On October 3, the Colgate History Department welcomed special guest Marcy Norton for the annual Douglas K. Reading Lecture.. Persson Auditorium was packed for the occasion. The subject of Norton’s lecture, “Taming the Wild: Animal Familiarization in Greater Amazonia, 1492-1700,” was human-animal relations, colonialism, and science. She will soon publish a book on this topic with Harvard University Press.
Norton began by introducing animal familiarization, or taming. She first came across this topic 10 years ago when she decided to write a book about humans and animals after 1492. She started by reading treatises about hunting in Europe and began to notice a discrepancy between the way animals were objectified through livestock husbandry, and the way they were viewed as fellow subjects in the aristocratic hunt.
Finding this difference intriguing, Norton moved on to studying