Short Abstract

Amazonian pets are wild animals captured, tamed, nurtured and made into kin. We address the effects of pet keeping on kinship, shamanism, warfare and ritual, asking how interspecific kinship articulates with intraspecific kinship, and how relations of ownership affect the familiarization of animals.

Long Abstract

Although it is highly probable that no animal species has ever been domesticated in Amazonia, throughout the region Amerindians cohabit with a wide array of pets, individuals of wild species that have been captured, tamed and nurtured. Despite a number of regional differences, including preferences and prohibitions on species that can be tamed, certain aspects of Amazonian pet keeping seem to be widespread, if not universal in the region: pets are typically associated with a specific owner, woman or child, who feeds and cares for them. The owner-caretaker of the pet establishes with it a relation of interspecific filiation, such as a mother-child bond. Their movement is often restricted, they do not reproduce in captivity, and are almost never eaten.

Pet keeping has occupied an anomalous position in theories of Amazonian social life: while it has been amply recognized that the associated practices form part of a native schema underscoring shamanism, ritual, and warfare (in which trophies and captives play an important part), pets have remained silent elements within this schema that draws from the language of hunting and familiarization, but veers towards less "prosaic" relations seen to accrue capacities for those who display mastery over others. Our aim is to rectify this omission, asking, for example: what does interspecific kinship with pets do to Amazonian theories of kinship and relationality? How does ownership of pets relate to the ownership of people, spirits or ritual knowledge? How do pets relate to domestic animals introduced by non-Indigenous foreigners?