Encountering El Tigre : jaguars, knowledge, and discourse in the Western world, 1492-1945

The jaguar is one of the most charismatic species found in the Western Hemisphere, and its presence has long resonated with human communities. Throughout history these large spotted cats have evoked a myriad of responses, from reverence and respect, to fear and disdain. Situated within ongoing re-examinations of the place of animals in public discourse, this dissertation examines representations of jaguars from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which knowledge about this species was constituted in the Western world within the evolution of scientific thought and natural history. Locating the jaguar at the intersections of nature, science, and culture, this dissertation is concerned with the ways this elusive species’ animality was constructed and represented.

Records produced by Europeans in the New World demonstrate the dynamic ways in which humans imagined the jaguar’s physical form, interpreted their actions, characterized their feline-ness, and ultimately, attempted to locate these cats within their own notions of natural order. Loaded within these accounts from the outset are notions of value, which are as fluid as the positions these cats occupied in ecological, biological, and imaginary landscapes of the New World.

This dissertation examines accounts from prominent explorers, scholars, scientists, authors, and artists, all of whom sought to represent jaguar lives. Drawing from accounts of explorations, guides produced by naturalists, scientific reports, and the letters and journals of those who traveled through the shared margins, these chapters locate the jaguar at the center of its own natural history. These jaguars are a connective thread moving through the span of post-contact natural history, and they keep notable company: from Cortés to Balboa; Alexander von Humboldt to Charles Darwin; and Theodore Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold. All of these men published tales of the jaguar that circulated widely through Western Europe and the United States, playing a significant role in the production of jaguar knowledge. In so doing, the jaguar’s tale become one that operates across scales of time and space, simultaneously immediate and localized within these encounters and yet timeless and global, embedded within global circulations of information and power.