Reflection: Conviviality and Companionship: Parrots and People in the African Forests

Abstract

This article provides an account of how humans and parrots interacted in African tropical forests during the Holocene. Underscoring the growing intersections of environmental history with affiliate fields, it employs the insights of animal studies and the environmental humanities to suggest the term “conviviality” as a way of characterizing the heterogeneous assemblages that structured parrot-human politics. In doing so, it draws on ecological, ethnographic, historical, and ethological evidence to construct a more-than-human narrative of the past. Hampered by trypanosomiasis and tsetse flies from keeping livestock, people probably tended parrots as they did guinea fowl and chickens. However, human relationships with parrots were more affective than with poultry because of the parrots’ sociability and vocal abilities. Because people did not domesticate or frequently tame parrots, neither the term “companion species” nor Marcy Norton’s concept of “iegue” adequately describe the relationship between parrots and humans in African forest villages. The better description may be “proximate conviviality.”