Abstract

"Sheep Circuits in Rapa Nui and Southern Patagonia: Aesthetics of the Pastoral and the Industrial"

Nathan Norris, Cornell University (ncn38@cornell.edu)

This presentation highlights the history of two nodes in what I have called the “southern ovine hemisphere” in my dissertation; a large swath of the world devoted to wool and mutton production supplying consumers in the Global North. Beginning in at least the mid-nineteenth century, flocks of white hybrid merino sheep began to drape hilly pastures from the Malvinas or Falklands, to southern Patagonia, French Polynesia, Australia and Aotearoa/NZ, and South Africa. In Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, economies of scale planted atop lands violently dispossessed of original inhabitants yielded processing plants for rendering excess sheep body parts into tallow and other saleable commodities, and large frigorificos, or cold works complexes, for preserving mutton and animal corpses. In Rapa Nui (Easter Island, annexed by Chile in 1888), an Indigenous people resurged from a population dwindled down to as low as one hundred souls (today there are at least 5,000). By the mid-twentieth century Rapanui lived side-by-side with a peak of 70,000 merino hybrids and under a ranch authority rumored to run the island “like a small fiefdom.” At Easter, the rudiments for wool cultivation were constructed—ruins of sheep baths and shearing sheds remain visible, but the island no longer houses ovines—though never to the scale of industrialized operations in Patagonia. This talk wrestles with the tensions and strictures imposed by domesticated herd animals on the aspirations of international capital and capitalists via a comparative assessment of Rapa Nui and southern Patagonia’s positions within global commodity chains. I take particular interest in the human (and Indigenous) aesthetic and spatial experience with pastoralism and an increasingly industrialized wool and mutton industry.