Humans in Animalscapes: Reconstructing Vermin-HumanInteractions in Rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia (ca. 1600–1850)

Abstract

One of the most frequent cases in which vermin appear in Ottoman official correspondence is when they “attack” or “invade” human settlements, consuming or destroying food produced specifically for human consumption. Until effective ways and tools to manage them emerged in the late nineteenth century, communities withstood flies, locusts, and rats. Indeed, specific categories of animals subsumed within the category of vermin/haşarat seem to have become among the biggest troublemakers in rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These vermin caused not only short-term scarcity of food, especially concerning during famines, but also writ-large settlement abandonment, resulting in the temporary and even long-term problems of rural/regional economic systems. Yet very few Ottoman historians have reconstructed these stories within a critical animal history perspective. While it is true that these attacks and invasions of vermin created great burdens on human (and other animal) communities throughout history globally, the ways we historians have handled such cases tend to be anthropocentric. Here I argue for an ontological turn towards spatial aspects of vermin lives within human settlements and thus position my line of thinking about interaction from the ground-up, both literally and figuratively. From early-modern Ottoman discourses about vermin and the strategies used to cope with them from dictionaries/lexicons, literary and scientific texts, legal codices, and archival material, I develop a new analytical tool to understand interaction between humans and vermin as competition over perceived and actual space. I argue that we approach vermin behavior from the perspective of a spatial consciousness that constructed extended liminal configurations of space, which I call animalscapes. Human communities in Anatolia and Mesopotamia on the other hand, acknowledged the vermin perception of animalscapes and negotiated their place within, until the invention of chemical weapons against vermin at the end of the nineteenth century.