Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno,

ed. Rolena Adorno (Copenhagen: Royal Library Digital Facsimile, 2002), 1105.

Special topics:
A history of animals in the atlantic world
History 497, section 001 Abel Alves
Spring Semester 2011 Burkhardt Building 216
Monday, 6:30-9:10 PM aalves@bsu.edu; 285-8729
Burkhardt Building 106 Office Hours: Monday, 5:00-6:30; also by appointment

Prospectus
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote that animals are not only “good to eat,” they are
“good to think.” Throughout the course of human history, people have interacted with other animals, not
only using them for food, clothing, labor and entertainment, but also associating with them as pets and
companions, and even appreciating their behaviors intrinsically. Nonhuman animals have been our
symbols and models, and they have even channeled the sacred for us. This course will explore the
interaction of humans with other animals in the context of the Atlantic World from prehistoric times to
the present. Our case studies will include an exploration of our early hominid heritage as prey as well as
predators; our domestication of other animals to fit our cultural needs; how nonhuman animals were used
and sometimes respected in early agrarian empires like those of Rome and the Aztecs; how Native
American, African and Christian religious traditions have wrestled with the concept of the “animal”; the
impact of the Enlightenment and Darwinian thought; and the contemporary mechanization of life and call
for animal rights. Throughout the semester, we will be giving other animals “voice,” even as Aristotle in
The Politics said they possessed the ability to communicate. We will also explore who we are as a unique
species and what we share with other animals.

Grading
 
  

Grading will be based on a take-home exam (25%); your own evidence-based and substantiated definition
of “animal” (10%); a book review (15%) of one of the assigned or optional readings; a critical analysis of
a work of art found online or at the Ball State University Museum of Art (10%); and a final research
paper (7-10 pages) or group project (30%). The final paper or project will also be presented to the entire
class as part of your grade (5%). Attendance and discussion will determine the final portion (5%) of your
grade. The book review and art critique should be in the vicinity of some 750 words.

For the final paper or project, please select something that is both manageable in scope and of interest to
you. If you choose to work as an individual, you might consider focused engagement with one primary
source: e.g., a detailed analysis of the writings of Montaigne on animals; an analysis of
anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in the Florentine Codex; what the RSPCA stands for today through
a reading of their website; the life of Anna Sewell in relation to Black Beauty; an overview of how Peter
Singer, James Serpell and Linda Kalof compare in their approaches to the history of human association
with other animals; or how a modern ethologist (Cynthia Moss or Jane Goodall) describes animal
behavior. Try to build on something that you have read in class or already know a little about from other
classes. If you choose to join a group, you might consider continuing work on an electronic exhibit and
catalogue of Ball State University Museum of Art works that portray nonhuman animals. There are other
potential group projects: e.g., the meaning of humane husbandry in contemporary agriculture or student
pet-keeping explored through interviews. A very useful background overview to any of these topics
regarding human association with other animals is: James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of
Human-Animal Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

If you face any physical challenges that might interfere with your success in this course, please do not
hesitate to tell me. Aside from what I can do to accommodate your needs, assistance often can be
provided by the Office of Disabled Student Development (SC 116/285-5293) and the Learning Center
(NQ 323/285-1006).

books
Required:
Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
David DeGrazia. Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Linda Kalof. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books, 2007.
Bernardino de Sahagún. The Florentine Codex. Vol. 11: Earthly Things. Translated by Charles E. Dibble
and Arthur J. O. Anderson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1963.

Optional (choose one):

Isabel Allende. City of the Beasts. Harper Perennial, 2009.
David Brin. Startide Rising. Spectra, 1984.
Grant Morrison. Animal Man. DC Comics/Vertigo, 1991.
Anna Sewell. Black Beauty. Signet Classics, 2002.
T.H. White. The Book of Merlin. University of Texas Press, 1988.

Useful websites

 
  

Animals and Society Institute:

www.animalsandsociety.org

Animal Studies at Michigan State University:

www.animalstudies.msu.edu/

H-Animal:
www.h-net.org/~animal/

Ball State University Museum of Art:

www.bsu.edu/artmuseum/dido/

Animals in Action: An Exploration of Animals in Art. Created by Jessica Barnes, Teya Green, Alysha
Page, Nick Reddy and Andrew Vandewielle. Currently available at
http://jbarnes2.iweb.bsu.edu/AnimalsArt/index.html.

Syllabus
Week I (January 10): Humans and Other Animals: Competition, Cooperation and Coevolution
Required Reading: None

Recommended:
• Bekoff, Marc and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
• Bulliet, Richard W. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of
Human-Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
• Coppinger, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger. Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of
Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution. New York: Scribner, 2001.
• Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Cooperation among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Dunbar, Robin. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural
Selection. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.
• Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
• Waal, Frans de. Our Inner Ape: a Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We
Are. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
• Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.

Monday, January 17: NO CLASS in honor of Martin Luther King Day.

Week II (January 24): Human Agrarian Empires: the Mediterranean World

Required Reading: Kalof, 1-39; Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. John Bostock, Book
VIII, chapters 1-11 (available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137).

 
  

Recommended:
• Aesop. The Complete Fables. Translated by Olivia and Robert Temple. London: Penguin
Books, 1998.
• Arnhart, Larry. “The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle’s Political Animals,” American
Journal of Political Science 38: 2 (May 1994): 464-485.
• Burkert, Walter. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Clutton-Brock, Juliet. A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals. Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; originally published 1987.
• Hughes, J. Donald. Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and
Romans. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
• Jennison, George. Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1937.
• Scullard, H. H. The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1974.

Week III (January 31): Human Agrarian Empires: the Americas and Africa
Required Reading: The Florentine Codex. Vol. 11: Earthly Things.
DEFINITION OF “ANIMAL” DUE.

Recommended:
• Brotherston, Gordon. “Andean Pastoralism and Inca Ideology.” In The Walking Larder:
Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation. Edited by J. Clutton-Brock.
London: Unwin Hyman, 1989: 240-255.
• Law, Robin. “A West African Cavalry State: the Kingdom of Oyo,” Journal of African
History 16: 1 (1975): 1-15.
• Morales, Edmundo. The Guinea Pig: Healing, Food, and Ritual in the Andes. Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1995.
• Olátéjú, Adésolá. “The Yorùbá Animal Metaphors: Analysis and Interpretation,” Nordic
Journal of African Studies 14: 3 (2005): 368-383.
• Olusola, Ajibade George. “Animals in the Traditional Worldview of the Yorùbá,”
Electronic Journal of Folklore 30 (2005): 155-172; available from
www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol30/olusala.pdf; accessed November 29, 2010.

Week IV (February 7): Nonhuman Animals and the Christian Mosaic

Required Reading: Kalof, 40-96.

Recommended:
• Badke, David, Editor. The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages. Available at
http://bestiary.ca.
• Evans, E. P. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: the Lost
History of Europe’s Animal Trials. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
• Hobgood-Oster, Laura. Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York and
London: Routledge, 1994.
• Schmitt, J.-C. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the 13th
Century. Translated by M. Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Week V (February 14): Montaigne vs. Descartes, a French Duel

 
  

Required Reading: Kalof, 95-99; Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. Charles Cotton (1630-
1687), Book II, chapter 11, “Of Cruelty” (available at www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600~h/3600-
h.htm).

Recommended:
• Boas, George. The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933; reprinted New York: Octagon
Books, 1966.
• Guerrini, Anita. “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century
England,“ Journal of the History of Ideas 50: 3 (July-September 1989): 391-407.
• Harrison, Peter. “Descartes on Animals,” The Philosophical Quarterly 42: 167 (April
1992): 219-27.
• Montaigne. Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated and edited by M. A. Screech.
London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Week VI (February 21): The Spanish Empire

Required Reading: The Animals of Spain handout.
TAKE-HOME EXAM DUE.

Recommended:
• Alves, Abel A. Brutality and Benevolence: Human Ethology, Culture, and the Birth of
Mexico. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
• Asúa, Miguel de and Roger French. A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans
on the Creatures of Iberian America. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2005.
• Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of
1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972,
• Cunninghame Graham, R. B. The Horses of the Conquest. Edited by Robert Moorman
Denhardt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949.
• Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, Oliva. New Philosophy of Human Nature Neither Known to
nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and
Health. Translated and Edited by Mary Ellen Waithe, Maria Colomer Vintró, and C.
Angel Zorita. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
• Varner, John Grier and Jeannette Johnson Varner. Dogs of the Conquest. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

Week VII (February 28): Colonial British America

Required Reading: De John Anderson, Creatures of Empire.

Recommended:
• Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
• Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern
England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.
• Krech III, Shepard. The Ecological Indian. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
• Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

March 6-March 13: SPRING BREAK

Week VIII (March 14): Enlightenment Impact, from La Mettrie to Bentham

 
  

Required Reading: Kalof, 97-136; Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, chapter XVII.6, esp. note 122 (available at www.econlib.org/library/Bentham).
ART ANALYSIS DUE.

Recommended:
• Hastings, Hester. Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Oxford University Press, 1936.
• Morton, Mary, Editor. Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in
Eighteenth-Century Europe. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007.
• Palmeri, Frank. Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture:
Representation, Hybridity, Ethics. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2006.
• Robbins, Louise E. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in
Eighteenth-Century Paris. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002.
• Senior, Matthew, Editor. A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment.
Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Week IX (March 21): The Darwinian and Humane Revolutions

Required Reading: Kalof, 137-164; Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals, chapter 8, “Joy, High Spirits, Love,” pp. 215-221 (available at www.darwin-
online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1142&viewtype=text&pageseq=1); RSPCA, “Our Heritage,”
including “Animals in War,” “Changing the Law,” and Thomas Hardy’s “Compassion” (available at
www.rspca.org.uk/in~action/aboutus/heritage).

Recommended:
• Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1984.
• Darwin, Charles. From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles
Darwin. Edited by Edward O. Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. (Includes: The
Voyage of the Beagle, 1845; The Origin of Species, 1859; The Descent of Man, 1871; The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, 1872)
• Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
• Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian
England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
• Moss, Arthur W. The Valiant Crusade: The History of the RSPCA. London: Cassells,
1961.
• Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Shubert, Adrian. Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight.
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Week X (March 28): Susie the Gorilla: Early 20th-Century Zoos, Gender, Science and Popular Culture
Required Reading: Susie the Gorilla handout
Discussion led by Katherine Craig, M.A. Candidate, Department of History, Ball State University

Recommended:
• Hanson, Elizabeth. Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004.

 
  

• Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Hardouin-Fugier, Elizabeth. Zoo: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West. London:
Reaktion Books, 2004.
• Hoage, R. J. and William A. Deiss, Editors. New Worlds, New Animals: From
Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
• Montgomery, Georgina M. “‘Infinite Loneliness:’ The Life and Times of Miss Congo,”
Endeavour 33: 3 (2009): 101-105.
• Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: the Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008.
• Strum, Shirley C. and Linda Marie Fedigan, Editors. Primate Encounters: Models of
Science, Gender, and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Week XI (April 4): Animal Welfare, Animal Rights and Transhumanism

Required Reading: David DeGrazia, Animal Rights.
BOOK REVIEW DUE.

Recommended:
• Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory.
New York: Continuum, 1990.
• Budiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008.
• Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Scully, Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call
to Mercy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.
• Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Harper Collins Ecco, 2002.

Week XII (April 11): Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism in Fiction

Required Reading: Select a recommended work of fiction.

Recommended:
• Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London: Routledge,
2008.
• Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern
Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
• Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction 1786-1914. Aldershot,
Hants, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.
• Nyman, Jopi. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee. New Delhi: Atlantic
Publishers and Distributors, 2003.

Week XIII (April 18): MOVIE

Robert Kenner, director. Food, Inc. Los Angeles: Magnolia Pictures, 2008.

Recommended:
• Manning, Richard. Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. New
York: North Point Press, 2004.

 
  

• Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York:
Penguin Press, 2006.
• Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Week XIV (April 25): Presentations

Final Exam Period (May 2, 7-9 PM): Presentations

RESEARCH PROJECT DUE.

Kitchen Still Life with a Scene of the Supper at Emmaus Beyond, 1551–1553.
Pieter Aertsen and Studio. Netherlandish.
Courtesy of the Ball State University Museum of Art.