Llamas beyond the Andes

More than half a century after the publication of Alfred Crosby's seminal book about the environmental dimension of the Americas’ colonization, the Columbian Exchange and its enduring echoes and ramifications continue to plague the imagination of scholarly and popular audiences. Marcia Stephenson's Llamas beyond the Andes is a much-overdue reconsideration of the centrifugal processes unleashed by the early modern ecological transformation of the world. Centered on llamas and alpacas, the largest domesticated animals of the Americas before colonization, Stephenson's book provides a more-than-human account of capitalism, development, ecological imperialism, and the enduring endeavor of colonial powers to assign value, transform spaces, and reproduce their desires through commodification, sciences, and other forms of interventions on organisms and places. In an age when most scholarship claims global reach, Llamas beyond the Andes exhibits a breadth and depth of archival research that brings the reader through distant and seemingly disconnected places such as Seville, Australia, Dallas, and Puno. Weaving together space and time, Stephenson renders Andean camelids as the narrative thread of locally grounded intended and unintended consequences of colonial and imperial extractions, global exchanges, and transregional circulations.Central to Stephenson's arguments is the idea of the “contact zone” stressed by Mary Louise Pratt. Stephenson builds on and expands this widely acclaimed concept—defined by Pratt as a place and space of collision of asymmetrical powers and originally crafted to frame a conversation about colonial writing and literacy, particularly in the context of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615–16)—to signal how the commodification of llamas and alpacas and the ideas about these animals were a result of a multilateral convergence of “ever-widening circles of protagonists gathering around camelid bodies” (p. 8). These protagonists include early modern Spanish colonial officials, French naturalists, Ecuadorean politicians, British entrepreneurs, Australian zoologists, and US fashion designers. Clashing against while also actively collaborating with these protagonists were colonial Indigenous communities, Andean shepherds, and, of course, llamas and alpacas themselves, whom Stephenson pays attention to as key historical actors of the world that the fascination with and imagination about these animals created. In Stephenson's version of a “camelid contact zone,” conventional chronologies and geopolitics of empire and nation give way to a thicker, multilayered narrative of animal and ecological creations and re-creations.Llamas beyond the Andes is persuasively structured thematically and chronologically, following the journey of Andean camelids from colonial times to the modern era. It begins with the discovery of bezoar stones, a gastrointestinal digestive feature of many mammals, including Andean camelids. These stones were objects of colonial and imperial desires that facilitated a reintroduction and gradual commodification of llamas in early modern Europe. As the desire settled and further research on the medicinal value of bezoars ensued, imperial powers ventured inside the bodies of camelids, dissected them, and paved the way for the rise of “camelid science” and the formation of “knowledge-as-possession” as a distinctive feature of extractive interventions (p. 87). In a classic capitalist tale, the extractive drive of scientific curiosity and knowledge gradually led to further commodification, as eighteenth-century European powers, political and otherwise, attempted to ship camelids to Spain and France as epicenters of late colonial globalization. Once in Europe, amid imperial contractions and geopolitical reconfigurations on both sides of the Atlantic, research on llamas and alpacas stimulated pivotal developments in the nascent science of acclimatization, including the surprising valuation of “Indigenous shepherds [and] their knowledge of the animals” for the future global circulation of Andean camelids (p. 163). Because of the limited success in acclimatizing camelids to European landscapes, nineteenth-century research on llamas and alpacas—now dominated by the British—delved deeper and acquired an ethnographic component, harnessing some success while stimulating new challenges. Aligned with the well-known narratives of modern ecological imperialism, British-sponsored science attempted to reproduce camelid contact zones in Australia, with entangled results. By the twentieth century, once US imperialism displaced the British, camelid extraction focused on the production of imagery and, pivotally, on the extraction of fiber of llamas and alpacas as the new frontier of commodification.At its core, Stephenson's Llamas beyond the Andes is an animal history of capitalism, a compelling account of the transformation of Andean camelids “from exotic creatures into important commodities” (p. 285), and an exemplary revisiting of the Columbian Exchange as both a historical and ecological process and an analytical concept. Scholars of the environment will find much inspiration and substantial interdisciplinary methodological training in every chapter. Students of Latin America and the Andes will appreciate the powerful and readable prose of the book. Llamas beyond the Andes stands as a milestone for many historiographies, a mandatory stop for many classrooms, and a must-read for everyone interested in understanding the llama

Ancient history · Genealogy · Geography · History · Philippine History and Culture