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From the masters point of view:hunting is sacrice

Tim Ingold University of Aberdeen

In their dazzling speculations on reindeer domestication and the origins of sacrifice,Rane Willerslev, Piers Vitebsky, and Anatoly Alekseyev (2015) left me yearning for thedays when anthropology could unashamedly devote itself to solving the intellectualconundrums thrown up by detailed cross-cultural comparison. Not only is their articlea fine example of the genre, it is also gratifying to see them return to one of those classicpuzzles which already seemed anachronistic when I was writing about it almost thirtyyears ago. The article amply demonstrates that the puzzle is far from dead and buriedbut actually very much alive, reinvigorated by the new ethnography that has becomeavailable since Siberia was reopened to Western-trained fieldworkers in the 1990s, andalso by contemporary debates surrounding human-animal relations, animism, andperspectivism in northern circumpolar societies.

In my essay Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals (Ingold 1986), Iproposed that the cosmologies of circumpolar reindeer hunters and pastoralists arebroadly similar, that the principles of sacrifice are prefigured in the hunt, and that all ittakes to trigger the shift from hunting to pastoralism is a transfer of control over herdsfrom the animals spiritual masters to humans. Taking their cue from this proposition,Willerslev et al. maintain that usual explanations of the origins of reindeer domestica-tion, which prioritize considerations of economic gain or ecological adaptation, are notin themselves sufficient. Whatever economic or ecological incentives may havefavoured domestication, only by attending to cosmological understandings can weaccount for how and why these incentives were actually taken up. More particularly,their argument is that domestication resolved a double bind in which erstwhile huntersfound themselves: how to deal with the discrepancy between the ideal, in which thedocile animal gives itself up, in a spirit of love and beneficence, to the hunter, and thereality, in which animals are manifestly capricious and bent on escape, and in whichhunters have to resort to deceit and trickery to bring them down. The sacrifice of thedomestic reindeer, in effect, enacts the perfect hunt.

The argument is ingenious; however I am not wholly persuaded by it. To be sure, itis not hard to see why hunters might have cosmological objections to domestication.

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 24-27 Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

The spiritual indomitability of animals, and the dire consequences that can follow fromhuman attempts to control this spirituality by seeking to capture and tether livingbeasts, are recurrent themes of hunting narratives throughout the northern circumpo-lar region (Ingold 1980: 282; 1986: 271). This may certainly help to explain why somehunters notably in North America did not become pastoralists. But it does notexplain why others such as in Siberia did. The standard argument is that assteppe-dwelling peoples, already accustomed to riding on horseback, expanded north-wards into the forested taiga, they substituted the reindeer for the horse as a beast ofburden since it was so much better suited to the rough terrain. This argument seemsentirely sensible to me, and I could find nothing in what the authors of the presentarticle have to say to indicate that there is anything wrong with it. Moreover, it alsohelps to explain how people who would never dream of imposing their will on animalsthat are not theirs to control could nevertheless do just that when it comes to theparallel population of animals already incorporated into the human fold.

What other alternative do we have? Should we seriously believe as Willerslev et al.intimate that hunters remain hunters because the solution to the cosmological doublebind that pastoralists found in the sacrifice of domestic animals has somehow eludedthem? Are we to suppose that hunters are so retarded in their cultural evolution thatthey failed to recognize an escape from their existential dilemma that was staring themin the face? The dilemma, according to the authors, lies in the apparent disjuncturebetween ideal and reality, or between what people say and what they do. Hunters saythat animals give themselves up; actually they have to be pursued and tricked intosubmission. [W]hen ... pastoralists sacrifice a reindeer, claim the authors, they areeffectively doing what the hunters say they do, but cannot do (Willerslev et al. 2015: 11,original emphasis). It seems to me, however, that the difference here is rather one ofperspective: indeed I am surprised that the authors do not draw on the well-establishedliterature on northern perspectivism to which at least one of them has made majorcontributions to argue the point. This is that in the hunt, it is not the hunter but themaster of the animals who is sacrificing one of his herd. Thus when pastoralistssacrifice reindeer, they are doing what hunters say the animal masters do. If you were theanimal master, watching over all that transpires, would not the whole episode of thehunt appear as the ideal narrative proposes?

Of course from the mortal hunters perspective it appears quite differently after all,he is but a bit-part player in the process, whose task is absolutely not to sacrifice theanimals but to perform the immolation on the masters behalf, receiving the meat inreturn for services rendered. (The master is of course precluded from performing theimmolation himself since killing is equivalent to sexual penetration, and would betantamount to father-daughter incest.) Perhaps, in the perspective of the animalmaster, the sacrificial victim is even tethered by ropes that are invisible to the hunters.Indeed, precisely such mystical tethering is explicitly described in the story of theYukaghir grandmother (Willerslev et al. 2015: 13) who claimed a magical control overmoose of a kind that could only be rightfully exercised by the animal master. Themaster got his revenge, and the granny and her family paid with their lives for herpresumptuousness! The story of the perfect hunt, then, is the animal masters story, astold by humans. In this story, themaster (who is really a spiritual pastoralist) dominatesthe animals, but trusts the hunters to do their job, while the hunters trust the master toprovide them with animals to kill and consume, though not without difficulty. Whatthe hunters fear, or regard with abhorrence, are human sorcerers who play pastoralist

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with the herds, seeking to dominate them by mystical means or to tether them withmagical ropes and angering the herds rightful masters in the process.

By missing this rather obvious point,Willerslev et al. have succeeded in spinning outastringof ingeniousyetwholly illusoryparadoxes.Theseallcentreontheissueofwhether,given the episodic and fraught circumstances of actual encounters with animals, hunterscan establish any kind of social compact with their prey. In a recent contribution to thejournalCurrentAnthropology, JohnKnight (2012) argues that they cannot.Those such asmyself, who have suggested that they can, have according to Knight confused theanimals with the spiritmaster who bestows them: it is with the latter, and not the former,that relations are established. Where the animals are flesh-and-blood individuals, thespirit master is the incarnation of an abstract species essence.Willerslev et al. appear toagree, stating that Knight has a valid point (205: 8). Yet elsewhere, in a comment onKnights article, Willerslev goes out of his way to discredit it! There can be no simpleopposition,Willerslevargues,betweenthefleshlyandthespiritual.The former isnomoredistributed among discrete individuals than the latter is pinned to an abstract category.Rather,at leastamongcircumpolarhunters,animals in thefleshare thebodyof theanimalmaster turned inside out (Willerslev 2012: 351).Anotherwayof putting this,which at leastaccordswith Inupiaq ideas about themaster of the caribou, is that individual animals arelike specks in the masters eye. For mortal hunters, that eye is the sky and the specks areactual animals (Ingold 2000: 125).

The animal masters story is, of course, also the bears story, since the bear is themaster of the animals. Clearly, therefore, the so-called domestication of the bear is anentirely different matter from that of the reindeer. Willerslev et al. do recognize thatthere is a difference, though Im not sure that they put their finger exactly on what thedifference is. Nor am I convinced by their explanation of the bears curious treatment,which combines elaborate respect with what looks like utter humiliation (Willerslevet al. 2015: 14-16). Since this is an exercise in classic anthropology, I wonder whether wemight go back to another classical anthropological theme, namely the joking relation-ship. The bear is invited in as an honorary guest, but he is also the master of a domainthat is structurally opposed to that of the human, and which humans would rather liketo annex for themselves if only they could. The alliance is tense, to say the least. Couldthe bears treatment, like the joking relationship, be an expression of the combinationof friendship and hostility that is the hallmark of structural alliance? This would tie upvery nicely with the observation(Willerslev et al. 2015: 17), concerning the Eveny, thatthe tension played out in the oscillating moods of the bear is here played out betweencategories of wild and domestic deer. The axis of alliance and opposition is identical inboth cases: in the first it is embodied in the figure of the bear, in the second it isembodied in the herds that emerge from the bears innards.

Finally, theres the issue that keeps cropping up of trust and domination. I haveargued (Ingold 2000: 61-76) that the relation between hunter and prey is based on aprinciple of trust, which rests in turn on a combination of autonomy and dependency.Domination, on the other hand, through the imposition of the will of one party uponthe other, inevitably compromises the autonomy on which trust is founded. That is whyit is so dangerous for the hunter to play pastoralist with the masters herds. In retro-spect, I am fully prepared to admit to weaknesses in the trust to domination accountof the transition from hunting to pastoralism; however, the principal weakness, towhich the present article also succumbs, seems to me now to lie in my conflating twoquite different models of domination. One is the patriarchal model, applicable to Near

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and Middle Eastern pastoralism as represented in biblical accounts and associated withthe proximate power of ancient kingdoms. The other is the northern circumpolarmodel, where the control of the pastoralist over his herd is not at all like that of a rulerover his subjects but very much like that of the spirit master over animals which arereally just refractions of his own being. If the one kind of domination, which hasprovided such a rich repertoire of metaphorical resources for the Judaeo-Christiantradition, is anthropocentric, then the other, in line with an ontology of animism, couldbetter be described as anthropomorphic (Viveiros de Castro 2012: 100-1). Might it bepossible, then, to describe the transition from hunting to pastoralism, and with it theorigins of domestication and sacrifice, in terms not of evolutionary progression but ofthe exchange of perspectives?

REFERENCES

Ingold, T. 1980.Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: reindeer economies and their transformations. Cambridge:University Press.

1986. Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals. In The appropriation of nature: essays onhuman ecology and social relations, 243-76. Manchester: University Press.

2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.Knight, J. 2012. The anonymity of the hunt: a critique of hunting as sharing.Current Anthropology 53, 334-55.Viveiros de Castro, E. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere (four lectures given in

the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February-March 1998, introduced by RoyWagner). Hau Masterclass Series, Vol. 1.

Willerslev, R. 2012. Comment on Knight, The anonymity of the hunt: a critique of hunting as sharing.Current Anthropology 53, 350-1.

, P. Vitebsky & A. Alekseyev 2015. Sacrifice as the ideal hunt: a cosmological explanation for theorigin of reindeer domestication. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, 1-23.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldworkin Lapland, and has written on the comparative anthropology of the circumpolar North, evolutionary theory,human-animal relations, language and tool use, environmental perception, and skilled practice. His currentwork explores the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture.

Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK.

[email protected]

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