Vicuña, Silk of the Andes Domestication, Acclimatisation and Conservation

Helen Cowie (University of York)
28 January 2022, 12 h (CET)

Formato híbrido
a) Virtual: https://conectaha.csic.es/b/oli-53t-5ol-1kr
b) Presencial: Aula de seminarios (1er piso) IMF-CSIC, c/ Egipcíaques, 15, 08001 Barcelona

Aforo limitado: preinscripción obligatoria, escribir a oliver.hochadel@csic.es antes del 27 de enero.

Uso de mascarilla obligatorio, mantener distancia social.

Coordina Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC)
Actividad organizada por el Grupo de Historia de la Ciencia,
Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC, Barcelona)

Abstract: This paper focuses on shifting human relationships with the vicuña, a wild relation of the llama and alpaca prized highly for its silky fleece. Carefully managed by the Incas, who hunted the animals every four years in sustainably-managed round-ups, or chakkus, vicuñas were slaughtered indiscriminately by the Spanish conquistadors and their descendants and were subject to some of the earliest colonial conservation legislation. They subsequently became targets to domestication and acclimatisation in the eighteenth century – both in the Americas and in Europe; the New Granadan botanist, Francisco José de Caldas, outlined a scheme to transfer vicuñas from Peru to Bogotá, while the Peruvian priest, Juan Pablo Cabrera, succeeded in the 1840s in interbreeding vicuñas and alpacas at his estate in Macusani. Exploring the vicuña’s important role in indigenous and European commerce, the paper examines the various strategies devised to exploit and protect the animal and assesses their wider significance. I focus in particular on the important role of indigenous American practices and knowledge in shaping European uses of the vicuña and the camelid’s importance in past and present debates about wildlife conservation. 

CV: Helen Cowie is Professor of History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the history of animals and the history of natural history. She is author or Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750-1850 (2011), Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (2014) and Llama (2017). Her most recent project, ‘Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain’, was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.