ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a way of dressing oneself that was no longer being observed at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fuegian ethnography is appealing to think with precisely because Darwin’s powerful voice concerned the divide between animality and humanity. Since 1970s and 1980s, philosophers and sociologists have taken issue with the notion of there being a human-animal divide, and they have engaged in debates concerning a human–animal continuism in relation to animal rights. The peoples of Tierra del Fuego became known to northerners through reports of mariners. An early description of how Fuegians clothed themselves came in 1578 from the sailors on the Golden Hind, whose captain was Drake. One of the two main garments Yaghan wore before the introduction of European clothing was a cape made from fur seal or otter skins. Gusinde reported that women preferred to use two to four otter skins, in some cases stitching together up to eight or ten hides.
