NEILL MATHESON Thoreau's Gramática Parda: Conjugating Race and Nature These ate wild animals (beasts) What constitutes the difference between a wild beast & a tame one? How much more human the one than the othet!—Growling scratching roaring—with whatever beauty 6k gracefulness still untameable this Royal Bengal tiger or this leopard. They have the character & the importance of another order of men. Thoreau, Journal (June 26, 185 1)1 [The African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History] is not a random world . . . but the moment of origin where nature and culture, private and public, profane and sacred meet—a moment of incarnation in the encounter of man and animal. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions Thoreau's essay "Walking" proposes a movement beyond the nation and its politics, beyond the law, into a "nature" imagined as primordial, prior to "civilized" culture. The idea of walking becomes a metaphor for metaphor itself, the passage across boundaries, beyond proper limits or distinctions, but it is also a metaphor for the end of metaphor, the impossible unmediated encounter with the real and the wild. The essay repeatedly asserts the fundamental separateness of the natural and the political, in order to promise a departure from politics: the "political world" has "its place merely, and does not occupy all space"; one can easily walk beyond the "narrow field" of "politics," the "most alarming" of all man's "affairs," into wild nature (ioo-i).z Nevertheless , "Walking" implies a more fundamental politicization of the very concept of nature in its plural meanings, both human and nonhuman , than this gesture of separation might suggest. What it calls for is Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 200T Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Neill Matheson not a flight into nature, a pure escape from culture, but rather a new ecology, a healthier culture regrounded through a return to origins, to the moment of first emergence of culture from nature.' In "Walking," Thoreau imagines the revitalization of civilized man through a return to intimate, feral contact with wild nature.4 This revitalization is necessary because white European American men are in danger of becoming "dissipated," corrupted by materialism and by idleness and sensuality, traits associated for Thoreau with a culture alienated from nature, located symbolically in the "degeneracy" of the village (???)? Thoreau's vision of regeneration is Utopian, in that its fulfillment demands not only a reframing of the relationship between the human and nonhuman nature, but a radical rethinking of existing social, political, and economic arrangements—in short, of civilization itself as he sees it.6 Yet his evocation of "another order of men" occurs in the subjunctive, not as a proposal of specific reforms, but as an expression of desire for something that can only be imagined in terms of alterity and futurity. Wildness is the principal name the essay gives for the difference and otherness it invokes, but this set of ideas takes on racial meaning as well. If "Walking" sets out to reimagine the relationship between nature and culture, racial difference plays a more essential role in this project than its seemingly peripheral status would imply. I want to follow the tracks of Thoreau's engagement with race in the essay, leading into its margins, and beyond them; his Journal in the early 1850s displays a persistent interest in speculating about the filiations of race with culture and wildness, and placing it in dialogue with "Walking" opens the essay's sometimes oblique comments into various broader contexts. Thoreau's racial imagination as revealed by "Walking" and the Journal is strongly influenced by his reading of travel literature, natural history, and racial science, particularly in his adoption of a rhetoric of primitivism that understands non-white races as still united with nature, prior to the break that leads to culture and civilization. Yet Thoreau's notions of race are also original and idiosyncratic in antebellum America , not so much in his positive valuation of the wild man's fusion with nature (a version of romantic primitivism or "savagism"), but in his intimation that race is mutable, transformable, taking shape in response to "environmental" factors such as climate, and more fundamentally in...