The Ethics of Macaw Keeping in the Prehistoric Southwest and Northwest Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper considers the ethical components of prehistoric macaw husbandry practices in the cultural areas of the US Southwest and Northern Mexico. Within many traditional Native American cosmological schemes, humans and animals occupy a shared social world with reciprocal responsibilities toward one another articulated through oral traditions, and responsibilities of care are organized along these connections. Macaws are presented as human affines, key figures alongside humans in the organization of cosmology. This ethical context is the larger framework within which I interpret the instrumental techniques of how they were kept. I provide archaeological, ethnographic, and ethological evidence for the intersubjective social relationship between captive macaws and the specific humans charged with their care, presenting how the modification of macaws created ritual platforms for exchanging physical and metaphysical properties, while new human subjectivities also emerged from their informed and skilled interactions with macaws.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36921.0