Chained: Civet Cats and Slavery
Stubbornly, a civet cat hooks itself to the ground with its claws. The animal tries hard to keep its head down, pulling energetically at a leash held firmly by a woman’s two hands. Even in struggle, human and animal are chained, gazing at each other, their bodies aligned in posture and movement. The woman’s pigtail and clothes find their continuation in the civet’s fur and tail. Together, both form a unit situated in front of a background landscape composed of natural and cultural fragments: a few plants, buildings, a couple of unrecognizable people, some birds, and gunstocks protruding from a turret.
Civet Cat and Woman, illustration from: Aegidius Sadeler, Theatrum Morum, Prag 1608, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-5217, Public Domain.
This blog post focuses on the leash that chains civet cats and humans together. Civets – viverrids native to large parts of Africa and Asia – were extensively exploited in early modern Europe for the strong-smelling matter they produce in their perineal glands, used in medicine and perfumery: civet.[1] But the story of the civet-human-chains goes beyond the often-told tale of humans capturing, using, extracting and killing animals for the resources they provide.
The engraving is from the 1608 Theatrum Morum, written and illustrated by the court painter of Rudolf II., Aegidius Sadeler.[2] The volume assembles 139 pictures, mainly of animals and humans, representing often well-known fables and their respective morals. As with the other examples, the image of the civet cat is accompanied by two short texts: the fable itself, in the form of a short poem, and a story from antiquity. Both make it clear that the depiction is an emblem of power and domination.
The poem tells the story of the civet cat and the woman who had asked the animal to give her its civet as medicine for her womb. When the civet cat refuses, the woman captures the animal depriving it of its “free life”. The second text continues the message by telling the story of the enslaved ancient physician Democedes, who, according to the text, only offered his medical services to his new master after the latter had resorted to violence. The main message of the ancient original, namely that the art of medicine eventually gave Democedes back his freedom, is omitted.[3] Instead, both stories, the civet cat’s and the one of Democedes, the physician, emphasise the being who had better not thwarted his own enslavement: “If I had given it [civet or another medical service] willingly, I would have kept my free life” or, transferred to the storyline of Democedes, “I would not have been beaten”.[4] The text turns the production of civet into a morale of service and duty – “freely” given under the threat of imminent violence.
The message, strange enough from a 21st century perspective, gets even more disturbing when we consider that the civet trade was deeply intertwined with the enslavement of African people. Since the 15th century, civet cats had been extracted by Europeans from the West African coastal regions, mainly the Gulf of Guinea, a hotspot of European imperial and commercial interests for gold, ivory and slaves. With the expansion of the slave trade and the institutional strengthening of deportation to the Americas, the Dutch civet production in the late 17th century would eventually even spread to Curaçao, the hub of the Caribbean slave trade, where civet cats were transferred to from Africa.[5]
Humans and civet cats thus share a history of exploitation and deportation. Both were literally put in chains and cages, deprived of control over their own bodies, reduced to their market value for the production of coveted commodities. While this is true for many animal histories, civet cats were actually captured and transported alongside enslaved people. The surviving sources of the shared aspects of the story are few and unremarkable. It was simply the joint presence of civet cats and enslaved humans, mentioned together, mostly unrelated, on the same pages of the Dutch West Indian Company archives, that initially caught my eye, made me shiver and left me pretty clueless about what to make of it.[6]
In her introduction to the blog, Hannah Murphy discusses the concept of indirectness and its potential to document and perhaps in time unravel the links between early modern medicine, race, and slavery. Although the chains connecting the civet cat as a medical actor with the latter histories of race and slavery are very present in the simple fact of a shared fate, they are also indirect, not least because of the invisibilization these ties experienced, which left them so devoid of intelligibility. Indirect stories are often parallel stories in which the actual connections beyond co-presence are hard to grasp: Physicians simply being at the places of enslavement, civet cats captured and trafficked alongside humans, shared logistics of routes taken, or infrastructure like the African forts conquered or built for the necessities of the deportation of both humans and animals.
Historians intuitively shy away from telling the stories of enslaved humans and animals together for fear of reproducing the dehumanisation embedded in slavery and racism by linking them (yet again) to animal histories, despite important, early and powerful voices advocating the opposite.[7] Parts of history, slavery and the holocaust in particular, are so unique in their cruelty, extent and horrors that they seemingly need to be told in isolation.[8] In the context of animal history, it is important to recall Jonathan Saha’s warning, who does indeed tell parallel stories of the colonialisation of humans and animals, but makes it very clear that “keeping both animals and colonized humans in the same analytical lens [must also mean] still attending to their particular experiences of domination” and not let one of them obscure the other.[9]
The fears and warnings are justified – comparing cruelty risks exploitation and a loss of relevance, even if we are careful not to speak of “identities” but of “commonalities” and the subjugation of different beings under the same framework of oppression.[10] The nonchalance with which writers of colonial times used the same phrases to talk about the use of enslaved humans and animals does not diminish the difficulties involved.[11] But the chains that bind the stories of humans and animals together cannot simply be detached or ignored. If we don’t reflect and talk about them, we miss out on indirect connections and shared as well as mutually enabling stories of suffering, different but same in their contexts and forms.
When I first came across Sadeler’s representation of the civet cat on the woman’s leash, I read it from a present-day perspective. I was utterly appalled by the ease with which the source seemed not only to justify slavery, but to promote it. It even asked humans and animals to willingly submit to the forced service of others? Seriously? But the source has to be put into context. Written in 1608, it actually predates the heydays not only of the large-scaled civet production in the 17th century Netherlands but also of the Atlantic slave trade. Its references to enslavement address much “closer” stories and experiences of human capture, especially in the Mediterranean. What’s more, it does not see the animal and the human as separate, as we do when we read the story. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, a view prevailed that understood humans much more as part of nature, and at least in part constituted of animal components, rather than as distanced from the animal world.[12] The human animal – so Sadeler in the introduction of his book – had to be taught morally but also practically by the other animals.[13]
The civet cat on the leash really is Democedes, a man captured by his enemies, who through cunning instead of defiance, manages to improve his situation and eventually regains his freedom. It is also potentially the reader of the book, just in case he or she finds themselves in a similar situation. The chain between civet animal and human animal expresses closeness, not distance.[14] But still, the subjugation of animals and some humans was justified here in line with a long tradition of argumentation going back to Aristotle.[15]
After my first reading of Sadeler, I tried to find more references that linked the civet trade and human enslavement. I felt relieved when I came across a text that seemed to set things right. Much easier to grasp from a 21st century perspective, Jean Charles François de Ladoucette used the civet cat in his fables, published more than 200 years after Sadeler, to describe West Africa as “la terre où frémit l'esclavage” – where slavery simultaneously thrives and trembles. Focusing on the civet trade, with slavery only in the background, Ladoucette described and criticised the Dutch as profiteers not caring for the animal in their possession and keeping it only out of “vile interest”.[16]
However, my new perspective on Sadeler as based on a closeness of human animals and animals, also changed my understanding of Ladoucette. In his superficially critical account, there is no room at all for animal agency; instead of clawing at the ground, Ladoucette’s civet cat is described as naively cooperative. The Dutch merchants and the civet cats are set completely apart from each other. The chain has transformed from a connection to a mere instrument of objectification, dominance and hierarchy – only slightly concealed by the French author’s compassion.
Carol Adams, writing about the connections between feminism and vegetarianism, famously has unravelled the importance of the “absent referents” – in her case the female inside the consumed animal meat – that make domination narratives so powerful, precisely because their obvious links are erased.[17] Even when we are uncertain about what they really mean, it is important to consider the absent and sometime surprisingly present referents of human–human as well as human–animal relations and to read them not as metaphors but as shared stories of suffering and distancing.
Sarah-Maria Schober is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer of early modern history at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her book on early modern urban societies, physicians and the social value of excess has been published in 2019 (Gesellschaft im Exzess. Mediziner in Basel um 1600, Campus, 2019). In her current book project “The Civet Cat. Producing Exotica in Early Modern Europe”, she is researching the history of the scent civet and its producer, the civet cat. In addition, she works on human remains, especially hair, and writes on topics such as disgust, commodity knowledge, gender and material culture or the sexing of animals.
sarah.schober@uzh.ch
[1] For more information and references on civet cats see Sarah-Maria Schober, Zibet und Zeit: Timescapes eines frühneuzeitlichen Geruchs, in: Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 47:1 (2020), 41–78; Sarah-Maria Schober, Taming the Untamable: Early Modern Civet Cats and the Nature-Culture Dichotomy, in: Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 71 (2021), 32–57.
[2] Aegidius Sadeler, Theatrum Morum: Artliche gesprach der thier mit wahren historien den menschen zur lehr, Prag 1608, 35–36.
[3] Herodotus 3, 129–137.
[4] “het ichs willig gebn, So bhielte ich mein freyes Leben” or even “so wehre ich vngeprigelt blieben”, Sadeler, Theatrum, 35–36.
[5] Johannes Hartog, Curaçao: From Colonial Dependence to Autonomy, Aruba 1968, 144; A. M. Husson, De Zoogdieren van de Nederlandse Antillen, Curaçao 1960, 40–41. In the end, because of several reasons the Caribbean production was not successful and could not stop production in the Netherlands.
[6] Several examples can be found in the archives of the West India Company, kept at the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag and in part accessible with the search engine developed by Gerhard de Kok, https://dekok.xyz/htrsearch/ [26.7.2023].
[7] Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, New York 1996. It certainly is no coincidence that Alice Walker has put the civet cat centre stage in her foreword to Spiegel’s book, ibid., 13.
[8] With regard to the holocaust’s uniquity and its relation to colonialism, the debate has recently spiked in the German feuilleton, see A. Dirk Moses, The German Catechism, in: Geschichte der Gegenwart, https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism. An overview on the debate about analogies between the holocaust and animal oppression building upon Derrida is provided in Richard Iveson, Animal Oppression and the Holocaust Analogy: A Summary of Controversy, in: Zoogenesis. Thinking Animals, Encounter, and Other Stuff, 12.3.2012, https://zoogenesis.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/animal-oppression-and-the-holocaust-analogy-a-summary-of-controversy/ [26.7.2023].
[9] Jonathan Saha, Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar, Cambridge 2022, 2.
[10] Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, New York 1990, 43; Spiegel, Dreaded Comparison, 28.
[11] “On élève beaucoup de civettes en esclavage, pour leur parfum”, Frédéric Cuvier, Civette, in: Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, vol. 9, Strasbourg 1817, 339.
[12] Mark Hengerer, Die Katze in der Frühen Neuzeit. Stationen auf dem Weg zur Seelenverwandten des Menschen, in: Clemens Wischermann (ed.), Von Katzen und Menschen: Sozialgeschichte auf leisen Sohlen, Konstanz 2007, 53–88, 75–76.
[13] Sadeler, Theatrum, preface.
[14] This gets even more obvious in other stories in the same volume, like the one of the horse and the carter in which the mistreated horse is likened to bondservants and the carter to the tyrannical master, Sadeler, Theatrum, 63–64.
[15] Spiegel, Dreaded Comparison, 73–74.
[16] Le Baron J.C.F. de Ladoucette, Fables, 3rd edition, Vouziers 1868, 274–277.
[17] Adams, Sexual Politics.