter of which is an important, overlooked part of the origins of contemporary practices of ‘pet-keeping’. The conversation closes with reflections on the methods of animal history, the relationship of animal history to the broader animal studies world, and our own relationships with animals.
Keywords
animal historyanimal studieshuntingfarminglivestockwitchcraftdemonologypetsnative AmericaI’m very pleased to introduce Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History. She’s a historian of the early modern Atlantic, interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She’s the author of the beautifully named 2008 book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, but we’re going to talk primarily about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492. Welcome, Marcy!
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here!
Can you start by telling us what led you to work on this topic?
There are two origins to this project. One of them is something that I came across while researching that first book that you mentioned on tobacco and chocolate. I was reading a source that is very well known to historians of this period.1 This isn’t an obscure source. In theory, many others had read about this episode, but I had never seen it mentioned in the scholarship. It actually opens up chapter 9 of my book.
The source describes how, on the island that is today the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in the 1540s, there was an Indigenous man who had escaped either slavery or the brutal and coercive labour system of the encomienda. He fled into the mountains. And he had adopted three feral pigs. At this point, there were many, many feral pigs on the island because their population had exploded as an introduced species. And the Indigenous man had trained them to hunt other pigs.
The story ends badly with the pigs being killed by Spanish soldiers. The man is utterly bereft. And the Spanish chronicler is baffled that the man was able to tame pigs to hunt other pigs because for him, pigs were a livestock species, meant to be eaten, not engaged as collaborators.
And when I read this episode, I thought ‘What is going on here? Could this have even happened? If I can explain this, I feel like I can explain all kinds of things.’ And so in one sense, that was the origins of this book.
But the other origin is one that maybe a lot more people can relate to, which is that in 2004, I adopted a dog, Lilly. I was just mesmerised by the power of that relationship on so many levels. At the same time, I was very aware of the intense suffering that humans inflict on animals, above all from industrial agriculture. And because I’m a historian, when something confuses me in the present, I want to understand its origin.
Central to your approach in The Tame and the Wild is this idea of modes of interaction. What are modes of interaction, and why are they important?
Early on in the research, when I started looking at sources that describe European and Indigenous ways of interacting with animals, I was struck by how different they were. Yet I wanted to write about these differences without assuming that European practices—such as those organised around animal domestication—were intrinsically superior. I conceptualised modes of interaction as the structures that organise how people interact with other kinds of animals.
Simply put, to make it a little bit less abstract, the modes of interaction that I look at in Europe are hunting and husbandry. Those terms will be familiar to everyone. But probably less familiar are predation and familiarisation, which are the modes I explore for Native America.
Also, from the get-go, I was interested in animal subjectivity. But rather than approaching it, as I think a lot of philosophers and scientists do, by trying to determine a priori possibilities. I think there is also value in thinking about how different concepts and practices of subjectivity are themselves produced, and the cultural, and therefore also historical, conditions that shaped them. More precisely, I am interested in how culturally—and therefore historically—constituted relationships allow—or preclude—people’s ability to recognise others’ subjectivities. I start from the position that subjectivity or personhood is relational. In other words, subjectivity is not a characteristic that exists separately from an interactive relationship between two subjects. Modes of interaction condition, if not determine, people’s perceptions of other animals’ subjectivities.
I’m glad you raised this point about animal subjectivity, because that’s what I was about to ask. That’s really one of the central threads of the book. And you’re interested in, as I understand it, the extent to which animal subjectivity is recognised or not recognised in different modes of interaction.
You mentioned this distinction between European hunting and Indigenous American predation. Could you introduce us to that distinction, and explain what these different modes of interaction tell us about perceptions of animal subjectivity?
Let me say, to start off in answering that question, that hunting and predation are probably where European and Indigenous modes of interaction are closest, while it’s husbandry and familiarisation where they’re at their farthest. This means there are a lot of similarities as well as differences.
And let me clarify here, too, that the focus of the book in Native America is two macro-culture areas. One of them is what scholars refer to as Mesoamerica. That region includes Central Mexico, an area that was dominated by the Aztecs when the Spaniards arrived in 1519. And then there’s what I refer to as Greater Amazonia, an even larger area that includes the Caribbean in terms of Indigenous communities.
Hunting and predation, among other things, refer to the practices humans have of hunting other animals. But I use different terminology because there are some really important differences between the two modes. In Europe, hunting was a collaborative act with other animals—above all, horses, dogs, and raptors. And so that created a mediated relationship between humans and the prey. It also created intensely strong relationships between people and these (what I term as) vassal animals.
In Greater Amazonia and Mesoamerica, predation was not mediated with these vassal animals. There was a much more direct relationship between humans and the prey. That produced different kinds of intersubjective relationships.
So going back to your question about subjectivity, in both predation and in hunting, the prey is understood to be a fellow subject. If you read European hunting manuals from this period, what you quickly discover is that much of these texts is actually dedicated to admiring the capacities of these animals, with pages and pages memorialising even individual animals—for example, in one case, a boar who was able to evade being hunted for years on end. These manuals’ authors, professional huntsmen, would give such animals nicknames and understood them as individuals (see Figure 1).
Figure 1.
A Hunter and Dogs Pursuing a Fallow Deer. Source: Unknown author, ‘Livre de la Chasse’, c. 1430–1440. Ms. 27, fol. 81v, (87.MR.34). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
Four hunting dogs following deer in forest with hunter blowing horn in upper-right corner.
And, even more, they celebrate the capacities of vassal animals (see Figure 2). The subjectivity of these animals and the intersubjective relationship of those relationships just jumps off the page in these hunting treatises.
Figure 2.
A Hunter Attending to Kenneled Dogs, about 1430–1440. Source: Unknown author, ‘Livre de la Chasse’, c. 1430–1440. Ms. 27, fol. 46, (87.MR.34). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
A structure with a yard that contains four black dogs and five tawny dogs, as well as a fire and man holding a pole.
I should note the very asymmetrical nature of the sources. For Europe, of course, we have the voices of the hunters themselves, whereas, in this period, for indigenous perspectives, one is frequently relying on European sources. And so the technique, sometimes called ‘reading against the grain’, is to find traces of Indigenous perspectives, despite the mediated nature of the sources.
As I read sources that described Indigenous hunting techniques (often authored by European missionaries) I noted frequently that they required the hunter to take on attributes of the prey who they were stalking. For instance, a hunter might use vocalisation to attract the animal, and so, we might say, learn how to speak the animal’s language. Or the hunter might camouflage himself (for hunters were usually men) in the environment, and so came to understand the habitat of the animal on a deep sensorial level. Where we start to see a really important divergence between hunting and predation—in addition to not having the relationship with the vassal animals—is the way that the very experience of being a hunter [in a predation context] requires a transformative effect of becoming the animal. This changes the subjectivity of that hunter themselves.
Another way that I would talk about the differences between hunting and predation is that in both European hunting and Indigenous predation, there is the idea that the prey–predator relationship can flip around. These European hunting treatises often do mention times when hunters were the ones who ended up getting eaten by animals rather than vice versa, and that adds to the glamour and the stakes of it. But that notion that people could be prey as well as predators in the Indigenous context is much more pronounced. And so this notion that it’s a much more contingent relationship, that there’s no natural hierarchy of prey and predator. In fact, there are apex predators that go beyond humans, such as jaguars and eagles. Hunters themselves try to become like those apex predators.
Let me pick up on this idea of hierarchy, because you’re talking about these European—I think especially Spanish and Portuguese—hunting manuals framing hunted animals as having their own perspective on the world. That might be contrary to what we’d expect to see in early modern European sources.
You mean because you’re thinking of a Genesis or a classical notion of hierarchy of beings; discourses like that?
Precisely, but also the hostility that we see in early modern sources to ideas of animals having a perspective.
Yes. That tension is actually in the treatises themselves. There will be times where there’s an apologetic note. The author admires the animals’ cognitive abilities, suggesting that these animals definitely have reason, but then they ‘correct’ themselves and will write ‘Well, not exactly reason’. There is this acknowledgement that what they’re observing and experiencing is at odds with other kinds of discourses in their culture.
One of the more memorable discussions in the book ties questions of animal subjectivity to fears of witches and demons, both in Europe and among European colonists in the Americas. What’s going on there?
To answer that question, I need to talk about the most important mode of interaction in Europe, which is livestock husbandry. We’ve been talking about hunting and the way that hunting was an intersubjective relationship between the hunters and the animals, but also that it’s a relatively restricted activity—intentionally so, in Europe. Whereas animal agriculture or livestock husbandry (I use those terms interchangeably) was pervasive, as it is today. We’re heirs to that system. Animals, in the context of livestock husbandry, are objectified. They are raised so we can eat their flesh, wear their fibres, and so on. This mode of interaction had developed over millennia in Europe.
Other scholars have seen objectification as a result of a particular world view. Famously, Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World has argued that an anthropocentric worldview is what enabled people to mistreat animals and use them for their ends. I see the relationship in reverse: I’m suggesting is that it’s actually the mode of interaction of livestock husbandry that led to objectification. I focus particularly on the herding complex and the slaughterhouse complex. I describe the ways that those assemblages of practices create a separation between the consumer who eats an animal or wears an animal and the animal itself. This will be very familiar to all of us today because today the distance is exponentially larger. But rather than seeing that distance and objectification as products of industrialisation, I argue that the roots are much, much deeper; it was already well developed by the early modern period.
Figure 3.
Anthony Tormented by Demons. Source: Detail, Master of the Brussels Romuléon and workshop, ‘Invention et translation du corps de Saint Antoine,’ c. 1465–1470. Ms. Ludwig XI 8, fol. 6v, 83.MN.127.6v. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
A man wearing clerical robes who is being attacked by three demonic figures with tails, flawed feet, and animalistic faces.
Where do demons and witches fit into all of this (see Figure 3)? Despite all these objectifying technologies, livestock husbandry does not shut down all opportunities for intersubjective relationships. This is partly because of the presence of hunting, and because within livestock husbandry there are still relationships that are organised around an intersubjective relationship, such as the one between a shepherd and his dog.
I suggest that demonology is a realm where people unconsciously deal with these contradictions. Starting with depictions of hell and demons going back to the Middle Ages, you see a kind of inversion of the human/non-human relationship where it’s humans who become the objectified animals. In mediaeval depictions of Hell, you see demons with poles, who are herding human animals into an enormous, Satanic maw that eats them. By the 16th century, such as in Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, you see even more analogous pictures of the Angel of Death on a horse, like a cowboy, herding people. In a sense, people put themselves in the place of animals and imagine the kind of suffering that animal husbandry inflicts.
Do you think that a fear of witches and demons would not have developed in a society that didn’t have this fraught relationship with animal subjectivity? Or at least it might have evolved quite differently?
The way that scholars and other people use the term ‘witch’ really varies a lot. I think, according to some definitions, you could have witches without this animal connection. I don’t want to generalise about things outside my scope. But I think the way that demonology develops in Europe is utterly entangled with the way that people are interacting, or not interacting, with animals on a quotidian basis. Those things are inseparable.
You introduced the mode of interaction of husbandry, and you earlier contrasted that with the mode of interaction of familiarisation.
Essentially familiarisation is the practice of taking an individual wild animal and taming that animal so that they become a companion. Unlike the animals who are managed within livestock husbandry, familiarised animals—at least prior to 1492—are not domesticated. Individuals might become tame, but the species has evolved separately from human interventions.
Let’s say you belong to a community in Greater Amazonia and you go on a hunt, and you kill a monkey, and left behind are some baby monkeys. And you take that dead monkey home, and you eat the monkey, and you also return with one of the living baby monkeys. You feed and raise the monkey, and they becomes similar to what we would call a pet (see Figure 4). (I don’t use the word pet. I prefer the Indigenous terminology [see below].) And then once you name them, you talk to them, and they imprint on you. You would never ever eat that monkey because the act of feeding that monkey is the quintessential act of taming and a familiarisation. That monkey is now your kin; they are your family member. So, even though you might eat the parent or you might eat a relative of the monkey, it’s the act of that taming that distinguishes this monkey from that monkey. In this Amazonian system, the essence of familiarisation is you don’t eat who you feed. This is really the opposite of livestock husbandry, which centres around us eating animals who are fed.
Figure 4.
Tupinamba men dancing with feather ornaments in the presence of a tame macaw and monkey. Source: Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre de Brésil, (Geneva, 1580: 246). Digital image courtesy of John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence.
Two men flanked by a parrot and a monkey. One man wears a feathered crown and holds a macara, and the other man has a feathered cape and feathers on his ankles.
By focusing on familiarisation I am arguing against views found in popular works such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond and other scholars have either consciously or unconsciously assumed a natural progress of human civilisations. (Even the way I say lack of domestication, it’s as if something is missing.) This is in children’s textbooks, right? Domestication is one of those milestones; a necessary point in growth for cultures. As a result, Diamond asks: Why didn’t Indigenous people domesticate animals in the way that Europeans did? He concluded that it’s because the animals weren’t suitable for domestication. In posing the question like that, the assumption is you would domesticate animals if you could.
I reject a notion of hierarchy of civilisations and instead try to understand different ways of interacting with animals on their own terms. That allowed me to see familiarisation in sources. Attention to familiarisation shows that there are some really good reasons to not domesticate animals. If you are repulsed by eating an animal who you have fed, why would you want to keep animals in captivity in order to eat them?
How does familiarisation help us understand the impact of the arrival of livestock farming with the Europeans?
There’re a lot of elements to what happens.
I began to notice that scholarship in the tradition of Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange had conflated two things: the introduction of new species and the introduction of livestock husbandry as a system (or, as I would call it, a mode of interaction). Indigenous people often welcomed the former while rejecting the latter. On the one hand, were often really eager to adopt introduced species: chickens, horses, and European-bred dogs come to mind above all. They integrated these new species into the system of familiarisation. Of course, the man and his three pigs is an example of that; he was able to take these feral pigs and treat them like any other familiarised animal.
The example that I saw over and over again, ranging across 500 years, was that of chickens. There was a huge enthusiasm for chickens, for their feathers and bringing them into the fold. But once the chicken was part of the family unit, then you wouldn’t eat them. And I think part of the reason we have quite a bit of documentation on that is that was really shocking to European observers. Why would you not eat a chicken or ‘even an egg’, as one missionary noted? That was extremely strange to the Europeans who had been socialised in livestock husbandry cultures. The Europeans who observed this aversion would actually present it as a form of sloth and laziness. They couldn’t understand it; they couldn’t understanding the cultural logic that was at the heart of it.
While there would be this enthusiasm for introduced species, the idea of livestock husbandry produced a real revulsion in Indigenous people, particularly in Amazonia. In a system where you don’t eat who you feed, livestock husbandry doesn’t make any sense. Now, there were also regions where Native groups lost their autonomy and were under European rule. And in those regions, really, people didn’t have a choice but to adopt livestock husbandry. It was frequently forced on them, in the sense that they were made to participate in ranching as labourers, or they turned to it after their agricultural fields were decimated by European livestock. For a second generation of Indigenous people living under European rule, it would become normalised. By then, that becomes part of their landscape.
Historians, when considering the ways that colonial rule forced Indigenous communities to abandon traditional cultural practices and adopt colonisers’ practices, often focus on religion, the forced adoption of Christianity. Because animal husbandry is often seen as political economy, it’s not seen as part of actually changing belief systems, or in terms of its cultural effects. And that’s something that I explore.
I was really struck by your recurring discussions of how the modes of interaction of Indigenous Americans influenced European conceptions and practices as well. You include lots of discussion of the development of zoology and other scientific disciplines. But what I really wanted to ask you about was the emergence of pet keeping in Europe after encounters with Indigenous Americans.
I do see the modern pet as developing out of the entanglement of European vassal animals, and then also Europeans’ exposure to Indigenous tamed animals.
When I refer to these tamed animals in Indigenous America, I don’t use the word pet, because, as you said, pet in English and other languages doesn’t even appear on the scene until later on. One of the Indigenous terms is iegue; that’s a Kalinago word. The Kalinago are people who lived on the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, and still today have a strong presence on Dominica.
Starting on October 12, 1492, which is when Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, Europeans became enmeshed within familiarisation practices.
I say that because on that day Columbus was gifted a parrot. And I think the intention of his his Bahamanian hosts was to make these weird, hairy strangers into allies. The parrot gift relates to practices that predate European arrival, where gifts of tamed animals were ways that Indigenous communities created bonds of alliance and kinship between them, functioning, in a way, like how a marriage might bring two communities together. The gift of a tamed parrot, for instance, to another community would be a way to bring these communities together.
I’m going to say as an aside here: I haven’t given people a sense of the diversity of tamed animals who could be encompassed in these familiarising practices. Monkeys and parrots appear probably most frequently in the sources, and I think that has to do with their portability, something that I’ll come back to in a second (see Figure 5). But, every kind of animal that you could imagine appears as possible. Almost any animal that could be hunted could also be a familiarised animal. I have examples of a manatee; peccaries; tapir; various kinds of rodents, including capybara; all kinds of birds like a toucan, owls; iguana… a huge diversity of animals. Anyway, back to the entanglement of European and Indigenous modes of interaction with familiarisation. Because of these pre-existing practices around familiarised animals, Europeans were immediately on the receiving end.
Figure 5.
Indigenous traders in South America exchanging parrots and monkeys for metal tools and mirror. Source: Vallard Atlas, c. 1547, HM 29, detail. fol. 12. Digital image courtesy of Huntington Library, San Marino.
A man wearing a red robe and blue stockings a and hat, holding a mirror and a metal tool, is trading with naked men and women with two green parrots and two monkeys on leashes.
The Europeans who arrived, like Columbus, were very excited about these parrots. They were coming from cultures that had traditions of court menageries since the Middle Ages, and even before back to classical times. Powerful kings and popes would show their prestige by having these menageries of exotic animals. There was thus a meeting point: there was a desire for these exotic animals from Europeans, and Indigenous people were ready to gift them with a different set of intentions.
And so, very early on, parrots start being brought back to Europe in large quantities; some monkeys, as well. But these individual animals who were brought back were themselves products of familiarisation: of taming practices, of really skilled expertise. And the big difference between familiarised animals and court animals, or even vassal animals, was that the purpose of familiarised animals is to provide the pleasure of companionship. Those kinds of bonds might be products of the vassal relationship, the relationship that a hunter might have with his dog or his horse, but that was an effect of the relationship, and not the purpose of it.
My suggestion is that Europeans’ exposure to familiarisation, where this kind of love and companionship is an end in itself, helps explain the timing of the emergence of pets, something that hadn’t previously existed in Europe. Let me clarify: I am not saying that medieval Europeans didn’t have strong, emotionally rich bonds with nonhuman animals—they most certainly did with certain dogs, horses, and raptors. But the concept of a ‘pet’, wherein the joy afforded by mutual affection between a human and nonhuman animal is the purpose of the said relationship, did not exist in medieval Europe.
Let me ask about methods. In your introduction, you talk about finding animals in the margins, which is an idea that will be familiar to lots of animal historians and many academics in the wider animal studies world. But let me really push you on this.
It’s one thing to find (to take some of your sources as examples) animals as peripheral figures in pictures, or to learn about animals from early dictionaries. But do you feel we can, or could, or should, recover animal voices and animal agency from these margins?
Or to put it another way, how, if at all, can we capture the voices, literally or figuratively, of the early modern animals themselves?
That was not my object in this book. I would characterise my approach as a kind of humble anthropocentrism, which means that I don’t want to overreach what seems to me epistemologically and phenomenologically possible.
I enjoy, for instance, fiction that tries to occupy the animal perspective. But I think there’s a real risk in absorbing the animal into human consciousness. And so that’s just a position that I occupy; maybe philosophically, but even more so methodologically when it comes sources that I don’t think allow us to access that.
That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the animal experience or animal agency. But the sort of terrain that to me seemed not really investigated was, as you said at the beginning, humans’ ability to be sensitive to forms of animal subjectivity.
And that is the thing that I was exploring in this book: human sensitivity to different kinds of subjectivities. The nature of the sources are wildly asymmetrical. And in order to give a picture that appears symmetrical, I had to use very different methodologies in the different sections.
I’m glad you mentioned your own philosophical position, because that ties very neatly to how I wanted to close this part of the conversation. I wanted to reflect a little on your epilogue. Both, I think, because it’s something that interested me, and because I see that this has shaped the way that some of your reviewers and commentators have responded to the book.
To put it simply, I suppose the epilogue shows that you’re not aiming for a detached work of historical scholarship here. Instead, your epilogue paints a bleak picture of our current relationship with animals—perhaps I should say our contemporary modes of interaction with animals—and it shows that you want to push contemporary commentators on human–animal relationships to recognise the origins of these relationships in the early modern period.
How would you tie, in broad terms or in specific terms, the kind of scholarship you’re doing here to contemporary questions about our relationships with animals?
Well, I think it is bleak, but I actually think I also want to emphasise that I think there is some optimism in it. I’ll start to answer this by talking about a conversation I had with a friend’s 12-year-old child a number of years ago. This very precocious child was telling me that there was nothing to be done about the way that we treat animals, that people were going to eat animals raised in factory farms and that was just the way it was, and they saw no other way. That’s how it had always been.
And I pushed back. I said ‘Really? This is not how it’s always been.’ And actually, in the history of humanity, these practices are just the blink of the eye. One of the aims of my book is, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s apt phrase, ‘to provincialize’ animal agriculture.
But also, it goes two ways. We need to recognise the degree to which animal agriculture has created so many of people’s cultural assumptions. It goes beyond just the enormous suffering of the 92 billion livestock animals who are killed every year in the world, and the environmental degradation that goes along with it, causing countless more deaths to wild animals. Our current system also creates this sense of inevitability and impotence. I think if there’s one contribution that I hope my book has, it’s to show that that we are living a contingent, and therefore changeable, history.
People often think it’s somehow more ‘natural’ to have an instrumental relationship with animals than a non-instrumental relationship with animals. That it’s more ‘natural’ to have an objectifying relationship than one that recognises animal subjectivity. I think to have things change, a lot of things need to happen. I don’t think one book (or many books) are going to change things overnight. But I think it’s part of the equation to help people see. I think one of the really positive things history can do is open our imagination for ways of being. It helps us see that one way of being seems like the only way of being.
Now, Marcy, I close my interviews with five quick questions. Are you ready for your five quick questions?
Yes!
Can you recall the first piece of pro-animal scholarship you ever read?
Before I started the project, I had read J.M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, where he sort of takes on the Peter Singer perspective. That one really struck out for me, even in a fictionalised form, putting forward some of the views of animal scholars and philosophers.
Can you recall the first piece of pro-animal scholarship you ever wrote?
I wrote an essay in a volume called Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, where I first outlined my ideas about modes of interaction. A different essay, called ‘Going to the Birds’, which also explores these ideas in a preliminary way, actually appeared in print first, but it was the Lexikon one that I wrote first.
If you had to name one animal studies scholar who’s had a big impact on you, who would it be?
I think the philosopher Cora Diamond was really important to me. Her essay ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’ really helped me in thinking about modes of interaction and how practices create ideas, rather than vice versa.
That’s very funny. One of the first marginal notes I wrote when I was reading your book was Cora Diamond, when I saw something that felt very Diamond-esque. It’s interesting to hear there was that influence there.
Yes; definitely!
What do you think is the most important thing that academics can do for animals?
I don’t know what the most important thing is. I only know what I thought I could do, so I’ll speak to that. This is what I’ve said already: showing the sense of possibility, that things don’t need to be the way that they are by looking at things that we see as inevitable as products of a very contingent past.
If you could change one thing about the human–nonhuman-animal relationship, what would it be?
End animal agriculture.
Oh, I like that answer! What are you working on next?
My current project looks at how people in Europe and the Americas engaged with wild plants while living in agricultural societies.
And how could people find out more about your work?
Google me, and my Penn profile will pop up, along with titles and descriptions of my books. https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/marcy-norton .
Well, thanks so much, Marcy, for joining me for this conversation!
Thank you. It was wonderful.
Acknowledgement
An audio version of this interview was released as episode 251 of the podcast Knowing Animals, which is available through Spotify or iTunes, or on the web at https://knowinganimals.libsyn.com/episode-251-tame-and-wild-with-marcy-norton.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
Josh Milburn used TurboScribe for assistance with the initial transcription of the interview. The authors did not otherwise use AI in the preparation of this article.
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1
The text in question is Historia general y natural de las Indias [General and Natural History of the Indies], by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557). Norton cites the 1992 Ediciones Atlas edition edited by Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso.
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a26
Published on: 30 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Norton, M. with Milburn, J. (2026), ‘The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492: an interview with Marcy Norton’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a26 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a26Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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