Presented By: Department of History
2024 Arthur Aiton Lecture: Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia
Professor John Soluri
This talk challenges images of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego as idyllic, wild places by revealing how the exploitation of animals was central to the regions’ transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile.
Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, historian John Soluri traces the nineteenth- and twentieth-century circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of capitalist fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the “end of the world.”
Carnegie Mellon University history professor John Soluri's teaching and research uses transboundary approaches to understand social and environmental change in Latin America and beyond. A founding member of the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History (SOLCHA), his writing focuses on Central and South America. He is the author of "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (2024) and "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (revised ed., 2021).
This lecture is sponsored by the Aiton Lecture Committee in collaboration with the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, historian John Soluri traces the nineteenth- and twentieth-century circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of capitalist fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the “end of the world.”
Carnegie Mellon University history professor John Soluri's teaching and research uses transboundary approaches to understand social and environmental change in Latin America and beyond. A founding member of the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History (SOLCHA), his writing focuses on Central and South America. He is the author of "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (2024) and "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (revised ed., 2021).
This lecture is sponsored by the Aiton Lecture Committee in collaboration with the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
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