Archaeologies of Capitalism in Monterey, Part I: Tracking the Ott(h)er

"Sea otter pelts were the prize sought by early Spanish mercantile companies engaged in a triangular trade with China via the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, exchanging the valued Pacific Coast fur for Chinese quicksilver, essential to mining in Mexico. Pelts were traded between ships' captains and the missions, usually with official mediation by presidio officials. With a contract on offer, including promises of rare precious imports such as religious artifacts and manufacturing equipment, the padres then turned to Indians for the collection of otter skins. As the trade flourished in the 1790s, English and U.S. ships began cruising the coast in search of direct hide deals with missions and local Indians. This avenue of exchange also prospered judging from local observations about better prices from British and American traders and Spanish concern over 'contraband.' Mission San Carlos played a prominent role in the otter trade and joined the smuggling with a Boston ship in 1796.

"Although the trade continued into the 1820s, when the sea otter population declined, it never became a major industry for California . . . Yet if the otter trade fell short of economic transformation, it provided valuable precedents for the immediate future. It initiated California's participation in the global economy and began undermining Spain's mercantile monopoly. It introduced English, U.S., and South American merchant sailors to the coast, preparing the way for trade expansion in the Mexican period. Missions and Indian communities found new opportunities in commercial relations with the outside world, including experience with shipping contracts that would prove useful in subsequent transactions."

John Walton, Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (University of California Press, 2001), p. 95




(Monterey Bay Aquarium Gift Shop, 2011)







Nearly two hundred years after the collapse of the regional pelt trade, the otter remains the privileged nexus between Monterey and the circuits of global capital. Just as the fashionable ladies of nineteenth century Shanghai and Moscow could adorn themselves with its alluring fuzziness, today's stressed office employees in New York, Houston, or indeed Moscow or Shanghai can vicariously enjoy its winsomely ludic self-absorption via the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sea Otter Web Cam. On a casual stroll down Cannery Row, one hears a Babel of languages comparable to what one might have heard in the rowdy taverns of Spanish and Mexican Monterey; then as now, the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Russians, the French traverse oceans for the sake of an encounter with the bulkiest and most thoroughly aquatic of the mustelids.




(T-shirts sold on Cannery Row, 2011)





Now, Hardt and Negri might identify in the changing roles, functions, and forms assigned to the otter an emblematic shift from the production of and circulation of objects as commodities towards the production and circulation of affect, and yet Georg Wilhelm Steller's description of the lutra marina, one of the earliest offered by a natural historian, suggests that the production of affect was always crucial to the otter's exchange value: "These animals are very beautiful, and because of their beauty they are very valuable, as one may well believe of a skin the hairs of which, an inch or an inch and a half in length, are very soft, very thickly set, jet black and glossy. The soft underfur also among the longer hairs is black; but the tips, or the hairs from the middle on, are black, while the bases or roots are whitish, lustrous like silk, and silvery" (De Bestiis Marinis, 1751). Note here that the vocabulary of Enlightenment aesthetics unfortunately lacked a term for the "cute" even though the category was not infrequently invoked in recognizable fashion by Kant and Baumgarten in addition to Steller; in most cases, the solution was to subsume the qualities associated with cuteness (fuzziness, etc.) into the generic category of the beautiful. Thankfully, some of our colleagues in animality studies are making every effort to redress the perennial neglect of cuteness. This line of research is essential to any future efforts to comprehend the otter as actant in the capitalist incorporation of the California coast and the particular nature-cultures it has engendered, since the key to the otter's long history as a vehicle of commercial expansion is the appropriation of cuteness, in the rich visual and tactile dimensions in which it manifests itself in the otter.

I recently quoted Latour's allegation that "[t]o accuse something of being a fetish is the ultimate gratuitous, disrespectful, insane, and barbarous gesture." But do otters invite fetishization, or rather what is it about otters that has invited their successive fetishization by the various human groups they have come into contact with? What kind of a hybridization is the appropriation and circulation of cuteness? Also, are otters cute to otters, that is, do otters fetishize each other? Is their fuzziness an adaptive trait in sexual selection as much as in survival in cold Pacific currents (surely some would want to tell us so)? Are otters fetishes-among-themselves?




(Aleutian fetish of otter mother and pup)