Event
Global Discovery Series | The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492
The Global Discovery Lecture Series lets you explore the world virtually, both far and near, with Penn faculty members and your fellow alumni community. Each live, interactive lecture features Penn professors sharing new and innovative research on a variety of topics. Participants will have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions and are sure to learn something new in each one hour session.
Today billions of animals lead tortured lives in confinement and then are slaughtered for human over-consumption. Others die because of human-caused climate change, water pollution, and deforestation. And, yet, on the other hand, many of us have pets whom we adore and consider family members. Norton’s latest book, Tame and the Wild challenges the idea that treating animals as livestock is a natural and normal way to interact with other creatures. It questions the notion that animal domestication leading to livestock husbandry is a necessary stage of development for cultural progress. In many parts of the Americas, Indigenous cultures developed very different kinds of relationships with other animals. As a result, they were able to recognize the subjectivity (or personhood) of nonhuman animals. Eventually, these practices and even some of these ideas influenced European cultures and contributed to the emergence of the modern “pet.”
Featured Speaker
Marcy Norton is an associate professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in food and environmental history of science, as well as the history of science. Her scholarship explores how on-going encounters between Indigenous and settler communities in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Amazonia transformed the modern world. She is the author of Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2008, winner of the inaugural book prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society), and The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), recently short-listed for the British Academy Prize for Global Understanding. Her academic honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016-2017 and Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early America at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 23-24.