Panel 18: Animals on the Move: Towards a Multispecies Understanding of Mobilities (EN)

Chairs: Nina Vieira, Carla Vieira & Catarina Simões (CHAM-NOVA FCSH)

Part I: 16 April, 9:00 am | Room D106

In the Wake of Ferguson: A Multispecies History (1881-1957)

Kwabena Agyare Yeboah (University of California Santa Barbara)

Inspired by George Ekem Ferguson’s expeditions and map-making (14 July 1864 – 7 April 1897), this talk centers the world of relations within which he worked. This project invites you to explore the entangled human and nonhuman conditions that followed in the wake of Ferguson. Ferguson was a British Gold Coast (Fante) civil servant, surveyor, and cartographer. His first employment with the British Gold Coast colonial government came in 1881 as a clerk. Rising through the ranks of clerkship, he learnt map-making on the job. Between 1889 and 1890, he attended the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London. In this talk, I will introduce animals that were collected from the British Gold Coast (now Ghana). These animals came under the Linnaean classification system and the knowledge of them were circulated globally through 'calculating centres'.

Keywords: cartography; British Gold Coast; West Africa

Animal Mobility, Labour and the Environment in Plantation Zambezia – 1880s-1970s

Bárbara Direito (IHC, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

The Zambeze region has long garnered scholarly attention for the strategic role it played in the development of the plantation system in colonial Mozambique, with many works focusing on the relation between forced labour and cash crop expansion. Conversely, the more-than-human dimensions of this plantation complex have received insufficient attention. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the historiography by examining the historical relations between humans, animals, capitalist expansion and the local environment of the lower Zambeze between the 1880s and the 1970s. Drawing on a variety of sources found in Portuguese and Mozambican archives, the paper will show how eradicating the tsetse fly, the main vector of a deadly animal disease, destroying forests and translocating bovine cattle brought on the hoof from other regions of Mozambique since the late 1920s, helped boost the plantation economy. By replacing African workers, cattle thus occupied a central role in the labour regime of the plantation economy, while also supplying milk to the city of Quelimane. But since maintaining the tsetse at bay was a constant and costly battle, in the 1960s 100 water buffaloes were brought from the region of Naples, in Italy, to replace cattle, adding another dimension to the more-than-human history of the lower Zambeze.

Keywords: more-than-human; Mozambique; plantation system; Zambeze; animal translocations

Rhythms of Land, Sea, and Sky: Seals, Seabirds and Animal Mobility as a Guide to Navigation and Resource Use in Early Modern Southern Africa

Diogo Falcato & André Carvalho (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) & Ana Roque (Centro de História, Faculdade de Letras Universidade de Lisboa)

Seasonal movements of marine and coastal animals shaped both human navigation and resource use in different contexts and cultures. Along the southern African coast, during the early modern period, the Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) followed predictable cycles of reproduction, moulting and haul-out behavior, creating conspicuous aggregations on land that offered reliable markers for orientation as well as opportunities for harvesting. Similarly, the presence and movements of seabirds, shorebirds, and other coastal fauna indicated to European seafarers and local coastal communities the location of rookeries, fishing grounds, and safe landfalls, highlighting areas of concentrated biological activity. These multispecies associations and concentrations linked land, sea, and sky, providing environmental cues that informed how people moved through, interpreted, and extracted from coastal environments. Drawing on archival documents, ship logbooks and navigation diaries, this study situates fur seals within a broader constellation of animal signs, showing how colonial navigation and harvesting practices became synchronized with animal movements, life cycles, embedding natural rhythms into both wayfinding and regimes of resource use.

Keywords: animal stories; multispecies interactions; sealing; environmental navigation; historical information

Orcas, Humans, and Boats: Historicized Encounters mediated by Movement

Cristina Brito (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Species that inhabit or use the ocean, either marine, terrestrial or amphibious in their habits, inevitably, must meet one another. Sometimes they partner with each other, on different occasions they are competitors or even establish a prey-predator relationship. But at all times, a connection, and sometimes a memory or a learning event, is established. Orcas have feeding and mating preferences, particular acoustic communication habits and behaviors. According to their subspecies, clan, or family, and throughout their long lives, they share these preferred ways amongst their kin and future generations while living in integrated ecosystems, or rather in ecocultural systems. There have been, recently, well-documented practices of hitting sailing boats in Portugal and Spain by a small family group of orcas (the so-called ‘Gladis’). This particular group moves along the Iberian shores and shows this learned behavior, which is transmitted across generations and is a deterrent for other species and their ways of living – in this case, humans and their boats. In historical times, we can identify several interactions between orcas and humans - dynamics of exchange mediated by movement – that were either mutually beneficial or partial to one side while harming the other. In any case, it impacts and reminisces on those who cross paths with them. Orcas have prey, enemies and partners with whom they meet and interact in the multidimensional and multisensorial world they live in – the oceans. A world also occupied by humans and invaded by anthropogenic practices and activities not easily compatible with the moving lives of these (and other) large pelagic predators. The goal of this paper is to address past and current orca-human interactions, allowing scholars to understand environmental challenges and provoking societies to consider alternative ways of creating common futures.

Keywords: animal studies; ocean studies; environmental history; ecocultural systems; multispecies interactions; marine conservation

Part II: 16 April, 11:00 am | Room D106

Travelling Stories: Animal and Narrative Migrations in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Beth Chapman (University of California Los Angeles)

In Extinction Studies (2017), the editors insist on telling stories about species loss that attend to “the simultaneously biological and cultural complexity of our world,” as “extinction is an inherently and inextricably biocultural phenomenon” (5). Animal migrations, too, are biocultural. I propose reading The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi author Alexis Wright as a work that foregrounds this entanglement of narratives and bodies in migration. The Swan Book is set in northern Australia one hundred years into a dystopian future. Displaced by climate change, black swans arrive in their thousands at the swamp, a detention center for dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and climate refugees. Working through the “all times” of an Indigenous temporality, Wright offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the swans, including multiple interpretations from local people, global swan myths and folklore, colonial histories, and the very real avian arrivants who have travelled far from the songlines and stories of their Country. Through this admixture, Wright points to ongoing “storytelling wars” and the contagious, migratory nature of narratives in a community under colonization. Wright’s novel provokes critical questions for our age of migration marked by exclusionary (bio)security discourses and climate change: How should a community respond to new arrivals who have no story there? How can new stories be told in an ongoing crisis? How does looking beyond the human reveal how the stories of capitalism and colonialism disrupt intergenerational cultures–e.g., the transmission of birds’ migratory routes–to impinge on the autonomy of other lifeways and species? How can we historicize migration to understand the causes of past migrations and their effects on the present, including further displacement? How does attending to mythologies of migration elucidate who has the freedom to move and who is detained? And, finally, how can animal migrations help us to rethink boundaries within and between nations?

Keywords: migration; animals; Indigenous; naturecultures; narrative

A Modern Way to Move Bovines: Portugal in the Development of the Global Livestock Market in the 19th Century

Leonardo Aboim Pires, Bárbara Direito & Inês Gomes (IHC, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

As beef and milk became increasingly important in European diets during the nineteenth century, especially in and around cities, the demand for bovine cattle witnessed a sharp rise. The historiography has highlighted the central role Britain played in the internationalization of the beef and meat trade (Perren 2006), facilitated by the steamship and refrigeration, and in the development of the “first food regime” by importing livestock and livestock by-products from “settler states” in South America and Australia (McMichael 2009), but also Spain, especially Galicia (Carmona 1982). In the case of Portugal, Pereira’s work on the 19th century peripherally discussed the cattle trade with Britain and Spain (1983). In a recent agrarian history of Portugal, however, cattle and livestock more broadly were only briefly mentioned, leaving many questions unanswered (Freire and Lains 2016). This paper brings together data gathered in different local and central Portuguese archives to examine the role of Portugal in the global circulation of cattle in the nineteenth century, looking specifically at relations between Portugal and Spain, Britain, and other European countries. It will discuss the different agents involved in these exchanges – namely, gentleman farmers, agricultural societies and governments –, the reasons that motivated these instances of animal mobility, but also their economic and environmental impacts. The presenters are members of the FCT-funded project titled “Cattle in motion: Knowledge, circulation and environments in the history of cattle in Portugal, 1750-1960” (2023.12421.PEX).

Keywords: global cattle and beef trade; Portugal; animal mobility; Europe; nineteenth century

All Roads Lead to Lisbon: Animal Displacement in the 15th to 17th Centuries

Joana Lages Gonçalves & Daniela Teixeira Gomes (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

This communication aims to understand the movements of land animals, whether natural or forced, to the city of Lisbon in the 15th to 17th centuries. In this sense, these movements will be sought at the local, regional and transoceanic levels, since the chronology under study allows us to analyse the impact of Portuguese expansion on the mobility of these historical subjects. The methodology will combine historical research, using administrative sources, with a special focus on customs, combined with Digital Humanities, in order to understand the routes that animals took to reach the city, as well as the paths they took within the city. The difficulties and solutions regarding the mapping of animal movement will be addressed. On the one hand, there are the difficulties imposed by the sources, which present a scarcity of information on geographical references, as well as the loss and transformation of places and toponymy. On the other hand, the resources are used to mitigate these difficulties. Furthermore, the specific methodology for constructing animal routes included digital strategies, namely Geographic Information Systems (GIS), whose limits and possibilities are open to debate, thereby outlining new strategies and perspectives in animal historiography. The results of this study will be presented using an interactive digital map identifying the routes taken and the animals that travelled them, as well as the reasons behind their movement. This will enable us to identify their place of origin, possible routes, the places where they were received and the buildings where they were subsequently housed in Lisbon. As a result, it is imperative to understand animal dynamics in the history of Lisbon in order to establish the city's relationship with other regions, as well as to understand the focus on land animals in supplying the city. Understanding these movements is crucial to recognising animals not only as resources, but also as historical agents that contributed to the formation of Lisbon.

Keywords: Animal History; Environmental History; Spatial Humanities; migration; diaspora