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Accepted Paper:
Creatures of fashion: animals, global markets, and the transformation of Patagonia
John Soluri Soluri
(Carnegie Mellon University)
This paper centers on relationships of people and animals to show the entanglement of capitalist exploitation and settler colonialism in transforming Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation, based on a forthcoming book, will offer a synthesis of how the exploitation of animals —terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead— transformed Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego from Indigenous-controlled places into national territories of Argentina and Chile that were economically integrated into global markets. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, this presentation tracks the circulation of furs and fibers revealing how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture and drove social and environmental changes in a part of the world often perceived to be an isolated, “frontier.” By exposing seams in national territories and capitalist regimes knit together by force, the intent is to offer perspectives and analysis vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.