This is the ninth post in the NiCHE series Animal Encounters, edited by Heather Green and Caroline Abbott. You can read all posts in this series here.
At sunrise and sunset, Guariba monkeys come together to explore the Amazonian forests and riverbanks. Described by eighteenth century Portuguese colonial scientist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira in the Philosophical Voyage to the Captaincies of Grão-Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso and Cuiabá (1783-1792) as “fierce and indomitable,”1 these monkeys have a strong sense of community, often caring for each other to the point of death.2 If one of them is injured, the others surround him and try to stop the bleeding or administer treatment with their fingers and lips, not unlike other primates who have been observed trying to block wounds with chewed leaves.3 However, when approached by the colonial scientist’s crew, the Guariba exhibited “a multitude of extravagant postures,” such as grinding their teeth and breaking tree branches to throw at the humans, along with their urine and excrement.4 Ferreira recommended against their domestication because of their “reckless air” and the “lugubrious and terrible voice” he observed as the primates many refer to as “Howler” monkeys vocalised in groups at the top of the trees with their telltale screeching sounds.5
Conversely, Ferreira describes the Prego monkeys (also called Capuchin, of the subfamily Cebinae), another Amazonian primate species differently. Unlike the Guariba, he does not contraindicate their domestication, affirming instead that these monkeys are “gentle and docile” towards humans, but warning about the “extravagance in their affection.”6 Ferreira further explains their characteristics, elaborating: “to some people, for no real and manifest reason, they show an extreme inclination, and to others, an implacable rancour.”7 By observing the Guariba and Prego monkeys, we can see that their historical encounters with settlers have taken different forms, shaped by the characteristics of each species. The interactions range from expressions of curiosity and affection to repulsion or violence, exhibiting a range of active responses to the settlers’ attempts to tame them.
Fig. 1, left and Fig. 2, right: Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s Viagem filosófica pelas Capitainias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá is prolifically illustrated with plates which accompany and describe the colonial scientist’s observations on plants, animals, insects, fish, and Indigenous People. Illustrations of primates, like these, are particularly descriptive of these animals’ habits and natural movements, suggesting proximity elsewhere reflected in expedition records. Wikicommons: Public Domain.
Ferreira registered the singularities of these monkeys’ character during the eighteenth century scientific expedition to the Amazon Rainforest which he led in service to the Portuguese Crown between 1783 and 1792. As the historians Wakild and K. Berry asserted, “science provides one lens through which to consider attempts by various human societies to construct some species as valuable and others as disposable,” and this is particularly evident in the Portuguese colonial society.8 In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese Crown adopted a utilitarian approach to Illuminism, organising such “Philosophical Voyages” to deepen understanding about the nature of their territorial possessions as a means to intensify colonial control over them. Scientists were expected to produce knowledge on the natural history, taxonomy, physical and personality traits of the colonies’ animals, as well as to produce suggestions of their potential dietary, medicinal and economic uses. For example, Ferreira also wrote that the Guariba monkey is “very beautiful for their colour and abundance of hair, very soft,”9 suggesting it could be used for “holsters, chairels, chapels for weapon covers and patrons to hunt.”10 Colonial science was a tool for the Portuguese Empire to improve the exploitation of animals and determine the most profitable species through a detailed study of their singular characteristics.
Even with the emergence of recent works with an environmental approach to the colonial history of Brazil11, scholarship surrounding nonhumans based on the archival record historically favoured portrayals of animals as passive beings, as if they were totally subject to the settlers’ demands and desires without any reaction. In general, animals have been historically discussed as objects of scientific study,12 as tools to understand the colonial scientists’ expertise,13 or as “natural resources” for their use as food, ingredients for medicines, or even everyday artifacts.14 In the latter case, there is a tendency to privilege animals that were transformed into products which were massively consumed by colonial society.15 Analysis of the effects of colonialism on species that were not economically central to the regime is important: this is the case for monkeys.
Fig. 3, left: “Alouatta skull front view. Skull of Alouatta guariba clamitans male from Anhembi, São Paulo, Brazil. Zoology Museum of University of São Paulo (Museu de Zoologia da USP).” 11 June 2013. Miguelrangeljr via Wikicommons. CC BY-SA 3.0. Disclosure of changes: image has been slightly cropped at edges to center skull (subject of photograph). Excluded pixels contained no identifiable subject matter. No other changes made. Fig.4, right: Front matter of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s “Viagem filosófica pelas Capitainias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá.” Wikicommons: Public Domain.
Given these circumstances, how can we write about these Amazonian monkeys (and other animals) as historical actors within the context of exploitative colonial science? When examining the archival record of the Philosophical Voyage with attention to the Guariba and the Prego monkeys, I sought to move beyond historically-utilitarian perspectives on animal history by considering the entirety of the information provided by the document regarding their existence during that historical period, rather than selectively focusing on the aspects that indicate their utility to the settlers. By following the reflections of philosopher Vinciane Despret, who asserts in texts like What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) that in order to write the history of animals, historians must ask themselves how animals understand and experience what humans offered or imposed upon them, I focused on understanding each monkey species’ ways of living, and how they acted upon the colonial agents’ attempts to modify them.16
Ferreira’s examples of the Guariba and the Prego monkeys in the beginning of this post defy the idea of the passivity of animals in the face of the exploitation of nature promoted by the settlers, but they were not the only primates he considered. When the Marica-açu, or “Pot-Bellied” monkey was seen by Alexandre, he wrote that “all of them are poltroons,”17 because this monkey species preferred to avoid contact with the settlers in the face of the attempts to tame them. Conversely, when Alexandre approached the Coatá monkeys, he noticed that they “have strong teeth,” and “[attack] the dogs and other animals that chase them.”18 Recognising the highly varied personalities of monkeys facing colonisation can contribute to approaching historical non-humans as more than secondary characters in human history.
Fig. 4, left: “Família Guariba,” 4 January 2020. Andrea del Rocío Bárcenas García via Wikicommons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Fig. 5, right: “Brown Howler Monkey female and infant,” 25 August 2008. Kenny Ross via Wikicommons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
However, in light of the fact that our sole source of information regarding the existence of specific animals in the archival record is often from the settler’s perspective, it is important to engage in a critical reading of the documents: by contrasting these with other sources, historians can avoid putting these monkeys into generalised categories of behaviour. An interdisciplinary approach to zoology can be interesting to help us formulate hypotheses on why some species may have acted in a certain way, especially if they are portrayed in a negative light by the settlers.19 For example, recent studies in the field confirm that animals personality traits can indeed be shaped by the ecological pressures to which they are exposed.20 If the animal’s habitat undergoes a transformation — such as an increase in predator activity, or a reduction in food availability, among other factors — a previously non-aggressive species or community can become hostile towards humans and other animals.
Adopting this approach to the reading of the Philosophical Voyage and its accompanying, archival record led to the realisation that the Guariba and some of the Prego monkeys could have several reasons for their so-called “extravagant” attitudes towards humans by Alexandre Ferreira. Portuguese colonisation caused profound injury to the Amazon forest: the massive deforestation for the construction of colonial villages, disruption of Indigenous communities, and the opening of agricultural and livestock fields all impacted the Guariba monkeys, who need extensive forest areas with large and robust trees in order to avoid conflicts within different groups of primates.21 The trees are essential to their long resting habits and folivolo-frugivorous diet.22
In moving the monkeys from the margins to the centre of the documental analysis, I aspired to reflect on how historians can write about non-human animals as active historical actors without overlooking the imbalance of power to which they were subjected by colonialism. By considering animal individual personalities when interpreting natural history documents, we can perceive that they had complex modes of existence entangled with more-than-human actors (trees and insects, among others) that were in tension with colonial endeavours to objectify them. Furthermore, this approach can facilitate more effective investigation into the impact of the colonial regime on each species. In this sense, I hope that recognizing the extent to which the individual personalities of monkeys in natural history texts and documents from the eighteenth century can be an example for historians to think about new approaches to encounters with non-humans and their communities in this type of document.
Notes
[1] Original title in portuguese: Viagem Filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grão-Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá.
[2] Ferreira, A. R. Viagem filosófica pelas capitanias do Grão-Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá. Memórias Zoologia e Botânica. (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1972), 139.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 144.
[7] Ibid.
[8] E. Wakild and M.K.A. Berry, A primer for teaching environmental history: Ten design principles (Duke University Press, 2018), 56.
[9] Ferreira, 50.
[10] Ibid., 141.
[11] Notable works that focus on non-human animals of colonial Brazil are: Duarte, R. H. (2019). História dos animais no Brasil: tradições culturais, historiografia e transformação. Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) revista de la Solcha, 9(2), 16-44; and Brito, C. (2019). Pessoas, manatins e o ambiente aquático na América moderna: confluência e divergência nas interações históricas entre humanos e animais. Revista Brasileira de História, 39, 162-184. (2019)
[12] B.L. Ferreira, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: as estratégias narrativas das “Observações gerais e particulares sobre a classe dos mamais”(1790), História 42 (2023), e2023001.
[13] For example, some monkeys’ engravings appear on analysis about the techniques of the drawers, and the taxonomic categories attributed to the monkeys by Alexandre are mentioned to investigate his scientific accuracy and references.
[14] L.V. da Silva Campos Filho, “Os recursos naturais e seus usos: o Brasil setentrional de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira”, ACENO-Revista de Antropologia do Centro-Oeste 9,20 (2022), 131-164.
[15] Fiori, M. M., & SANTOS, C. F. M. D., A carne, a gordura e os ovos (Porto Alegre: Edipucrs, 2015).
[16] Despret, Vinciane. “From Secret Agents to Interagency.” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 29–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542957.
[17] Ferreira, A.R., 142.
[18] Ibid., 143.
[19] The objective of this approach is not to attribute the content from the zoology studies from later historical periods to the authorship of colonial scientists. Instead, it employs such studies as analytical instruments to gain a deeper understanding of the animal’s characteristics that were either not discernible at that time or which the colonial scientist chose not to register.
[20] W.O. Costa, Comportamento social e personalidade em macacos- prego (Sapajus libidinosus) residentes em área de manguezal no estado do Maranhão, Brasil (2021), 10.
[21] On the massive deforestation that occurred in colonial Brazil, including the Amazon region, Miller (2000) argues that the Portuguese monopoly over the colonies’ hardwoods influenced many settlers to burn and tear down all the trees from the forest inside their lands in order to prevent the identification of hardwoods by the Crown, since they were prohibited to commercially exploit them. See in: S.W. Miller, Fruitless Trees – Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[22] A. M. S. Gomez, Ecologia e comportamento de Alouatta seniculus em uma mata de terra firme na Amazônia Central (1999), 17.
Feature image: “Brown Howler Monkey female and infant,” 25 August 2008. Kenny Ross via Wikicommons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Maria Eduarda Góes B. da Silva