Fashion victims

Regions such as Patagonia have been transformed by the commodification of animals. Review: Creatures of Fashion, John Soluri, by Gavin O'Toole

Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia, John Soluri, 2024, University of North Carolina Press

Animals do not respect national borders, which makes them mutely appropriate objects of study in regional history, but also when it comes to processes such as capitalist globalisation.

Yet animals have occupied only a lowly position in the history of international trade, often secondary to those of exchangeable commodities such as gold, silver, coal, wood, sugar and rubber over which imperialist powers have competed more openly.

Nonetheless, as other recent studies suggest, some of the earliest and most important commodities in Latin America have been animals and products derived from them such as furs and fibres.

And this has meant, as John Soluri observes, the commodification of animals and their conservation are two sides of the same coin. In Patagonia, for example, the exhaustive commodification of animal furs and fibres eventually heightened concerns for protecting both fur-bearing native animals as well as exotic livestock.

This paradox is among themes explored by Creatures of Fashion, which traces a century of commercial exploitation alongside attempts to regulate hunting or create habitats for native fauna on local, national, and intercontinental scales—a reflection of both the migratory behaviours of the animals themselves and the nature of the markets exploiting them.

As the author writes: “Both the commodification and conservation of animals in southern Patagonia were transboundary affairs.”

Soluri’s unusual and interesting history of the region examines how the transformation of animals into fashionable goods was the most consequential outcome of the relationship between humans and animals over the past 150 years.

Caught in the midst of this turbulent encounter were the indigenous people—the Aonikenk (Santa Cruz and Magallanes), Selk’nam (grasslands of Tierra del Fuego), Yamana (coastal zones of Tierra del Fuego), and Kawéskar (littorals of the Straits of Magellan).

It is no coincidence that the decimation of these populations and the conversion of the lands and waters they occupied into “national” Chilean and Argentine territories went hand-in-hand with the rising commodification of animals. In effect, commercial hunting gave rise to a capitalist economy in the region, to which its indigenous people fell victim.

Terrestrial animals in this part of the world include ñandús (ostrich-like birds), huemuls (deer), and tuco-tucos (rodents) and guanacos (camelids), and littoral zones are rich in marine life that sustain large populations of fur seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals as well as many birds, including several kinds of penguin.

While these creatures inevitably shaped the cultures of the indigenous communities, everything began to change from the late eighteenth onwards when North Atlantic fur seal hunters began visiting southern Patagonia.

Sealers focused on short-term profits and paid little heed to nurturing future populations, with commercial hunters ravaging South American fur seal populations. A terrestrial fur, feather and wool trade transformed backwaters such as Punta Arenas into commercial ports, and the grasslands of Tierra del Fuego witnessed the emergence of one of the largest ranching operations in the world.

These factors forged new, exploitative relationships between humans and animals, as markets responded to trends of fashion in the Latin American continent, North America and Europe—hence the globalisation of Patagonia’s animals and animal products continued apace.

Notwithstanding a century of extraction, by the late nineteenth century governments were beginning to pay attention to the high cost of such activities, and official initiatives to conserve animals in Patagonia were precursors to the eventual creation of national parks.

Initial efforts to restrict hunting took place amid rising concerns about biological extinctions in many parts of the world—but were often far too late. Fur seal hunting persisted well into the twentieth century and by the time Argentina and Chile placed bans on hunting, fur seal populations were severely depleted.

Creatures of Fashion is a lively and well informed contribution to a category of scholarship broadly referred to as Animal Studies, which positions these subjects in academic disciplines that extend well beyond departments of zoology—from environmental history to anthropology and geography—and in which Latin America is rapidly gaining prominence.

It is not an incidental development, and related to rising levels of biodiversity loss and growing environmental sensibility that have begun to outgrow straightforward materialist questions about the consequences of our development by raising more profound epistemological questions about the dependent categories of “animals” and “humans” themselves, not least in the context of how imperialism has treated indigenous people.

As the author writes: “Seemingly neutral terms like human, species, or Anthropocene, have fraught meanings in a world where all people might be conceptualized as human, but, historically speaking, not all humankind have been recognised as rights-bearing persons or sovereign societies.

“Indeed, historians have documented instances where certain kinds of animals received legal protection (not rights) before certain categories of people, including women and children.”