Friday, January 4, 2013: 8:50 AM
Gallier Room (Sheraton New Orleans)
In 2003, Edmund Russell argued the need for an “evolutionary” turn in environmental history. “By changing the environments in which organisms live,” he pointed out, “we have changed the selective regimes in which they evolve. In some cases, the resulting evolution has forced humans to interact with versions of those species in very different ways.”[1] This paper is an exploration of Russell’s idea, applied to canine evolution. It argues that dog morphologies and behaviors served as key sites of moral meaning in the British colonies of North America. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dogs that British colonists brought to the New World tended to be big, strong, and thick-muzzled in comparison to their smaller, lupine, long-muzzled American cousins. From an evolutionary standpoint, these variations made perfect sense. Europeans had bred dogs over a longer period, and for a wider range of tasks, than had American Indians. In the process, they had selected for a broader and less wolf-like array of physical traits. Yet from the standpoint of British and Indian observers, the variations made little sense. The most logical explanation, both sides thought, was to see them as reflecting the moral character of their masters. Working from their own system of canine-beliefs, Indians read the bulk, ferocity, and intelligence of British dogs as evidence of colonists’ divine favor and power over nature. Colonists, by contrast, read native dogs as proof that Indians subverted rather than advanced the “improvement” of nature. Colonists developed these views through sermons, travel narratives, images, and other forms of popular print. As this attempt to historicize one species suggests, then, Russell’s evolutionary approach can clarify how biology, culture, and the shape of British-Indian encounter were entwined.
[1] Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,” Environmental History 8, no. 2 (2003): 205.
See more of: Evolutionary History: How Biology Can Help Us Understand History
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See more of: AHA Sessions