Abstract This essay argues that bringing animals into the study of Latin American and Caribbean environmental history could serve several purposes. It would forge a point of entry into the phenomenology of everyday life in rural societies, since animals stand at the nexus of the relationship between man and the land, hence nature and culture. It is through caring for beasts that one interacts with the environment in ways that get the historian one step closer to what Bourdieu termed the habitus of rural labor; beasts also shed light on women’s domestic work as they are transformed from raw to cooked. In Latin America, the animal is also an important symbolic vehicle which is charged with meaning as evidenced in jokes and tall tales, and as the preponderance of narratives of demonic creatures across Latin America indicates, can also serve as a window into popular conceptions of evil.
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