knight, j. anonimity of hunt

The Anonymity of the Hunt: A Critique of Hunting as SharingAuthor(s): John KnightSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (June 2012), pp. 334-355Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665535 .

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334 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 3, June 2012

� 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5303-0004$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/665535

The Anonymity of the HuntA Critique of Hunting as Sharing

by John Knight

Hunter-gatherers are often ascribed a “monistic” worldview at odds with the nature-society dichotomy. The cen-terpiece of this claim is that they view hunting as similar to sharing within the band and prey animals as part ofa common sphere of sociality. This article challenges this thesis. An examination of the work of its main proponentsshows that it conflates two different senses of “animal”—the flesh-and-blood animals of the hunt and the animalSpirit that is said to control the animals. The sharing motif in hunting makes sense with respect to the anthro-pomorphic Spirit but not to the animals hunted. The conditions of the hunt as a spatiotemporal event providefurther grounds for skepticism toward the idea of hunting-as-sharing. Drawing on biologist Robert Hinde’s modelof relationships, I argue that hunting represents an anonymous one-off interaction that cannot develop into apersonal relationship, in stark contrast to the durable forms of personalized sociality associated with the hunter-gatherer band. This is not to deny the possibility of human-animal cosociality in the form of personal relationshipsbut rather to redirect the search away from the hunt to the interface with domesticated animals.

In their edited volume Nature and Society, Philippe Descolaand Gısli Palsson argue that anthropology has an importantrole to play in challenging the persistence of dualistic thinkingwith respect to what they call the “nature-society interface”(Descola and Palsson 1996:1). Anthropology, they claim, iswell placed to mount this challenge because ethnography sup-plies compelling evidence of the existence of nondualistic or“monistic” societies: “For many anthropologists . . . the shiftfrom a dualist to a monist perspective appears to have beentriggered by fieldwork among peoples for whom the nature-society dichotomy was utterly meaningless” (Descola andPalsson 1996:7). Pointing to the existence of “many societieswhere the realm of social relations encompasses a wider do-main than the mere society of humans,” they call for ananthropology that goes beyond “conventional social analysis”to “embrace not only the world of anthropos, but also thatpart of the world with which humans interact” (Descola andPalsson 1996:14). This idea of an unconventional social anal-ysis that, transcending anthropocentrism and ethnocentrismalike, takes seriously the possibility of society beyond hu-manity is certainly an exciting one. But if residual nature-society dualism is to be effectively challenged, proponents ofmonistic sociality must provide credible examples.

The example almost invariably given is that of hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers have come to stand for an ex-panded, heterospecific sphere of sociality that includes hu-

John Knight is Reader in Anthropology at the School of History andAnthropology, Queen’s University Belfast (Belfast BT7 1NN,Northern Ireland [[email protected]]). This paper was submitted20 VII 09 and accepted 11 XI 10.

mans and the animals they hunt, which are viewed as sharingpartners. Sharing is said to be central not just to interactionwithin the hunter-gatherer band but also to interaction withprey animals. While the hunt has long been viewed as a siteof human-animal antagonism or opposition (Cartmill 1993),the hunting-as-sharing thesis turns this view on its head andrepresents hunting as an intimate, mutualistic, and even non-violent relationship between hunter and hunted animal.

In this article, I examine this argument through the workof two of its main proponents: Nurit Bird-David and TimIngold. I argue that the notion of sharing, while it does applyto the hunt, does not apply to the hunt in the way that isclaimed. I show that hunting as a spatiotemporal event gen-erally precludes anything resembling bandlike sociality fromemerging between hunter and prey animal. Drawing on bi-ologist Robert Hinde’s model of relationships, I argue thatthe conditions of hunting foreclose the development of apersonal relationship between the hunter and the animals hehunts. I do not deny that personal human-animal relation-ships—and by extension human-animal cosociality—exist,but I argue that to find them we need to look at domesticatedanimals rather than the wild animals of the hunt.

The Hunting-as-Sharing Thesis

Sharing behavior has been widely reported in hunter-gatherersocieties (especially “immediate-return” hunter-gatherers,who do not practice storage; Dowling 1968; Marshall 1961;Woodburn 1998). Meat sharing is said to offset the chronicuncertainty of the hunt. Lorna Marshall wrote that through


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Knight Critique of Hunting as Sharing 335

sharing, “the fear of hunger is mitigated; the person one shareswith will share in turn when he gets meat” (Marshall 1961:236). Sharing serves as a “banking strategy” whereby throughthe sharing of surplus food now, one is entitled to draw onthe surplus food of others later (Kelley 1995:167). There areno permanent haves and have-nots because things even them-selves out over time. The essence of sharing is what JamesWoodburn calls “donor obligation” and “recipient entitle-ment” (Woodburn 1998:49). Sharing usually occurs in re-sponse to demands from others to share and is sometimescharacterized as “demand sharing” (Peterson 1993). In theface of a demand to share, the provider or donor has littlechoice but to accede. Such sharing transactions are said tohave an important social logic. Through regular sharing ac-tivity, close relationships among band members develop. Butthe integrative power of sharing is not limited to the humanmembers of the hunter-gatherer band. Sharing also providesthe framework for human ties with the natural world and inparticular with hunted animals.

In an influential paper, Nurit Bird-David argued thathunter-gatherers liken the unconditional giving or sharingbehavior among themselves to their dealings with the forest(Bird-David 1992:28–31). The human and nonhuman partsof the world coexist in a single sphere, which she calls a“cosmic economy of sharing.”

They do not inscribe into the nature of things a division

between the natural agencies and themselves as we do with

our “nature : culture” dichotomy. They view their world as

an integrated entity. While many other non-Western peoples

view the world in this fashion, it seems that hunter-gatherers

with immediate return systems distinctively view their ties

with the natural agencies in terms of visiting and sharing

relationships. We can say that their world . . . is a cosmic

system of sharing which embraces both human-to-human

and nature-to-human sharing. The two kinds of sharing are

constituents of a cosmic economy of sharing. (Bird-David

1992:30)

For Bird-David, the forest is a “sharing partner” to which onecan express one’s neediness in order to obtain food (Bird-David1992:31). In another paper, which examined four hunter-gath-erer societies, she concluded that “nature and humankind are‘seen’ within a ‘subject-subject’ frame as interrelated in variousforms of personal relatedness” (Bird-David 1993:121). Natureis reckoned not as an object to be exploited through extractionbut as a subject to be engaged through sharing.

Tim Ingold has further developed Bird-David’s notion ofthe “cosmic economy of sharing,” applying it more directlyto hunting. In the well-known paper “From Trust to Dom-ination,” Ingold argued, with respect to hunter-gatherer so-cieties, that hunting “is an attempt to draw the animals inthe hunters’ environment into the familiar ambit of socialbeing, and to establish a working basis for mutuality and co-existence” (Ingold 1994:12). From the hunter’s point of view,hunting is essentially similar to the sharing practiced within

the band. As he put it in an earlier paper, “sharing and hunting. . . are two sides of the same coin; each implies the other”(Ingold 1987:117). Particular encounters in the huntingground are enclosed by a larger human-animal relationship.

The animals in the environment of the hunter do not simply

go their own way, but are supposed to act with the hunter

in mind. They are not just “there” for the hunter to find

and take as he will, rather they present themselves to him.

. . . The encounter, then, is a moment in the unfolding of

a continuing—even lifelong—relationship between the

hunter and the animal kind (of which every particular in-

dividual encountered is a specific instance). The hunter

hopes that by being good to animals, they in turn will be

good to him. By the same token, the animals have the power

to withhold if any attempt is made to coerce what they are

not, of their own volition, prepared to provide. For coercion,

the attempt to extract by force, represents a betrayal of the

trust that underwrites the willingness to give. Animals thus

maltreated will desert the hunter, or even cause him ill for-

tune. This is the reason why . . . the encounter between

hunter and prey is conceived as basically non-violent. (In-

gold 1994:14–15, references removed, original emphasis)

Where Ingold goes beyond Bird-David is to challenge herinitial argument that sharing with nature is metaphorical (thetitle of Bird-David’s 1993 paper is “Tribal Metaphorizationof Human-Nature Relatedness”). Bird-David had argued that“human-nature relatedness” was a metaphorical extension ofrelatedness among humans. Sharing among humans is, as itwere, literal sharing, which is then figuratively extended tothe domain of nature. Humans use their own social relationsas a template for relations with the natural world. But, byapproaching the issue in this way, she in effect makes relationsbetween humans primary (literal sharing) and human-nature(or human-animal) relations secondary (metaphorical shar-ing). In short, Bird-David represents hunter-gatherer under-standings of social relations as projections from the human-human to the human-nature domain. Ingold takes issue withthis model on the grounds that it partly retains the nature-society dualism it purports to reject.

Ingold argues instead that sociality in the two cases is notanalogous or metaphorical but identical, inhering in the prac-tical interactions or encounters of daily life.

We have seen how both sharing (among humans) and hunt-

ing (of animals by humans) rest on the same principle of

trust, and how the sense in which hunters claim to know

and care for animals is identical to the sense in which they

know and care for other human beings. (Ingold 1994:18)

As far as hunter-gatherer sociality goes, there is a parity be-tween human and nonhuman “persons.” Thus, in his dis-cussion of Cree hunters, Ingold writes of “the ontologicalequivalence of humans and animals, as organism-persons andas fellow participants in a life process” (Ingold 1996:135).

For Ingold, Bird-David’s analysis of hunter-gatherer un-




derstandings of human-nature sociality is wanting becauseshe treats as metaphorical something that is “identical.” Thisis a bold claim on his part, and the onus is on him to dem-onstrate that hunting does indeed consist of a sociality be-tween hunter and hunted that is similar to that within thehunter-gatherer band. However, when examined closely,hunting proves to be a very poor illustration of human-animalcosociality. By its very nature as an event, hunting providesminimal opportunity for the emergence of a human-animalsociality that is in any way comparable with the sociality ofthe band. When we look carefully at the argument, we findthat Ingold’s monism proves to be scarcely less problematicthan Bird-David’s.

Hinde’s Model of Relationships

One of the difficulties that arise in examining claims about“sociality” is that it is not always clear what is meant by theterm. While “society” has classically denoted the idea of anabstract, bounded whole, with “sociality” the focus tends tobe on concrete social relationships. But we still need to elu-cidate just what we mean when we use the term “social re-lationships.” Moreover, in a discussion about the possibleexistence of human-animal sociality, we must ensure that theanalytical language we use is not so anthropocentrically loadedas to preclude nonhumans from the outset. To help provideboth conceptual clarity and an appropriately inclusive idiomin this context, I draw on the model of relationships for-mulated by the biologist Robert Hinde.

Hinde distinguishes between interactions and relationshipsin terms of their temporal character: an interaction is a rel-atively short-lived event that happens in the here and now,whereas a relationship consists of a series of interactions andtherefore exists over a longer span of time (Hinde 1979:15–16). In principle, there is a cumulative development wherebyearlier interactions between two individuals affect later in-teractions between them: “Because the individuals are knownto each other, the nature and course of each interaction isinfluenced by the history of past interactions between theindividuals concerned, and perhaps also by their expectationsfor interactions in the future” (Hinde 1979:5). The thresholdfor a “relationship” is therefore higher than that for an in-teraction, or a one-off encounter. Thus, “we do not speak oftwo strangers who meet in the street as immediately havinga relationship, reserving the term for cases where the inter-action is affected by past interactions or is likely to influencefuture ones” (Hinde 1981:2).

Hinde draws attention to the importance of serial inter-actions in “the dynamics of interindividual relationships”(Hinde 1983:65). A history of interaction is likely to accen-tuate mutual knowledge between interactants, which in turnaffects subsequent interactions between them. Through thisprocess, the relationship tends to deepen over time and be-comes “more intimate, in the sense that the behaviour of eachindividual is becoming more finely attuned to that of the

other” (Hinde 1983:66). The primatologist Hans Kummer hasmade the same point: “A relationship is the result of history—it has developed through times past. The partners have learnedfrom previous interactions what is possible between them andwhat is not. Relationship is the matured potential of twoindividuals for doing certain things together” (Kummer 1995:276). Regular interactions that extend over the long term canconfer on the relationship a “comfortable predictability”(Duck 1992:86). The special quality of many a relationshiparises, in no small part, from this interactional history.

We can distinguish two kinds of relationship in Hinde’smodel. The primary form of relationship is that based onserial interactions between the same two individuals. It is thesepersonal relationships that Hinde is, for the most part, in-terested in. But he also recognizes that the same relationshiplogic can apply to categories of people:

Just as interactions with an individual are affected by past

interactions, so also may interactions with one of a category

of individuals be affected by previous interactions with other

members of that category. . . . In such cases we may speak

of relationships between categories of individuals. This is a

weak usage of “relationship” in comparison with series of

interactions between individuals. (Hinde 1976:5)

Hinde refers to the primary form of relationship as “personal”and this secondary form of relationship as “formal” (Hinde1979:38).

The hunting-as-sharing thesis is predicated on an under-standing of sociality that corresponds to Hinde’s primary, or“personal,” form of relationship. This is the kind of socialityattributed to the hunter-gatherer band and therefore what thehuman-animal association in the hunt is measured against.Let us now look at the personal relationships of the band inorder to prepare the ground for our later examination of theclaimed sociality of the hunt.

Personal Relationships in the Band

Nurit Bird-David describes the extent and depth of the mutualfamiliarity among Nayaka hunter-gatherers as follows: “They‘grow old together,’ getting to know each other’s biography,personality, habits and idiosyncrasies, and experiencing forthemselves what happens in the hamlet” (Bird-David 1994:591). Kin ties are flexibly reckoned and grounded in inter-action; this is a social world in which “‘relating’ makes ‘rel-atives’” (Bird-David 1994:594). She claims that Fred Myers’sobservation about the Pintupi of Australia applies to the Na-yaka too: “shared activity constitutes people as related” (Myers1986:92; in Bird-David 1994:594). Referring to Alfred Schutz’sdistinction between “we relationships” and “they relation-ships,” she argues that “we relationships” are central tohunter-gatherer sociality (Bird-David 1994:598–599). In in-voking Schutz, Bird-David stresses the temporal depth of re-lationships in the hunter-gatherer band. For Schutz, the “werelationship” consists of a special connectedness conveyed by




the notion of consociation: “consociates are mutually involvedin one another’s biography; they are growing older together;they live, as we may call it, in a pure We-relationship” (Schutz1953:12). There is a stark difference between consociation andmere association. As David Plath has put it, “If ‘associates’are persons you happen to encounter somewhere, sometime,‘consociates’ are people you relate with across time and insome degree of intimacy” (Plath 1980:8).

Ingold, too, has highlighted the special quality of bandsociality. Drawing on Bird-David’s characterization of hunter-gatherer relationships as “we relationships,” he has writtenthat the band is a social environment distinguished by a “deep,intersubjective involvement of self and other. As such, it de-pends upon the deep mutual knowledge that people can onlygain through spending time together: on the intertwining oreven merging of their respective life histories” (Ingold 1999:406). What this means is that when the social relationshipsof the hunter-gatherer band are described as “immediate,”this “immediacy” should not be understood in terms of anabsence of temporal depth but rather in the sense of peoplefitting seamlessly together in their interactions precisely be-cause of the depth of mutual familiarity (Ingold 1999:405–406). In this connection, we can recall Ingold’s image of“growth”: “Selves . . . are ‘grown’ within a field of nurture”(Ingold 1999:407). “Food sharing is just one aspect of thetotal process by which persons are ‘grown’ in a context ofimmediate sociality, through incorporating the substance,knowledge, and experience of others within a field of nur-turance” (Ingold 1999:408). In short, the hunter-gathererband grows or nurtures persons in the fertile soil of intimatesociality. The quality of the “we relationship” is somethingrealized by means of an extended process of cultivation.

Ingold’s point is that band relationships between people arenot mental constructions but are experientially grounded andconstituted, developing through everyday interactions. Each re-lationship between two people has its history in which it hasbeen built up through regular contact. This would seem to beprecisely what an “intimate social group” is: a collectivity con-sisting of experientally rich relationships between people. Hu-man sociality, in other words, must be understood in terms of“practical involvement with the world” rather than projectionsonto the world (Ingold 1996:125). Thus, “the perception of thesocial world is grounded in the direct, mutually attentive in-volvement of self and other in shared contexts of experience”(Ingold 1996:129). Interactional experience forms the basis ofrelationships between people in the hunter-gatherer band.

This intimate sociality reported for the hunter-gathererband fits neatly with Hinde’s conception of personal rela-tionships. Band members have a fine-grained knowledge ofone another built up over a long series of regular interactionsthat are centered on and shaped by a sharing ethos. In orderfor the hunting-as-sharing argument to stand up, we wouldneed to find comparable relationships between hunters andthe animals they hunt.

The Relationship with the Animal Spirit

In the long quotation above (Ingold 1994:14–15), Ingold ac-knowledges something that in much of his writing on this topictends to be obscured: that the hunter’s relationship exists notin a one-to-one encounter with the animal hunted but at thelevel of the “animal kind.” Human-animal “sharing” in thecontext of the hunt, in other words, pertains to animals asmembers of a class. What Ingold is referring to here is a wide-spread belief complex among hunter-gatherers according towhich a spirit figure, described variously as the Animal Spirit,Owner of the Animals, Master of Animals, Animal Guardian,and so on, controls the prey animals.1 For the hunter, main-taining a benign relationship with this animal spirit orguardian—hereafter “Spirit”—is critical to whether the huntends in success or failure (Erikson 2000:12; Ichikawa 1996:472;Riches 1996:289). The Spirit is often attributed a humanlikeappearance—including that of a “dwarf-like” being (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976:312), an old man (Vitebsky 2005:311), and abearded white man (Descola 1994:257)—and is given human-like terms of address such as “Grandfather” (Vitebsky 2005:312). Furthermore, it is likened to a human herder carefullyguarding his animal flock (Descola 1994:257–258; Ingold 1987:249–253; Viveiros de Castro 1992:72–73).

As the owner of the animals, the Spirit becomes the objectof hunter petitioning to share them. Yukaghir hunters in Si-beria provide a good example of this:

People have the acknowledged right to demand that those

who possess goods beyond their immediate needs give them

up, and the owner of those goods must comply with the

demands or risk social disapproval. With regard to the

hunter-spirit relationship, this means that as long as an an-

imal master-spirit possesses plenty of game the hunter is

entitled to ask or even demand that the spirit share its animal

resources with him, and the spirit for its part is morally

obliged to comply with the hunter’s demands. (Willerslev

2007:45)

In this way, the principle of “recipient entitlement” is ex-tended beyond interhuman sharing. The empty-handedhunter is entitled to request animals from the Spirit, who inturn is obliged to “give” or “share” with the hunter insofaras he is a needy have-not.2

1. See Arhem (1996:192); Brightman (1993:91–93); Descola (1994:257–258); Hultkrantz (1961); Ichikawa (1996:472); Martin (1978); Paul-son (1964); Reichel-Dolmatoff (1976:312); and Willerslev (2007).

2. In passing, we should note that the parallel between such human-to-Spirit sharing and human-to-human sharing is far from absolute.There are clear differences. Given its “ownership” of the class of animals,the Spirit would seem to have a status very different from the hunter’s,and this status asymmetry (with respect to the animals shared) jars withthe notion of egalitarian sharing between humans. There would not bethe reversibility in direction of sharing that exists between different hunt-ing families, whereby hunter A shares his food with hunter B but nexttime around becomes the recipient of food from hunter B. Hunter-to-hunter sharing is bidirectional over the long term, and a given hunteris likely to be in both positions at different times. By contrast, with respect




Represented in this way, hunting appears as a kind of shar-ing transaction in which the hunter shares with a Spirit thathas a kind of one-to-many relation with the animals. As cus-todian of the animals as a class, the Spirit is in a position topart with individual constituents of the class. Individual an-imals become expendable because what matters is the exis-tence of the class of animals. Hunting success can continueas long as the hunter maintains a proper relationship withthe Spirit that controls the class of animals. The Spirit shareswith the hunter with respect to the whole category of animalsit controls.

Prima facie, the hunter’s tie with the Spirit would seem toapproximate a Hindean personal relationship. It is a rela-tionship that consists of a series of interactions in the formof the different hunts, each of which cumulatively affects andis affected by the overarching relationship. Ingold has arguedthat for hunter-gatherers, success in the hunt is seen as relatedto hunter conduct in past hunting episodes, “the idea thatsuccess in present hunting depends on personal relationshipsbuilt up and maintained with animal powers through a historyof previous hunts” (Ingold 1994:10). Understood in this way,a hunt never stands alone but is informed by the relationshipdeveloped through previous hunts. Each hunt is an interactionthat carries over into the larger relationship with the Spirit.With respect to the tie with the Spirit, hunting has a cu-mulative dimension. If the hunter offends the Spirit in onehunt (e.g., by openly showing joy or pride at hunting successor by behaving inappropriately toward the remains of thedead animal), he could suffer retribution in the form of hunt-ing failure next time around. There is no such thing as adiscrete hunt, for each hunt is connected to other huntsthrough the relationship between hunter and Spirit. Just asthe hunter should display skill in the hunt, he should be skilfulin managing this key relationship, on which success or failurealso depends.

On the face of it, Ingold would seem to be describing apersonal relationship according to Hinde’s definition. Ingoldis at pains to stress that hunting is embedded in a relationshipthat straddles the two sides of the hunt. But is this really apersonal relationship? In fact, he refers to “personal relation-ships built up and maintained with animal powers” (Ingold1994:10) rather than with the animals themselves. This meansthat the “personal relationship” in question is not directlywith the animals hunted but with the anthropomorphic Spiritfigure that hunters associate with the class of hunted animals.In other words, we are dealing not with a personal relationshipbetween hunter and hunted animal but with a quasi-personalrelationship with a class figurehead. The hunter’s constructionof the Spirit serves to abstractly bridge separate hunts. Theparticular animals hunted on different occasions all comeunder the umbrella of the Spirit, which encompasses the classof animals. This belief makes it possible to connect earlier

to the Spirit, sharing can only really be unidirectional—the Spirit sharingits animals with the hunter.

hunts with later hunts and to configure hunting as a single,enduring relationship. To recall the earlier quotation fromIngold (1994:15), each hunt is “a moment in the unfoldingof a continuing—even lifelong—relationship” between hunterand Spirit. But, according to Hinde’s model of relationships,this would be no more than a “formal” or categorical rela-tionship with the animals themselves. Hunting is subsumedwithin a relationship with the Spirit that works through in-teractions with particular animals. There is no actual conti-nuity between different hunts as far as the individual animalhunted is concerned.

That hunting-as-sharing has to do with the categorical an-imal other rather than individual animals is not always clearfrom Ingold’s writings. At times, the impression is given thatit is the particular animal being hunted that is the sharingpartner with the hunter. This would mean, of course, that theanimal gives or shares itself with the hunter. This is especiallythe case when Ingold refers to Cree ethnography. It is from theCree material that he takes the idea of a particular animal givingitself (Ingold 1994:9–10, 1996:129–136, 2000:13–14). He theninserts this idea—of what we might call animal autodonation—into his larger hunting-as-sharing model.

In passing, two objections might be raised here. First, theCree material is far from clear-cut when it comes to the ideaof animal autodonation. Cree ethnography suggests that thenotion of animals giving themselves to hunters is only partof the story, as animal guardians also feature (see Brightman1993:93; Feit 1994:433). Second, in the wider ethnography ofhunter-gatherers, the motif of prey animal autodonation tohunters is a relatively minor one, compared with that of theanimal Spirit as giver of these animals on the one hand andthat of spirit vengeance (of the hunted animal) on the other.Ingold acknowledged the importance of the animal Spiritamong hunter-gatherers in his earlier work (Ingold 1987,chap. 10). Yet in his later writing on hunting-as-sharing, thetheme of the animal Spirit is largely relegated to the back-ground. Nonetheless, as a general thesis, the idea of hunting-as-sharing really makes sense only in relation to the Spirit asthe figurehead of the animal class.

Why, then, does Ingold not foreground the Spirit motif inhis account of hunting-as-sharing? Why does he conflate oreven replace it with the notion of autodonation at the levelof particular animals? The answer would seem to lie in histheoretical commitment to the idea of practical sociality—that social ties inhere not in mental representations but indirect interaction and contact. From this perspective, human-animal sociality is measured by the extent of direct engage-ment. But to base straightforwardly the hunting-as-sharingthesis on the Spirit belief complex would leave Ingold opento the same kind of criticism he makes of Bird-David: thathe is dealing not with direct human-animal sharing of a kindsimilar to the sociality in the hunting band but with a modelof human-human sociality that is projected onto animals inthe guise of the Spirit figure.

Furthermore, the status of real animals is unclear. On the




one hand, animals are recognized as having “autonomy” (In-gold 1994:13). Animal autonomy is the foundation on whichIngold builds his argument about the centrality of “trust” inthe hunter-prey animal relationship (Ingold 1994:13). If a preyanimal has volition, it is incumbent on the hunter to behavein a way that will dispose the animal to choose to give itselfto him. It is because he is dealing with volitional animals thatthe hunter does not take the animal’s life but waits to begiven it. Yet vis-a-vis the Spirit, animals seem far from au-tonomous but rather subordinated to the will of the Spirit,who “owns” them. Prey animals appear not so much to givethemselves to the hunter as to be given by the Spirit to thehunter. They seem to be a kind of currency or medium ofexchange between hunter and the Spirit rather than a partyto exchange with the hunter.

To a considerable extent, the Spirit seems to have the samekind of trophic relation to animals as the hunter. PhilippeDescola has written that “Like the Achuar, who kill and eattheir domestic fowl while protecting them from animal pred-ators, the spirits kill and eat game while protecting it fromhuman predators” (Descola 1994:258). Existing one level upfrom the animals themselves, the Spirit is the owner of theanimals, with interests that potentially clash with those of thehuman hunters who also want these animals. If the Spirit,too, relies on the meat of the animals, it would logically reckonhuman hunting in zero-sum terms, seeing human success inthe hunt as diminishing its stock of animals.

The hunter must enter into and maintain a relationshipwith the Spirit in order to get it to share its animals. Thehunter can invoke the sharing ethic—and the principle of“recipient entitlement” in particular—as leverage to get theSpirit to agree to release some of its many animals so thatsuccessful hunting can occur. Represented in this way, thehunter receives animals from a Spirit that is disposed to sharesome of its “herd,” and the sharing model does extend to thedomain of human-animal relations. But crucially, this doesnot mean that it is the hunter and the hunted animal thatare sharing. Rather, it is the hunter and the Spirit that aresharing the animals between them. Put another way, the cor-ollary of the Spirit belief is that the hunter shares with animalsgenerically or as a category rather than with the particularanimal hunted. With respect to sharing, the hunt is reckonedin terms of what amounts to a categorical ontology: the huntermay catch a particular animal in the course of a hunt butshares with the Spirit that presides over the animal class. Theparticular animal hunted is an aspect of rather than a partyto the sharing relationship. The prey animal can be a sharingpartner—an animal subject—only at a higher, abstract levelcorresponding to the Spirit that encompasses the class ofanimals. Whether it is really helpful to depict this kind of“sharing” as a “human-animal” relationship is a moot point,given that the “animal” in question is self-evidently a cate-gorical representation on the part of the hunter rather thanan empirical animal encountered in the hunt.

In sum, the hunter’s relationship with the Spirit does not,

despite appearances, qualify as a personal relationship withanimals but rather represents an impersonal or categorical(“formal” in Hinde’s terms) relationship with them. But thisstill leaves open the possibility that the hunter may form apersonal relationship with the animal itself in the course ofthe hunt. To determine whether this is the case, we need nowto examine just what kind of human-animal interaction orassociation arises in the hunt.

The Hunt

Central to the hunting-as-sharing thesis is the propositionthat the hunter gets to know the animals in essentially thesame way that he gets to know other people:

To know someone is to be in a position to approach him

directly with a fair expectation of the likely response, to be

familiar with that person’s past history and sensible to his

tastes, moods and idiosyncrasies. You get to know other

human persons by sharing with them, that is by experiencing

their companionship. And if you are a hunter you get to

know animals by hunting. (Ingold 1994:16)

Ingold is claiming that hunting is a process whereby preyanimals come to assume the status of familiar persons in away similar to that in which other people stand as familiarpersons on the basis of a history of shared interaction.

Ingold argues that in the course of the hunt, hunters ex-perience animals as persons similar to human persons:

In short, animals do not participate with humans qua per-

sons only in a domain of virtual reality, as represented within

culturally constructed, intentional worlds, superimposed

upon the naturally given substratum of organism-environ-

ment interactions. They participate as real-world creatures

endowed with powers of feeling and autonomous action,

whose characteristic behaviours, temperaments and sensi-

bilities one gets to know in the very course of one’s everyday

practical dealings with them. In this regard, dealing with

non-human animals is not fundamentally different from

dealing with fellow humans. (Ingold 1996:136)

In response to this claim, let us address the issue of hunterknowledge of hunted animals.

Hunters certainly get to know prey animals generically. Inthe course of his hunting career, the hunter is likely to huntmany individuals belonging to the same species. In the pro-cess, he will, at the level of the species, build up an extensiveempirical knowledge of how this type of animal behaves inthe context of the hunt: the kind of terrain in which it is tobe found, the kind of tracks and other signs it leaves behind,its degree of sensitivity to signs of human presence, its re-sponse when sighted or pursued, and so on. The greater hisexperience in hunting this type of animal, the more extensiveand useful this knowledge becomes. The veteran hunter isone who can draw on a rich stock of categorical knowledgeabout the behavior patterns of the target species, which standshim in good stead to react to the situations that arise in the




course of a hunt. This accumulation of knowledge about cat-egories of prey is one of the reasons why hunting return ratestend to peak later in a hunter’s life (Walker et al. 2002:640).Here we can recall Hinde’s second kind of relationship, basedon serial interaction with different individuals belonging tothe same category, which he calls a “formal” relationship. Thissort of categorical knowledge of animals clearly can and doesdevelop in hunting.

The hunting-as-sharing thesis is not, however, concernedwith this kind of knowledge of and relationship with animals.For Ingold, the hunter draws on a personal knowledge of preyanimals. Indeed, he argues that this personalized orientationto the hunt is culturally mandated by a distinctive hunter-gatherer “economy of knowledge” that contrasts with the“Western anthropological” economy of knowledge (Ingold2000:46–47). But there is, in fact, a crucial slippage here be-tween human and animal referents: hunter-gatherers get toknow—establish a relationship with—other people in partic-ular, but it is difficult to conceive of hunters getting to knowanimals in particular. Hunted animals cannot be familiar per-sons in anything like the way fellow band members can be.There are a number of reasons for this.

First, compared with band members, hunter and prey shareneither time nor space. The nature of the hunt is such thatfor most of the time, hunter and prey are physically somedistance apart from one another. From the hunter’s perspec-tive, the prey animal is absent for almost the entire durationof the hunt. Of course, this animal absence is not absolute.There are tracks or other signs of an earlier presence that theanimal leaves behind. Tracking is typically a protracted phaseof separation that ideally for the hunter is gradually reducedas the spoor is followed, the trail determined, and the distancefrom the hunted animal shortened. Hunters are often skilledtrackers who learn a lot about the animal from its spoor (Lee1984:47–48; Liebenberg 1990, chap. 6). The level of profi-ciency of some trackers has even led to the suggestion thatthe track is, in fact, a kind of connection between hunter andanimal (Brown 1999; Low 2007:S75–S76). This may be rightin some cases, yet it should not be exaggerated. In general,on account of the difficulty of the terrain, the uneven qualityof the tracks, and the time that has elapsed since the trackswere made, tracking tends to be a rather hit-and-miss affair.

Nor is this state of separation easily overcome. On top ofthe unreliability of the trail, the hunter is up against the highlydeveloped elusiveness of the prey animal. The animal’s vigi-lance toward and fear-driven avoidance of the hunter meansthat any degree of hunter proximity to the animal will havebeen hard earned. The hunter knows that the animal’s sensorycapacity to detect him is likely to outstrip his ability to ap-proach it. In order to get within range of the prey animalwithout being detected, the hunter must be proficient in theart of self-concealment. Yet even for the most skilful of hunt-ers, such an approach remains a challenge because of theanimal’s own finely honed capacity for self-concealment. Re-ferring to what amounts to a battle of the senses in the hunting

ground, Richard Nelson reflects on his own experience at deerhunting as follows: “Both the deer and I strive to concealourselves, as we also try to break through the other’s con-cealment” (Nelson 1997:336). The skilled hunter may prevail,provided that he takes his chance if and when it comes. Butthe window of opportunity is likely to be momentary at best.All too often, the animal remains frustratingly out of viewand the hunter does not even get the chance to shoot. Theanimal may not be all that far away, but it is far enough tokeep safe as long as it denies the hunter a sighting. Huntingis an odd sort of “encounter” in this respect, as the preyanimal is generally at one remove from the hunter.

Let us assume that the hunter can determine the speciesidentity of the animal from its spoor. This allows him toinvoke his wider categorical knowledge of the species, con-taining information on general patterns of behavior relevantto the hunt (speed of movement, propensity to seek water,preference for cover, sensitivity to hunter approach, and soon) that he has acquired from hunting that type of animalin the past and from observing and talking to other hunters.But what the hunter cannot do is draw on any prehunt knowl-edge of this particular animal in the course of his pursuit.Knowledgeable as he may be in terms of the kind of animalhe is pursuing, even the veteran hunter remains fundamen-tally ignorant of the actual animal he comes across on a givenhunt. His quarry is, qua individual, simply unknown to him.Encountering one another for the first time, hunter andhunted are literally strangers. What the hunt, as an event,simply does not allow is for the hunter to build up a “file”on the individual animal he happens to come across.

Despite his stock of categorical knowledge of the specieshe is hunting, the hunter’s ignorance of the prey animal asan individual may well limit his effectiveness, because he can-not adapt his tactics to its idiosyncratic behavior. Louis Lie-benberg makes this point in relation to Kalahari hunters:

The prey animal is expected to do its best to avoid the hunters,

using the strength and intelligence characteristic of its species.

While the hunter expects to overcome the difficulties that

challenge his own skill and cunning (such as the animal’s

behaviour and other circumstances), there is always the pos-

sibility of being outwitted or otherwise frustrated by the in-

dividual animal’s idiosyncratic behaviour. Some animals are

said to be ingenious in the ways they outwit the hunter. Oth-

ers, who do not conform to the customs of the species, are

said to be stupid. (Liebenberg 1990:86)

Even the best hunter under the most favorable conditions canbe thwarted by the behavioral unpredictability of the specificanimal he is hunting.

At this point, we should acknowledge certain objectionsthat could be made to my account of the restricted characterof the hunt as a form of association. The first objection mightbe that hunts are sometimes extended affairs that potentiallyallow the hunter to get to know a lot about the individualanimal he is hunting. This may well seem a plausible objec-




tion. The literature on hunting certainly contains examplesof such protracted hunts (e.g., Lee 1984:48). Hunting mayinclude days of tracking, an initial violent encounter thatwounds the animal, the continued pursuit of the nowwounded animal, and even the driving of the wounded, de-bilitated animal to a location where it could be more easilyretrieved (Laughlin 1968:309). Such a hunt can span days andinvolve a number of encounters, each of which, save perhapsfor the final dispatch, triggers flight in the animal. In thissituation, one clearly would expect the hunter to build up afirsthand knowledge of the hunted animal: tracking the animal(before sighting), stalking the animal (that can be sighted ata distance), shooting the animal and seeing its reaction, andtracking or pursuit of the now wounded animal. One wouldexpect this sort of extended hunt to lead to an accumulationof knowledge by the hunter of the animal being hunted. Thelonger the pursuit, the greater the degree of hunter familiar-ization with the animal, to the point where what began asgeneric hunting becomes “customized” or fine-tuned hunting.At this point, the protracted hunt may come to resemble asocial relationship based on serial interaction. Here we canrecall that Hinde’s own recognition that “a prolonged inter-action takes on some properties of a relationship” (Hinde1987:24). The extended hunt may approximate a relationship.

However, even in a protracted hunt, which is clearly morethan a momentary encounter with the animal, the hunter’sconnection with the animal is hardly comparable to the kindof sociality described among members of the hunter-gathererband. For when the hunter does manage to detect an animal,pursue it, and finally corner and kill it, the encounter is withan animal in extremis—a highly stressed animal fugitive thatis desperate to resist such life-threatening “contact” with ahuman predator. The hunter simply does not have the op-portunity to observe the wild animal in a rounded way be-cause of the animal’s aversion to his presence. The huntercan know the wild animal only in a highly partial, one-dimensional way. This is evident from an anecdote reportedby Washburn and Lancaster in the Man the Hunter book:

In game reserves many different kinds of animals soon learn

not to fear man, and they no longer flee. James Woodburn

took a Hadza into the Nairobi Park, and the Hadza was

amazed and excited, because although he had hunted all his

life, he had never seen such a quantity and variety of animals

close at hand. His previous view of animals was the result

of his having been their enemy, and they had reacted to him

as the most destructive carnivore. In the park the Hadza

hunter saw for the first time the peace of the herbivorous

world. (Washburn and Lancaster 1968:299)

A second objection to my account of the hunt as a restrictedencounter might be that repeat encounters are possible andthat hunting can therefore span more than one interaction.Repeated attempts to hunt specific animals are certainly con-ceivable and have indeed been reported. One only has to thinkof the repeated attempts to catch man-eating predators in

colonial Africa and Asia (Corbett 1944; Hodges-Hill 1992) or“outlaw” wolves in the American West (Fischer 1995:18–19;Lopez 1995:188–192). The pursuit of these notorious animalsin some cases spanned many years, in the course of which acertain knowledge of the particular animal’s behavior couldbe built up. Of course, this kind of “bounty hunt” is hardlya typical form of hunting and in any case has little to do withhunter-gatherers. But even among the latter we should ac-knowledge that, given that hunters often limit their huntingto particular known areas and that prey animals have set homeranges, it would not be that unusual for a hunter to comeacross the trail of an animal he had followed before. Thepossibility of repeat encounters between a hunter and a par-ticular animal cannot, therefore, be ruled out.

In practice, however, “sequel” encounters are highly un-likely. The hunter would need to acquire sufficient infor-mation about the animal on each occasion in order to identifyit as the same animal. But in most unsuccessful hunts, hunterssimply do not get to know enough about the animal thatavoided them or escaped from them to link it to a past huntor to recognize it in a future one. Even if he were to comeacross the trail of the same animal again, the hunter wouldnot necessarily realize that it was a repeat encounter eitherbecause of the poor quality of the tracks or because he hadnot managed to get close enough to the animal first timearound to sight it clearly. In the absence of any real awarenesson the part of the hunter that it is the same animal, the earlierepisode counts for little and cannot carry over and make adifference to the present hunt. As Hinde points out, a rela-tionship effect arises only where one recognizes the identityof the other in both past and present interactions—only thencan the former affect the latter (Hinde 1979:16).3 Where thiscondition is not met, the hunter will pursue the animal asthough it were for the first time, treating it as a stranger.4

Encounters between strangers can lead to a longer-lastingassociation. The first-time encounter, insofar as it allows theparties to spend time together and observe one another atclose quarters, often generates a rudimentary familiarity,which can form the basis of a subsequent relationship. Yet itremains the case that hunting measures up poorly in thisregard. The hunter may devote many hours to hunting, buthe does not, of course, tend to spend a lot of time with theanimal he is hunting. If the hunt is a “joint activity,” it is notone that actually brings together the main parties—hunterand hunted—for any length of time. If the hunt fails and theanimal quarry preemptively flees or hides before the hunter

3. Hinde gives the example of the telephone operator to illustrate thispoint: “You might talk to the same telephone operator every day for aweek, but if you did not know it was the same person, if each conversationwas uninfluenced by what you had learned about the operator as anindividual on previous occasions, you could not have a relationship withhim” (Hinde 1979:16).

4. Sometimes the reverse might be the case, with the hunter believingthat he was on the trail of the one that got away last time when it is infact a different animal.




has a chance to approach it, the two sides may spend no timetogether at all. The prey animal is, after all, typically a human-averse animal that activates its suite of antipredator behaviorswhen hunted. But even if the hunt succeeds, the time of directencounter is still likely to be minimal. The hunter has nointerest in spending time in the company of the living animal;his purpose is normally to dispatch the animal as soon as itcomes within range of his weapon.

The hunt works on the basis of the relative separation ofthe two parties, a separation that is gradually reduced andultimately replaced by a proximity that enables the hunter tomake the kill. In a classic paper on hunting, William Laughlinpointed out that once an animal has been sighted, “attentionthen shifts to getting as close to the animal as necessary foran effective shot” (Laughlin 1968:308), adding that “gettingclose to an animal represents the major investment of theprimitive hunter” (Laughlin 1968:309). Only by mastering theart of self-concealment would the hunter be able to make astealthy approach to the prey animal (Nelson 1997:93). How-ever, this ultimate proximity between hunter and hunted rep-resents a peculiar form of “contact” that barely qualifies asassociation. For one thing, the self-concealment practiced bythe stalking hunter may well be such that the animal nevereven sees the hunter until it is too late. Even if there is mutualdetection, this will not last long. The eventual moment of fullencounter tends to be the moment when the hunt ends—either in dispatch by the hunter or in the flight of the animal.Proximity signals the beginning of the end of the hunt ratherthan the beginning of an intimate human-animal association.In this sense, the “encounter” phase of the hunt is fleetingand momentary. It may be a long time in coming, but whenit does arrive it is over in an instant. As a human-animal“interaction,” the hunt contains a built-in self-terminatingmechanism that precludes the emergence of any appreciablefamiliarity between the principals, let alone the kind of “con-sociation” ascribed to the hunter-gatherer band.

We should at this point address a claim that is sometimesmade by proponents of the hunting-as-sharing thesis aboutthis moment of encounter between hunter and hunted ani-mal. This is that the animal behaves in a way that conformswith the notion of autodonation. Thus, in connection withCree hunting of caribou, Tim Ingold points out that whilethe caribou may flee initially, at a certain point, “instead ofrunning away it stands stock still, turns its head and staresyou squarely in the face,” allowing the hunter to shoot it(Ingold 2000:13). He adds that “[it is at this] moment ofencounter, when the animal stands its ground and looks thehunter in the eye, that the offering is made” (Ingold 2000:13). Paul Nadasdy has made a similar argument, recountingan experience he had snaring rabbits during his fieldwork inthe Kluane First Nation in the Yukon. The rabbit was snared,then escaped (though with the snare still tight around itsneck), but later appeared at Nadasdy’s cabin, where he easilykilled it, leading him to conclude—in line with the beliefs ofhis informants—that “the rabbit came looking for me, that

it quite literally gave itself to me” (Nadasdy 2007:36). Headded that such animal behavior is “inexplicable from withina Euro-American view of the world” (Nadasdy 2007:36).

Should we therefore acknowledge that the hunt can be amore significant face-to-face encounter than I have suggestedabove? What if, short-lived as it is, the quality of the eventualencounter is such that the animal appears to be offering itselfto the hunter? Might the overall pursuit of the animal some-how be trumped by this moment of apparent autodonation?The problem, of course, is that such moments, to the extentthey do actually arise, are at odds with other phases of thehunt as well as untypical of the behavior of hunted animalsgenerally. Indeed, it is precisely because they are exceptionalthat they are remarkable. To suggest that such episodes un-derpin the belief in autodonation begs the question of whythe much more common hunter experience of animal avoid-ance or flight from the hunter does not give rise to oppositebelief. But the basic objection to this kind of argument wouldbe that such a momentary encounter counts for little as faras the standard of sociality represented by the hunter-gathererband is concerned. The members of the band do not bondwith each other on the basis of ephemeral face-to-face en-counters. In sum, despite the face-to-face contact that mayoccur between them, hunter and animal are still strangerswhen the kill takes place.

The hunter can therefore get to know prey animals onlyin general. Although a hunter’s knowledge of prey animalscan increase over time through the accumulation of huntingexperience, he cannot get to know animals as individuals inthe way that he can get to know other people as individuals,through experience of interacting with them over the longterm. The conditions of the hunt simply rule out the devel-opment of personal relationships (based on serial interaction)between hunter and the individual animals pursued. Thehunter’s knowledge of the animal is a general knowledge ofthe species based on piecemeal experiences involving the dif-ferent individual animals he has come across over the courseof his hunting career. Although his knowledge may be con-tinuous and overarching with respect to the species, it is dis-continuous and fragmentary with respect to individual ani-mals. If the hunter does have a relationship with the huntedanimal, it is a categorical or “formal” relationship rather thana personalized one, the polar opposite of the intimate rela-tionships forged in the hunter-gatherer band.5

5. We should acknowledge what might appear to be another possibilityas far as the connection between different hunts is concerned: insofar asthe hunt is understood as leading to spirit revenge (on the part of thehunted animal and directed against the hunter), as manifested in mis-fortune in a subsequent hunt, there is the semblance of a Hindean per-sonal relationship. This is because there are, in a sense, at least two“interactions” between hunter and hunted animal: that of the originalhunt and that of the later hunt affected by what happened in the originalhunt. Might this square the circle as far as the hunting-as-sharing thesisis concerned? The problem is that the band sociality described by pro-ponents of the thesis has to do with interactions among the living—between band members who are routinely copresent and who through




As the hunter cannot get to know real animals personally(because he hunts them), he must rely on a categorical knowl-edge based on animal type. Writers on the topic of categoricalthinking emphasize its convenience as a shortcut to socialknowledge when there is simply not the time or opportunityto acquire a detailed knowledge of other people as individuals.“The power of categorical thinking resides in the fact thatthis information can be generated without the necessity ofextended social interaction with the target. . . . Instead, merecategorization of the individual is sufficient to extract asso-ciated material from semantic memory” (Macrae, Mitchell,and Pendry 2002:187, reference removed). In a “challengingsocial environment,” we have little option but to make useof categories to “simplify and streamline the demands of theperson perception process” (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2001:242). I would suggest that a similar rationale applies to theuse of categorical thinking in the hunt. The nature of thehunt as a spatiotemporal event creates a vacuum as far as anypersonal relationship between hunter and hunted animal isconcerned, one that is then filled by formal understandingsof the relationship. Lacking access to optimal individualizedknowledge of the animal, the hunter is forced to rely onsuboptimal categorical knowledge.

Personal Relationships withDomesticated Animals

Let us return to the question of society beyond humanity withwhich we began. Proponents have argued that it is amonghunters that we should look for “social relations . . . [that]override the boundaries of species” (Ingold 1997:242). Forthe reasons set out above, I question whether there is a per-sonal relationship—as opposed to a formal relationship—between hunter and hunted animal. But if hunting falls shortin this way, does it mean that the notion of human-animalcosociality must be discarded as well? Or are there otherhuman-animal associations that might more convincinglydemonstrate the existence of cross-species personal relation-ships? I argue below that there are.

Domesticated animals are much more promising candi-dates as far as human-animal cosociality is concerned. Forthe purposes of this article, I employ a conventional definitionof “domesticated animal” that denotes a situation of captivetaming that makes possible controlled breeding (cf. Bokonyi1969:219). As a human-animal association, the key feature ofthe domesticated animal is its tameness—that is, its accep-tance of a human presence and of some degree of humanhandling. The combination of captivity and tameness createsa context of association very different from that of hunting.

their actions shape one another’s lives. Given the mutual and practicalcharacter of this sociality, dead band members could not be “consociates”comparable with living band members. Hence, to elevate the dead animal(though its spirit) to the status of interactant would mean departing fromthe very standard of sociality—that of the band—on which the hunting-as-sharing thesis is supposed to be based.

Human interactions with domesticated animals represent spa-tiotemporal events fundamentally different from the encoun-ters with prey animals in the hunt. A new quality of interactionwith people becomes possible for animals that have shed theirfear of humans as potential predators. Human minders anddomesticated animals can form relationships that consist ofa series of regular interactions that potentially build on oneanother in a cumulative way, such that later interactions ac-quire a depth and quality lacking in earlier ones. The rela-tionship emerges through a history of interactions and atten-dant familiarization.

African herders provide examples of such relationships basedon daily interaction and a detailed knowledge of the individualmembers of the herd. Edward Evans-Pritchard has famouslydescribed the intimate daily interactions between Nuer andtheir cattle, including milking them, cleaning the kraal, deco-rating their horns, removing ticks from their bodies, pettingthem, and leading them round the camp in the mornings andevenings (Evans-Pritchard 1940, chap. 1). For the Nuer, cattleare “intimate companions from birth to death” (Evans-Prit-chard 1953:181). The herder’s individuated relationship to andknowledge of the animals of the herd contributes to manage-ment, as the herder can draw on his knowledge of the tem-peraments and positional preferences of particular animalswithin the herd (as it moves or grazes) in day-to-day husbandryand herding tasks (Galaty 1989; Lott and Hart 1979). In anarticle titled “Cowmanship,” Martin Seabrook characterizesstockmanship as “knowing the individual behaviour of everyanimal in one’s charge, and having the ability to recognize smallchanges in the behaviour of any animal or all the animalscollectively” (Seabrook 1977:5). In contrast to a standardizedapproach to the animals of the herd, the ideal of “empatheticstockmanship” holds that the stockman should be able to rec-ognize the temperaments of the different animals and respondto “the individual requirements of individual animals” (Sea-brook and Bartle 1992:122–124).

Another close human-animal relationship is that involvingworking animals—in what Clifton Bryant has referred to asthe “human-animal work team” (Bryant 1992:22). Examplesof this kind of relationship include hunter and dog (Ellen1999:63), cowboy and horse (Lawrence 1984:60), shepherdand wether (Tani 1989), mahout and elephant (Hart 2005:184), circus trainer and performing animal (Kiley-Worthing-ton 1990:134–135), and fruit grower and crop-picking mon-key (Sponsel, Natadecha-Sponsel, and Ruttanadakul 2004).These are instrumental and often extremely hierarchical re-lationships, in which the human handler has power of com-mand over the animal and reinforces this authority by theuse of punishment, albeit in conjunction with rewards. Butthe fact remains that the often impressive degree of physicalcoordination that emerges between the two individuals as theyundertake the task in question is based on a high level ofmutual awareness developed through an association typicallybegun early in the animal’s life and spanning years.

Mention must also be made of the personal relationships




that commonly develop with household pets (Mendl and Har-court 2000:50–51; Sanders 1999; Smuts 2001:302–306). As theterm “companion animal” suggests, this is a human-animalassociation in which much time is normally spent together. Forthe pet, the connection with the human pet owner is likely tobe a lifelong one consisting of a daily round of shared activities,both structured and unstructured. As time passes, this regularcontact often forms the basis of a deep familiarity that is man-ifested in dyadically customized interactions or “rituals” (Smuts2001:303–304). The longer the association lasts, the larger “thecircle of shared experience” and with it the greater the degreeof “mutual attunement” (Smuts 2001:304, 306). By virtue oftheir shared biographical history, the two parties come to knoweach other as individuals rather than types (cf. Shapiro 1997:294–295). In the process, there develops an attachment betweenthem that is expressed in terms such as “member of the family”and “friend” that are applied to the pet (Arluke and Sanders1996:10–12; Beck and Katcher 1996, chap. 3; Serpell 1996:106–107). The extent of this relationship finds further expressionin the grief and sense of bereavement commonly experiencedby the pet owner upon the death of the pet (Archer and Win-chester 1994; Beck and Katcher 1996, chap. 10; McNicholasand Collis 1995).

The hunt, by its nature, does not allow this kind of processto occur. Tim Ingold has famously argued that “trust” is afeature of the hunt, but in fact what is striking about huntingis the elemental mistrust that disposes the animal to avoidcontact with the hunter. Even where the hunter manages toclose the gap with the animal and achieve a measure of “con-tact,” his inclination is to seize the opportunity and dispatchthe animal rather than try and associate directly with it. Inpassing, we should recognize that the latter is a theoreticalpossibility: even if it provokes animal flight, fragile first con-tact between a human and a human-averse wild animal canstill form the first small step in a protracted familiarizationprocess that ultimately leads to a degree of animal toleranceof human presence. This kind of association, known as “ha-bituation,” is, after all, the basis of the field methodology ofmany a zoologist (Mech 1988; Moss 1996; Williamson andFeistner 2003). But the hunter, of course, is not in the businessof promoting the habituation of the animals he hunts, stillless in bonding with them. He simply wants to kill them inorder to procure meat and the other resources they can supply.

At this point the following objection might be made. Hun-ter-gatherers do sometimes keep the young of animals killedin the hunt. This practice of what might be called juvenilelive capture is widely reported (Erikson 2000; Galton 1865;Serpell 1996, chap. 4). These young animals are raised by thehunter and his family. They are fed, watered, affectionatelyhandled, played with, and protected by their human carers,who are often women and children. The association can lastyears, although the animals may well be confined or discardedas they mature and become difficult to handle (Cormier 2002:73–74; Shepard 2002:110). They rarely breed and so do notconstitute domesticated animals (according to the conven-

tional definition given above), and new individuals have tobe recurrently recruited from the hunt. But on account oftheir tameness and the longevity of their association withfamily members, these animals clearly do form personal re-lationships with humans. The captive taming of juvenile an-imals makes possible an extended series of interactions thatmakes for personal relationships comparable with those de-scribed for Western pet keeping above. The existence of suchhunt-facilitated pet keeping among hunter-gatherers mightseem, on the face of it, to call into question the argumentadvanced in this article.

My response would be to point out that these intimatehuman-animal associations in themselves have little to dowith hunting. The animals may be procured through the hunt,but once they are captured alive and brought back to camp,they cease to be prey animals and become quasi family mem-bers. To argue that hunter-gatherer pet keeping has to beunderstood in relation to hunting would be like saying thatmodern pet keeping in urban-industrial societies has to beunderstood in relation to shopping because many pets areobtained through purchase. But this would be to miss the keyfeature of pet keeping as a form of human-animal association.The association between pet and pet keeper may be initiatedby an act of purchase, but the status of the animal is thentransposed to something other than a commodity—hence,the aforementioned designation of the pet as a member ofthe family. Similarly, with hunter-gatherers, the animal ac-quired through the hunt is subsequently inserted into a whollydifferent context of association. This transformation in statusis indicated by the fact that while its conspecifics in the wildcontinue to be caught and eaten, the individual pet is notconsidered edible (Serpell 1996:63–64; Shepard 2002:110). Itis not a living store of meat in a transitional state betweenlive capture and eventual consumption. Its personal relation-ship with the human carer arises because the animal has beenremoved from the sphere of hunting in which it originated.

Conclusion

This article has critically evaluated what I have called thehunting-as-sharing thesis—the claim that hunter-gatherersview hunting as similar to sharing within the band and seeprey animals as belonging to a common sphere of person-alized sociality. We have seen that the two areas of hunter-gatherer sociality, human-human and human-animal, whichare supposed to be similar in character, instead turn out tobe fundamentally different. One involves relationships withindividuals, the other a relation to a class. When Ingold dis-cusses the hunter-gatherer band, he describes an intimate anddurable sociality between real individuals who share spaceand time. Humans enter into relationships with particularother humans, and the uniqueness of a relationship is fash-ioned by the shared history between the two individuals. Yetwhen he discusses the human-animal “sociality” of the hunt,the “personalized relationship” is no longer between real sen-




tient individuals but between a human individual (a hunter)and a class of animals (corresponding to the Spirit). In otherwords, while human-human sociality inheres in interindivi-dual sentient encounters that extend serially over time, thehuman-animal “sociality” of the hunt does not. Althoughspecific people in the hunting band have personal relation-ships with specific other people, they cannot have commen-surable personal relationships with the specific animals theyhunt. To the extent that there is an encounter in the hunt, itis an anonymous one. At most, there is a representation ofa personal relationship with an anthropomorphic Spirit who“owns” the whole class of animal conspecifics. There are directone-to-one relationships among humans, but only an indirectone-to-many relation between humans and animals.

This article has also reanalyzed the hunt as a form ofhuman-animal association, drawing on biologist RobertHinde’s model of relationships. I have argued that the natureof hunting precludes the existence of personal relationshipsbetween hunters and hunted animals that are comparable toeither those found among members of the hunter-gathererband or those between humans and domesticated animals. Ido not deny that hunting is represented as sharing, but I dochallenge the claim that this is an understanding that arisesout of the hunt itself. On the one hand, the hunted animalsare not party to any such sharing arrangement. Hunters knowall too well that they are dealing with an animal that activelyresists the hunt rather than passively submits to it. The prac-tical truth of the hunt is that the life of the hunted animalis not something “given” by the animal but something thathas to be taken by the hunter. The hunter knows from ex-perience that hunting is something done to rather than withthe animals hunted. On the other hand, the conditions of thehunt are such that hunters are unable to experience actualhunted animals as partners in a personal relationship. Thehunter’s relationship with the “Spirit” figure, which has aquasi-proprietorial relation to the animals as a whole, maybe superimposed onto each hunt, but it cannot abolish thedynamics of the hunt as a spatiotemporal event. If it appliesat all, the notion of hunting-as-sharing applies at a cosmo-logical rather than an experiential level.

If this is the case, then we should recognize that logically,“hunting-as-sharing” does not mean that sharing somehowreplaces killing but rather that sharing coexists with killing,albeit at different levels—that is, the killing of animals at onelevel and the sharing of these animals with the Spirit at an-other. When the hunt is viewed in generic terms, the deathsof individual animals recede from view. The effect of thisrepresentation is to expurgate from the hunt the basic dis-position of the hunted animal. The animal is, as it were,subsumed in the larger relationship between hunter andSpirit. The individual animal hunted thus connects with thesharing process not as itself one of the active sharing partiesbut rather as that which is passively shared between the twosharing parties (hunter and Spirit). As a subject of the sharingrelationship, the individual animal is effectively absent.

In reality, the sentient animal does exist as an intrinsic partof the hunt. It makes its recalcitrant agency felt when it evadesthe hunter and thwarts his best efforts to catch it. Even whenthe hunter does succeed, it is the extent of the animal’s resis-tance against which the hunter’s achievement in catching ittends to be measured. But this connection between themthrough the hunt has nothing to do with sociality. The animal’sagency is expressed not in its ability to enter into a relationshipwith the hunter but, as it were, in its ability to avoid such arelationship in the first place. Even when the hunter does makethe kill and turns his hitherto limited association with the an-imal into direct control over its body, socially this is an act ofclosure, which ends the association. The successful hunt endsnot just the life of the animal but also any possibility of apersonal relationship with it. There are many human-animalassociations that merit recognition as examples of cross-speciessociality, but hunting is not one of them.

Comments

David G. AndersonDepartment of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, Universiteteti Tromsø, N-111 Breviklia, 9037 Tromsø, Norway ([email protected]). 26 VIII 11

I would like to thank John Knight for so clearly placing thequestion of human-animal sociality back on the agenda. Sev-eral generations of ethnographers have carefully documentedhuman-animal relationships outside of the urban heartlands,and it sometimes saddens one to see the debate being nowclumsily rehearsed in other disciplines. I applaud his intentionto question the categorical crispness of the “hunting-as-shar-ing” hypothesis. However, I am troubled by his deep adher-ence to neoliberal categories of animals as individuals.

I agree that the formulations of the “cosmic economy ofsharing” and even that of “trust” convey a strong element ofmutuality that does not capture the complexity of human-animal reciprocity. Running the risk of reciting my level-onelecture notes, reciprocity need not be kind. Indeed, SiberianEvenki hunters sometimes describe their environment as “ca-pricious.” Recent ethnographers of this disintegrating eco-nomic and ecological setting document what can only bedescribed as an anxious form of “taking,” complete with curs-ing and the conscious overstepping of traditional boundaries,to compensate for declining hunting luck (Anderson 2011;Brandisauskas 2009; Willerslev 2007). But even a fraught re-lationship can still be a social relationship.

Knight sounds an important note of caution by remindingus that reciprocity is often mediated by Spirits, or Masters,or the landscape seen as an agent in itself. However, it is alarge and unfortunate leap to assume that encounters with“individual” animals are therefore “ephemeral” or “anony-






mous.” Empirically, in almost every circumpolar context withwhich I am familiar, it is not the case that successful hunterscome to know their prey only while tracking to kill it. Mosttaiga people know their neighbors “intimately” through ob-serving their movements and their actions and by readinganimal tracks and attending to their dreams. This may notbe a Hollywood romance form of intimacy, but when donescrupulously it nevertheless leads to a remarkable profile ofan animal’s personality. This knowledge can be used to huntan animal if needed, but as often animals are just watchedand known. Perhaps the fault here is in framing all of thesecomplex interactions as with the ideologically charged word“hunting” (although this is certainly a valid metaphor forsocial relations; Nadasdy 2011). Cosmologically, many peopledo not experience individuality in the same way that urbanliberal democrats do. This basic ethnographic fact has twostrands. The first is that the consumption of corporal animalbodies does not imply the (“violent”) destruction of that con-crete, fully formed individual. Most taiga peoples see the lifeprocess as encompassing both life and death. They experiencethat the same animal person, when respectfully hunted, re-turns again and again (Fienup-Riordan 1990). A successfulhunt is not the destruction of an individual life but ratherthe continuity of taiga life. Second, talk of Spirits does notimply a dualistic division between sacred and profane butrather a classic example of surnature or “Supernature” (cf.Hamayon 1990; Zarcone 2005), wherein the concrete impliesthe universal. There is no category error in this literature, asKnight suggests. In other words, the Master of the taiga isembodied in that moose that turns toward the hunter. Rather,Knight and Hinde are exporting their own faith in possessiveindividualism to inappropriate contexts. The trick is how torepresent the feeling of surnature ethnographically using sucha literal language as English, and here I agree we all still havesome work to do. The metaphors of hunting as “sharing” oras “trust” have served us well in communicating these world-views to our students. But they are still metaphors—one stepaway from lived experience. Unlike Knight, I suggest that weopen ourselves to these worlds rather than insist that allworlds be like our own.

Knight concludes with his earlier suggestion (2005) thatso-called domesticated animals enjoy a heightened type ofcosociality with people. Again, I support his work in tryingto describe this sociality. But I wonder why caged or confinedanimals provide a more “promising” model. It is simply adifferent model. Proponents of this worldview often paradethe famous multidecade experiment of selective breeding tocreate a litter of affectionate, infantlike Arctic foxes withfloppy ears (Beliaev 1972; Trut 1999). Their resulting off-spring, for reasons which we do not understand, phenotyp-ically consent to confinement and tolerate human copresenceand an extremely patronizing type of care—but they are nolonger able to fend for themselves. As in Peter Pan, they arechildren forever. This is indeed a form of cosociality, andmoreover one of dependence, but at what price? Is there no

virtue in a more elliptical form of cosociality consisting ofcircumspect encounters wherein the animal’s agency andpower is respected? I suggest that by defining cosociality socozily, Knight is doing great violence both to the ethnographicrecord and to the wealth of real experience out there betweenpeople and animals.

Nurit Bird-DavidDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa,Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel ([email protected]). 28 VIII11

It is a pleasure to read this article, which takes me back tosome ideas that I worked on 20 years ago. I appreciate JohnKnight’s critical attention to the subject and the clear expo-sition of his critique. Reading his article spurs me into think-ing how this critique can be further pursued.

Knight focuses on what he calls the “hunting-as-sharingthesis” as a means of probing the broader claim about themonistic worldviews of hunter-gatherers. His “hunting-as-sharing” thesis draws together complex cultural ethnographiesand clear-cut analytical terminology borrowed from the studyof animal behavior. A hybrid argumentation of this kindmight trouble cultural anthropologists from the outset. ButI find the article engaging, and the clarity gained by this hybridargumentation is challenging. Whether one agrees or disagreeswith its thesis, this article forces us to think clearly about whatwe are saying. It invites us to pursue further the concernsthat Knight raises.

One direction in which this can be carried out concernsthe analytical terminology that comes from the 1970s workof the biologist Robert Hinde. Hinde commendably offersanalytical terms that in Knight’s words are “not so anthro-pocentrically loaded as to preclude nonhumans from the out-set” yet are sharp and precise. But these analytical terms tran-scend human-nonhuman distinctions in a particular culturalway. Hinde posits preexisting stand-alone individuals (hu-mans and others), and he distinguishes between the “inter-actions” and “relationships” into which they enter in Car-tesian temporal terms: “interactions” refers to one-off,short-term engagements and “relations” to a series thereofover time. It seems that hunter-gatherers approach transcend-ing human-nonhuman distinctions in other ways. Work inthe late 1990s and 2000s examines hunter-gatherers’ relationalnotions of personhood and how these notions extend to hu-mans and nonhumans (see, e.g., Bird-David 1999, 2004, 2008;Ingold 2000). This work suggests that living together andsharing are paradigmatically pregiven in the ontologies ofsome hunter-gatherers. These people are born into their re-lational worlds and sustain them; they do not act as free-floating individuals, with each producing his relations throughrepeated interactions. Sharing is not simply a function ofcumulative interactions over time in these cases. It would be





interesting to continue Knight’s work by considering hunt-ing—to the extent that it is a test case for the claim of hunter-gatherers’ monistic worlds (on which see more below)—insuch relational terms.

A second direction in which Knight’s critique can be pur-sued concerns the diversity of ethnographies that he uses andhow he draws them together. The “hunting-as-sharing” thesisis a sort of a “straw man” that Knight synthesizes from diversetheoretical and ethnographic works; this does a good job, yetit is still a straw man. The “hunting-as-sharing” thesis com-bines theoretical concepts (e.g., “the cosmic economy of shar-ing”) drawn mainly from work on immediate return, espe-cially subtropical forest peoples, who though classified ashunter-gatherers gather and hardly hunt, and concepts ofhunting among delayed-return Northern peoples, whothough classified as hunter-gatherers hunt more than theygather. The immediate-return hunter-gatherers’ sense of shar-ing as predicating living together over time (but not only this;see above) is juxtaposed with both the Western factuality ofthe hunt as involving ipso facto one-off, short-term engage-ment between the hunter and the kill and the Northern peo-ples’ own distinctions between the flesh-and-blood animalsthey kill and the animals’ spirits and the Animal Master withwhom they share. It would be interesting to examine the“hunting-as-sharing” thesis for the Northern peoples whiletaking into account their senses of sharing. Moreover, it wouldbe interesting to put to the test the “cosmic economy ofsharing” idea, but with respect to the lived experience andideas of the subtropical forest peoples themselves.

Knight’s critique does a good job in reminding us of theneed to keep checking and refining ideas and to navigate thedelicate balance between simplifying and complicating eth-nographic analysis.

Garry MarvinDepartment of Life Sciences, University of Roehampton, White-lands College, Holybourne Avenue, London SW15 4JD, UnitedKingdom ([email protected]). 1 VIII 11

I am not an anthropologist of those societies, the focus ofattention of this article, in which hunting is an importantelement in subsistence procurement. I therefore restrict mycomments to only one element of the piece. My research hasbeen with those who might be classified as sport, leisure, orrecreational hunters. With them I have sought to understandwhat is enacted, expressed, and experienced before, during,and after hunting. This article poses interesting questionsabout what occurs between hunters and hunted animals. Itwould be less clumsy to write that it asks questions about therelationships between humans and animals in hunting, butthe author queries whether there is ever a relationship, of anindividual kind, at all. The denial of this possibility is arguedin terms of one definition, that of Robert Hinde, who defines

a relationship as a series of interactions that exist over a periodof time. This is a perfectly serviceable definition for use inmany contexts, but my concern is that the author uses onedefinition and imposes it on all hunting. One could takeanother definition of social relationships, as Paul Nadasdydoes, reworking Alfred Schutz, in his exploration of animalpersonhood and hunting, which would allow understandingwhat occurs between an individual hunter and an individualhunted animal to be a relationship. “Sociality is constitutedby communicative acts in which the I (the hunter) turns toothers (animals), apprehending them as persons who turn tohim, and both know this fact” (Nadasdy 2007:32). This mightbe a way of conceiving what occurs between the hunter andthe hunted as a relationship, but it still does not solve theissue for me because of the “is-ness” here; “sociality is”—butwho is doing the defining?

Hunting is a complex social and cultural activity. I believethat one of the tasks of the anthropologist who studies huntingshould be to reveal this complexity from within rather thanto decide what it is from outside. I am sympathetic to theauthor’s questioning of what happens between the hunter andthe hunted. My concern is that what is questioned is largelythe metalevel interpretations and arguments of and betweenanthropologists rather than an exploration of the ethno-graphic accounts of what hunters believe, say, and do, or atleast how they express this to ethnographers. I use two shortexamples to suggest that we need to turn to grounded eth-nography in order to answer questions about human-animalencounters and experiences in hunting.

The author asserts that a hunter cannot draw on any pre-vious knowledge of a particular animal at the beginning of ahunt and that when hunter and hunted first encounter oneanother they are literally strangers. This is a general assertionabout all hunting cultures or about no hunting culture inparticular. From a perspective outside a particular huntingculture, this might seem a sensible interpretation—how cana hunter know the wild pig, suddenly visible through thevegetation, as an individual? But questions can be asked dif-ferently of the hunter, or hunters can be listened to whenthey speak among themselves. Do they speak of wild pigs asindividuals? Perhaps they do not, and the pig they see is justone of a category. But if they do speak of it as a person oran individual, what is individuality in animals for them? Ithink we should be interested in what they have to say.

A second example that should be teased out in terms ofparticular hunting cultures is the author’s assertion that “Whatthe hunt, as an event, simply does not allow is for the hunterto build up a ‘file’ on the individual animal he happens to comeacross.” I read building a “file” here as developing some sortof relationship. My problem again is that this is too generaland culturally nonspecific. Maybe hunters do simply happenupon an animal and are able to kill it moments after seeing it.Hardly time for a relationship perhaps, but maybe there is fromthe hunter’s perspective and beliefs. Most hunting, however,seems to involve more than happening upon animals. Often it





involves spending considerable time during which the hunterand hunted attempt to outmaneuver each other. Do huntersthemselves speak of having a relationship with an individualanimal during this process? Maybe they do not, and the an-thropologist can move on to other questions. If they do, thenwe should pay attention to the nature, development, and ex-perience of this relationship—how it is for the hunter and thehunted to encounter one another.

I have offered critical comments on only one aspect of thisarticle. I applaud the author’s questions, but my plea is forricher ethnographic evidence in the answers.

Molly MullinDepartment of Anthropology, Albion College, Albion, Michigan49224, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 20 X 11

John Knight’s article in some ways helps bridge an unfortunategap between the ethnographic literature on hunting and thelarger fields of anthrozoology and human-animal studies. De-spite the prevalence of the “hunting-as-sharing” discourseamong northern hunters, the ethnographic literature can seema world unto itself. Knight’s application of Hinde’s model ofrelationships seems especially helpful. Hinde’s model intro-duces some welcome clarity and allows for nonjudgmentalcomparison. To note that interactions with domesticated ani-mals can involve more cross-species sociality than hunting doesis not to denigrate hunters or hunting. However, Knight canalso be read as dismissing the importance of how Native huntersthink and talk about the world they live in.

Knight argues that how we understand hunters’ notions ofanimals is important because hunters’ ideas have been usedby Ingold, Bird-David, and other scholars to challenge theuniversality of dualistic thinking about nature and society. Iwill leave for another discussion entirely whether nature-culture dualism is the same as nature-society dualism. Andfor just a moment, I will set aside the question of whetherhunters’ ideas are important regardless of how scholars mayhave used them. Discussions of nature-culture/society dualismusually involve more than hunting and ideas about animals.Ingold, in particular, has emphasized hunting as part of alarger environmental context. Hunting as a means of existenceinvolves not just ideas about animals but also spatial orien-tations that contrast with those more supportive of nature-culture dualism. Domestication does not just involve “rela-tionships” with individual animals (Cassidy and Mullin 2007);it also involves settlement and housing patterns that can en-courage a sense of nature as being “out there.” How peoplerepresent themselves and their environments is important.

If hunting-as-reciprocity ideas provide contrasts withnature-culture dualism, they can do so regardless of whetherwe agree that reciprocity is an “accurate” representation andregardless of whether they obscure violence. Nature-culturedualism is, after all, a pattern of perception and representa-

tion. Similarly, Knight seems to ignore the effort made byIngold and Bird-David to describe the viewpoints of hunterswithout judging them. Knight writes, for example, that “forBird-David, the forest is a ‘sharing partner.’” For Bird-David,or for the people she is writing about?

Nadasdy (2007) has offered a very different sort of critiqueof Bird-David and Ingold. By describing beliefs about hunt-ing-as-reciprocity while unwilling to consider the possibilitythat animals really do give themselves to hunters (Knightmentions this part of Nadasdy’s article), ethnographers, Na-dasdy argues, help to marginalize the people they write about.For a variety of reasons, Nadasdy’s argument seems unlikelyto find many in agreement, but he helpfully distinguishesbetween describing people’s beliefs and agreeing with them(Viveiros de Castro 1998 and Kohn 2007a, 2007b offer otherinteresting perspectives that manage to take reciprocity seri-ously as a “valid” or reasonable way of comprehending huntedanimals while allowing for difference between views of eth-nographers and those of hunters).

Although not particularly convincing in some of its partic-ulars, Nadasdy’s article also mentioned historical context. Theabsence of historical context is one of the factors that can makethis ethnographic literature (including this article and those ofthe authors Knight critiques) seem so arcane. Related factorsinclude the tendency to make sweeping generalizations withlittle recognition of variation. It is, of course, notoriously dif-ficult or impossible to avoid oversimplifying when providinga comparative analysis. I am not suggesting that comparativeanalysis of cross-species sociality be abandoned. I find persua-sive Knight’s objections to hunting as a good example of suchsociality. But what is the purpose of getting this clarity abouthunting? Knight suggests that his purpose is to better under-stand (and critique) nature-culture dualism. I am not convincedthat Knight has achieved that larger goal of gaining clarity ondualism and its supposed alternatives. A more suitable goalmight be to help make ethnography on this topic more acces-sible to a wider audience. At any rate, at least some consid-eration of historical context is in order. Nonetheless, Knightprovides insightful and, at this point, refreshingly unorthodoxobservations about hunting and how it has been representedby hunters and ethnographers.

Laura RivalSchool of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, 51 BanburyRoad, Oxford OX2 6PE, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 2 XI 11

Knight agrees with Ingold that society exists beyond humanityand that humans and animals may partake in shared sociality.For Knight, however, it is the relation between a herder andhis livestock rather than that between a hunter and his preythat gives us the right model for social relations across speciesboundaries. Personal relationships need to be cultivated over







time for cross-species sociality to flourish. By deploying In-gold’s carefully chosen terminology to explore the physicalcoordination that emerges over time between two individualsgetting habituated to each other—the human tamer and thetamed animal—Knight is able to show that hunting involveskilling, which puts an end to the relation to the prey. Animaldomestication, by contrast, involves humans who attend to“the individual requirements of individual animals.”

The author should be commended for inviting us to goback to the question, What constitutes a social relation? LikeIngold, he understands the social as resulting from dyadicassociations between individuals; but inspired by ethologistRobert A. Hinde and his distinction between “interaction”and “relationship,” he goes a step further and examines theobjective basis of intersubjectivity. This leads him to contrastone-off events (e.g., a hunt) with iterative series of events(e.g., animal domestication) and to conclude that whetheroccurring among humans or between humans and animals,sociality arises from personal relationships.

Is it really possible to abstract sociality from the culturalmeanings people attach to their social practices? For theHuaorani hunter, killing a monkey is a completely differentaction from killing a peccary. The hunting of monkeys in-volves humans sharing fruit-producing forests with animalsand hunters sharing their blowpipes with kin. Monkey “blowhunting” requires applied concentration in weapon and poi-son making, calm dexterity in weapon use, and skilled masteryof the art of attracting the prey and keeping it close. It is nothunting (the action of blowing) that causes the monkey’sdeath but curare poison. Killing in Huaorani means “causingsomeone to die by spearing.” Peccaries are “spear killed” ex-actly like human enemies are, by inflicting large wounds atclose range, tearing internal organs, and spilling blood. Thepeccary hunter, like the warrior, manufactures and decorateshis deadly personalized spears in hiding while chanting warsongs. White-lipped peccaries come in packs, like invaders,and the Huaorani find their proximity enraging. Killing pec-caries is a violent and dangerous business. Peccary offspringare not adopted as pets; they are butchered and eaten alongwith the adults and subadults (Rival 1996). Much Amazon-ianist ethnography similarly points to a fundamental contrastbetween plants and animals that are treated as close kin andthose that are apprehended much more ambivalently as po-tential affines.

Like many Amerindian and Nordic hunters, the Huaoraniregard the animals they hunt as types of their species ratherthan as individuals. Moreover, they tend to personify typesrather than manifestations of types. This is why shamanismand mythology form essential components of monkey blowhunting or peccary spear killing (Rival 2002, 2005). Cross-cultural comparative work sheds light on the specific culturalpatterning of human-animal relations in the Americas (oftenreferred to as “animism” or “perspectivism”) as well as onthe specificities of hunting practices among the Huaorani(Rival 1996), the Achuar (Descola 1994), or the Cree (Scott

1989). Special attention must therefore be paid to collectivehistory. This is especially true of people who both hunt anddomesticate animals. It would be impossible, for instance, tofully understand why the Yukaghirs think of themselves as“double agents” who “play dirty tricks” on the elk they huntwithout reference to their colonial experience of control andmanipulation under the Soviet regime (Willerslev 2007:10).The experience of colonization is also central to Avila Runa’scollective engagements with nature. When they think aboutpeccaries as the domestic pigs of animal masters (Kohn 2007a:107) or when they treat their dogs as semiwild animals whosedreams their shamans can interpret (Kohn 2007b), the AvilaRuna make cultural choices that cannot be explained awayby invoking an ontology of dwelling or by relying on a contrastbetween anonymous interaction and personalized relation-ship. Sociality does not arise independently from conceptu-alizations of the social. Abstracting one-to-one social relationsfrom their cultural context, as the author proposes, does vi-olence to the ethnographic data.

For Haudricourt (1962), who is every bit as inclined to“rid observation from all preconceptions” (Bensa 2010:219–220) as Ingold is, humans dynamically interact with ecologicaland historical constraints through sensory and investigatoryexperience and transform them into choices and values. Thisis why his famous contrast between European pastoralismand Asian gardening is based on the holistic analysis of theecosystems, techniques, and representations that togethercharacterize the two great civilizations and open up “the pos-sibility of organisational schemata common to both the nat-ural and the cultural orders” (Bensa 2010:222). Anthropologywill have nothing to say about society beyond humanity unlessit continues to take seriously, as Haudricourt did, the systemsof values and ideas in which personal relationships with otherthan humans become meaningful.

James A. SerpellSchool of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadel-phia, Pennsylvania 19104, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 14 X 11

The Soul of the Animal

Knight’s critique of the hunting-as-sharing thesis is predicatedon the assertion that true sharing can occur only in the contextof ongoing personal relationships (sensu Hinde 1979) andthat it is erroneous to describe hunting in terms of sharingbecause personal relationships never develop in the “anony-mous one-off interaction” between a hunter and his prey.While it is hard to dispute the premise that a hunter cannotliterally establish a personal relationship with an actual flesh-and-blood animal in the context of a hunt—or even serialhunts—this does not necessarily preclude him from perceiv-ing his relationship with the animal as being a deeply personal





one fraught with ongoing reciprocal obligations. A key ele-ment missing from Knight’s argument that may help to clarifythis point is the belief in animal “souls.”

The idea that animals possess noncorporeal spirits or soulsthat animate their bodies and survive them after death isubiquitous among hunter-gatherer societies (Guenther 1988;Hallowell 1926; Paulson 1964; Speck 1977). These souls havethe ability to communicate with each other (Sharp 1988), areviewed as fully sentient and aware of the activities of hunters,and also are capable of taking offense at—and seeking revengefor—disrespectful, wasteful, or immodest conduct (Campbell1984; Guenther 1988; Martin 1978; Nelson 1986; Rasmussen1929; Speck 1977; Wenzel 1991). At the same time, animalsand their souls are considered to be rational and potentiallysympathetic to the hunter’s need to provide for himself andhis family. And, in many cultures, the animals are believedto get something in return for their sacrifice, namely, theprospect of rebirth at some point in the future. There istherefore an element of reciprocity in the relationship: theanimal voluntarily sacrifices its body to the hunter, providedthat respectful and appropriate conduct is observed, and inreturn the hunter releases the animal’s soul to return to thespirit realm, whence it will eventually be resurrected (Rasing1989). Hunter and animal are thus mutually interdependent,each needing the other to sustain or renew life.

Although individual animals are often conceived of as beingsubordinate to some form of supernatural “Animal Master,”Knight exaggerates the extent to which these are typicallyrepresented as anthropomorphic “owners” or “controllers” ofanimals. According to most accounts, such spirits are usuallydepicted as larger-than-life theriomorphic archetypes of thespecies they represent who, like parents or benevolent leaders,defend the interests of the animals over whom they exerciseauthority (Paulson 1964). The animals, meanwhile, continueto operate as quasi-autonomous agents. Indeed, given theiranthropomorphic, Westernized appearance and behavior, thepossessive, controlling versions of the Animal Master conceptreferred to by Knight look more like the products of earlycontact with Christian missionaries (Speck 1977).

The concept of animal souls also provides a mechanism bywhich direct, ongoing, interpersonal interactions betweenhunter and animal can be said to occur. In most hunter-gatherer societies, the contents of dreams or visions are con-sidered both real and prophetic and are actively sought afteras a means of entering the supernatural realm and obtainingthe guidance or patronage of animal spirits (Benedict 1923;Eliade 1964; Landes 1968; Sharp 1988). While the animalsthat appear in these dream states are presumably generic inthe sense of being “spokespersons” for a particular taxon, theinteractions with them are undoubtedly experienced as mean-ingful, intimate, and personal. Also, because these encountersrecur throughout a hunter’s life, the relationship with theanimal will doubtless acquire the qualities of an ongoing “werelationship,” albeit one that exists in a different realm ofconsciousness. It could be argued, of course, that such rela-

tionships are imaginary and therefore irrelevant to Knight’scritique. But they are evidently perceived as real as well asbeing directly relevant to the process and outcome of thephysical encounters with animals that occur during hunts.

Finally, Knight acknowledges that human-nonhuman co-sociality can arise in relationships with domestic animals andhousehold pets but states that these “intimate human-animalassociations in themselves have little to do with hunting.”While the former observation is self-evident, the latter ishighly questionable. Erikson (1987, 2000), for example, hasargued that the widespread practice of nurturing and sharingfood with wild animal pets among Amerindian communitiesserves, among other things, as a means of earning the approvalof the pet’s wild conspecifics, who will then be more inclinedto “share” their bodies with people in return. Conversely,among the Alaskan Koyukan, pet keeping is proscribed onthe grounds that it might be deemed offensive to the pet’swild kinsmen (Nelson 1986). In both cases, relationships withpets and with prey animals are viewed as directly connected,although clearly in opposite ways.

In summary, if hunter-gatherers perceive their “commonsphere of sociality” as encompassing long-term relationshipswith both tamed pets and the spirits of their wild brethrenencountered during periods of altered consciousness, thehunting-as-sharing thesis still holds.

Rane WillerslevMuseum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Postbox 6762, St.Olavsplass, 0130 Oslo, Norway ([email protected]). 8 VII11

What I find especially instructive about Knight’s pragmaticand down-to-earth argument is that it reveals the basic needfor anthropologists to elucidate exactly what they mean by“sociality” when it comes to human-animal relations. Thereis little doubt that the promoters of the so-called monisticthesis have had a too easy time in claiming that indigenoushunters and their prey engage in social relations of “sharing,”marked, as it were, by the animal’s self-sacrifice to the hunter’sweapon. Quite clearly, matters are not that simple. First, it ishumanly implausible that hunters, who search for game ona daily basis, would be ignorant of the fact that the interestsof prey not only differ from their own but indeed conflictwith them. Second, it is hard to believe that peoples who fullydepend on hunting to survive would kill an animal only whenit “gives itself up freely” to the hunter. Indeed, were we totake the monistic thesis at face value, we would effectivelyhave aligned these people with some sort of “death wish,” forsurely a community of hunters who simply wait for their preyto show and give themselves up would not survive long.

Knight is, therefore, quite right in questioning much cur-rent anthropological theory on human-animal relationsamong indigenous hunters. I am, however, not entirely con-





vinced that he himself provides a reliable alternative when heintroduces a set of dualisms between the animal and its spiritand between hunters and herders. Within the ethnographicliterature on hunter-gatherers, it is hard to find any ethno-graphic examples of a clear-cut dualism between the animalas flesh and its associated spiritual being. To provide just oneilluminating example, when Waldemar Jochelson asked a Si-berian Koryak about the difference between the sea and itsspirit, the latter first looked as if he did not understand thequestion and then replied, “We say, ‘sea’ and ‘owner of thesea’: it is just the same” (Jochelson 1926:30). It would, there-fore, be a misunderstanding to regard the sea as a kind oflodging in which the spirit resides. Quite to the contrary, thespirit is in some important sense the physical substance seenfrom the outside. The two can therefore hardly be separatedand on no account by way of the kind of dualism suggestedby Knight. It would perhaps be more fruitful to interpret thetwo dimensions “as constituting the figure and ground of eachother” (Viveiros de Castro 2001:42, emphasis in original),which implies that they are “reversibles” (Corsın Jimenez andWillerslev 2007; Willerslev 2009). Accordingly, animal-spiritrelations, along with the types of sociality at work betweenhumans and nonhumans, would effectively be a “deictic” phe-nomenon—that is, the respective presence of one of the di-mensions would depend on who sees and from where. Togive an example, Ludek Broz (2007) has described how amongthe Altaians in Central Asia, the animal spirit is said to con-sider itself a herder looking after its flock of domesticatedanimals, whereas from the viewpoint of human hunter, thesame animals appear as wild prey. Moreover, from the spirit’sperspective, hunters are seen as predatory wolves thieving,whereas the hunters themselves seek to engage in a relation-ship of mutual reciprocity with the spirit. In addition, all ofthese persons and their relationships can be turned “insideout” and “upside down”—something that both humans andspirits frequently do as a way of capitalizing on resources andavoiding being harmed by the other.

My point is that we do not have to go very deep into thecosmologies of indigenous hunters and herders to realize thatthe kinds of dualisms suggested by Knight do not apply well.This is so because these peoples hardly ever see things, ani-mals, or transactions as just themselves but always see themas something else as well, which makes it difficult, in factimpossible, to specify whether we are dealing with phenomenaof hunting or herding, sharing or thieving, and above all,animals or spirits.

Reply

Limitations of space mean that my response to the commentsabove has to be selective and cannot do justice to the manyvaluable points raised. Let us start with individualism. Both

Anderson and Bird-David make reference to this as a problemin my analysis. Anderson takes me to task for a “deep ad-herence to neoliberal categories of animals as individuals” andfor my supposed “faith in possessive individualism.” For herpart, Bird-David refers to Hinde’s model of relationships asbased on “preexisting stand-alone individuals” and goes onto characterize hunter-gatherers as “people . . . born into theirrelational worlds,” contrasting this with “free-floating indi-viduals” that produce their relations. The point seems to bethat there is a lack of fit between the kind of sociality foundin the hunter-gatherer band and (what these commentatorssee as) the individualistic theory of relationships I have em-ployed (this “misapplication” objection is also made by Rival,albeit in somewhat different terms). The charge seems to beI am using something akin to a formalist approach to analyzesociality.

Responding to Bird-David first, it is clear enough from thelanguage she uses that she interprets Hinde’s model in just-so social-contract terms according to which isolated, presocialindividuals come together in an interaction that then developsinto a relationship. I think that this is an unnecessarily narrowreading, and my own reading would be that the model isconsistent with the idea that an interaction—and by extensiona relationship—can comprise two social individuals (who eachalready have relationships with others). In other words, whilethe model might give the impression of simply being a processin which individuals go in at one end and a relationshipemerges at the other, seen in broader terms it could just aseasily be glossed as consisting of relationships at both ends(i.e., relationships that consist of individuals that consist ofrelationships, etc.). Put another way, in the real world theindividuals involved are not just forming a new relationshipbetween them but also in effect adding this relationship totheir respective sets of existing relationships.

This reading of Hinde’s model might also address Bird-David’s concern that the model is insensitive to the relationalpersonhood of the hunter-gatherer band. As somebody whospecializes in the study of Japan, I am very familiar withrelational notions of personhood such as “interpersonal-ism”—the idea that we become the persons we are throughthe relationships with others that we form, as opposed tosomehow standing (or “floating”) above such relationships.I do not see any fundamental inconsistency between this ideaand Hinde’s model. Although the latter, as set out in thisarticle, refers to the formation of relationships through serialinteractions between individuals, it hardly precludes such in-teractions—and the relationships that develop from them—being informed by the already existing relationships of eachindividual. Formulated in this way, the process Hinde de-scribes becomes doubly formative: of the relationship betweenindividuals and of a relation between relationships. In thisway, I would argue that despite the essential simplicity ofHinde’s model, further complexity can readily be built intoit to accord with real-world situations.

What of Anderson’s point that I am afflicted by a virulent




strain of individualism, which is preventing me from graspingthe hunter’s “lived experience” of animals? In response Iwould say that while the kinds of individualism to whichAnderson refers seem to me wide of the mark, in my researchon human-animal relations I certainly am interested in therecognition of individuals and its implications for cross-species sociality. If I had to choose a label for the strain ofindividualism that afflicts me, I would go for “sentient” in-dividualism, by which I mean both the recognition of theindividual as the subject of a life and the recognition of thesame individual from one interaction to another as a con-dition for a pattern of interactions to develop. With respectto hunting, recognition of the sentience of individual animalsarguably forms the basis of the widely reported hunter guiltover taking the life of the animal (see Duerr 2010). It seemsto me that there is a strong case for viewing the hunting-as-sharing model in these terms.

I would add that the approach to the human-animal as-sociation in the hunt contained in the hunting-as-sharingthesis is vulnerable to the charge of intellectual speciesism,defined by Kenneth Shapiro as “a form of discrimination thatoperates by the radical dissolution of the individual in speciesother than one’s own” (Shapiro 1990:17). In this, one cannothelp but notice a strong resemblance between the categoricalthinking that treats hunting as a form of sharing and thatwhich informs the species- or population-centered perspectiveoften found among modern hunters, which serves as a rhe-torical counterweight to the moral objections leveled at hunt-ing from animal welfarists (Cartmill 1993:236). The same sortof population-centered perspective is found among conser-vation biologists, for whom the focus is on population ag-gregates rather than individual animals that have little, if any,moral standing, such that population management or con-servation is always deemed to justify the culling or dispatchof individual animals. It would seem that hunting amonghunter-gatherers and “modern” forms of hunting (includingculling) may not be so different after all. If hunter-gatherershave only a categorical relationship with the animals theyhunt, Ingold’s proposition that for these hunters, hunting isnonviolent does make a certain sense—a category of animalsdoes not bleed in the way a flesh-and-blood animal does. Butthis only calls into further doubt the value of an approach tothe sociality of the hunt in which the individual animal isdisplaced and the resulting asymmetry in the human-animalrelation goes unquestioned.

Another theme that arises in the comments is the idea ofsharing in the hunting-as-sharing model. Anderson makes thepoint that sharing or reciprocity “need not be kind” (see alsothe Willerslev comment). I fully accept this point. It seemsto me that one of the consequences of Ingold’s emphasis ontrust and autonomy is that the idea of reciprocity as an in-strument of hunter control over prey recedes from view. Thisseems to me unfortunate, given that the very idea of preyautodonation to hunter tends to be understood in terms ofprior human actions that indebt the prey to behave in this

way. As Brightman argues in his Rock Cree study, successfulhunting requires the hunter to preconstitute the animal as“grateful prey” by carrying out a regenerative feast followingthe previous hunt (Brightman 1993, chaps. 7, 8). In this way,the hunter sees himself as acting to induce the desired hunter-friendly disposition of the animal and thereby render it hunt-able. The hunter, in effect, recruits his prey animal partnerthrough an act of tactical ingratiation.

The hunting-as-sharing model also raises certain questionsabout the prey animals. The work of Paul Nadasdy (2007)—mentioned both by Marvin and Mullin in their comments—suggests that the model can tell us something about how preyanimals behave in the hunt. Nadasdy argues that the notionof the self-sacrificial prey animal corresponds to actual animalbehavior (see also Ingold 2000:13; Knudtson and Suzuki 1992:87). This contrasts with my own view of the hunt as consistingof the twin dispositions of pursuit and flight. Remove thesedispositions and one is left with an odd, adrenaline-free imageof the hunt in which its signature tension as an event dis-appears. But what if my view is an ethnocentric one thatconceals the existence of nonflight behavior on the part ofthe hunted animal? Might a greater cultural familiarity withhunter-gatherers teach us to recognize the existence of voli-tional—rather than oppositional—prey behavior? Instead ofpursuit and escape, might not the hunt ultimately be a mutualconvergence? Should we not be open to the possibility ofconsensual as opposed to conflictual hunting?

My response to reports of self-sacrificial animal behaviorwould be that they are noteworthy only because the preyanimal behavior to which they refer is exceptional. When suchapparent self-sacrificial animal behavior is presented in iso-lation—rather than in the context of everyday hunting andthe normal experience of animal avoidance of and flight fromhunters—we get a misleading impression. Here I am re-minded of the isolated, one-off sightings of fantastical animalsthat are the staple of cryptozoological beliefs, the obvious flawof such beliefs being that the existence of a lone animal isbiologically meaningless insofar as the unit of animal existenceis the animal population (enough animals to form a breedingpopulation). Likewise, with this kind of behavioral variant ofcryptozoology or what we might call “cryptoethology,” animalbehaviors such as that to which Nadasdy refers are given aninflated importance to the extent that they are foregroundedand seen in isolation from the normal patterns of prey be-havior with which they are at odds.

In his comment, Serpell addresses the issue of the relationbetween animals and spirits or souls, suggesting that a per-sonal relationship between hunter and hunted animal mightbe conceivable if the posthumous spirit of the animal is takeninto account. I have treated the association between hunterand hunted animal as ending with the kill, but followingSerpell, could it not be argued that the association continuesin some form after the animal’s death with the spirit or soulthat survives it? This would give us something resembling aHindean relationship between hunter and hunted animal, al-




beit one that consists of heterogeneous interactions, that is,an interaction between living human and living animal fol-lowed by an interaction between a living human and a deadanimal in the form of its soul or spirit. The larger point wouldseem to be that the death of the animal does not precludethe formation of a relationship between hunter and animalbecause in an “animistic” worldview, relationships can tran-scend death. Could we not reconfigure the Hindean modelin this way and thereby recognize a personal relationship inthe hunt?

Extending Serpell’s thought further, might we not also rec-ognize that a similar argument could be made where a huntis deemed to lead to prey animal revenge on the hunter? Again,the hunt would appear to have a legacy in the form of thesubsequent interaction between the hunter and the soul ofthe hunted animal, this time one that is turned against thehunter. Either way, the possibility is raised that the death ofthe animal does not end the hunter-animal association buttriggers a new phase in it. The association between hunterand prey is punctuated rather than terminated by the animal’sdeath. Why not recognize that relationships can continue be-yond the death of one of the parties?

Serpell’s suggestion is an interesting one well worth furtherconsideration, but I do not think it has a direct bearing onmy argument in this article, which was addressed to the ideathat some hunter-gatherer groups extend the sociality of theband to the animals they hunt. As the benchmark for socialityin the hunting-as-sharing thesis is clearly the association be-tween living members of the band, consistency would obvi-ously require a comparable focus on living animals ratherthan on dead ones. To invoke extrasentient animal agencywould mean that sociality is being reckoned differently in thetwo cases.

—John Knight

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