Animal trafficking and wildlife markets

This book examines cases of animal markets and wildlife trafficking in Asia, Africa and South America, often described as the “global South”, leaving aside Europe and North America, defined by contrast at the “global North”. One of the goals of this book is to ask why, beyond global norms of biodiversity protection, the circulation of animals and their body parts has appeared as scandalous, while similar movements in the global North are presented as conforming to these norms. The notion of trafficking, which originally meant the ordinary movement of goods such as artworks or vehicles, has come to mean illegal trade because of the modern attempt to regulate trade within a framework guided by a modern conception that “purifies” objects and subjects, nature and culture. But relationships between humans and animals are much richer and more ambivalent than a simple division between the legal and the illegal supposes, and the ethnographic investigation by the authors gathered here of the countless movements of animals through human hands demonstrates these various meanings of “animal trafficking”. This book gathers surveys based on ethnographic fieldwork and historical archives to examine recent transformations of wildlife markets across the globe, such as the use of the Internet and social media to circulate images of animals, their body parts and the markets where they are sold. This book is a contribution to the anthropology of wildlife trafficking through the ethnographic investigation of animal markets. By this term, we mean sites where humans confront animals as living beings and commodities at the same time, therefore generating tensions by capturing and sometimes killing animals to transform them into objects of value.

Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS). After studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, he has investigated the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza. He was the director of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018. He published recently Solidarity between species: living with animals exposed to pandemic viruses (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2025).

Felipe Vander Velden holds a Master’s degree (2004) and a PhD (2010) in Social Anthropology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and postdoctoral degrees from Aarhus University (Denmark, 2017) and Leiden University (Netherlands, 2018). He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (Brazil). He is notably the author of Joias da floresta: ­antropologia do tráfico de animais (Edufscar, 2018).