Article ID: CBB052240652

Reflection: Conviviality and Companionship: Parrots and People in the African Forests (October 2021)

unapi

This article provides an account of how humans and parrots interacted in African tropical forests during the Holocene. Underscoring the growing intersections of environmental history with affiliate fields, it employs the insights of animal studies and the environmental humanities to suggest the term “conviviality” as a way of characterizing the heterogeneous assemblages that structured parrot-human politics. In doing so, it draws on ecological, ethnographic, historical, and ethological evidence to construct a more-than-human narrative of the past. Hampered by trypanosomiasis and tsetse flies from keeping livestock, people probably tended parrots as they did guinea fowl and chickens. However, human relationships with parrots were more affective than with poultry because of the parrots’ sociability and vocal abilities. Because people did not domesticate or frequently tame parrots, neither the term “companion species” nor Marcy Norton’s concept of “iegue” adequately describe the relationship between parrots and humans in African forest villages. The better description may be “proximate conviviality.”

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Authors & Contributors
Marguerite S. Shaffer
Aleksandra Gori͡ashko
Long, Max
Jan E. Dizard
Phoebe S. K. Young
Waiser, Bill
Concepts
Human-animal relationships
Environmental history
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Animals
Natural history
Landscape; landscapes
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
Medieval
Ancient
21st century
Places
Africa
Singapore
United States
Japan
Europe
Democratic Republic of the Congo
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