Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs - Softcover

Willerslev, Rane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520252179 ISBN 13: 9780520252172

Verlag: University of California Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance, both body and soul, both their own individual selves and reincarnated others. Hunters are thus both human and the animals they imitate, which forces them to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity of maintaining identity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rane Willerslev is Associate Professor in the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is also the author of Hunting and Trapping in Siberia (2000).

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“Soul Hunters combines intimate ethnographic knowledge of Yukaghir hunting practices with sophisticated phenomenological analysis and an impressive comparative range. The book critiques and revivifies familiar concepts and interpretive traditions, most notably 'animism' and 'shamanism.' It contains many original comparative arguments and analyses, and the ethnographic examples are always lucidly described. A remarkable book."—James Clifford, author The Predicament of Culture

“Soul Hunters is a detailed and theoretically original ethnography which will make an important contribution to the anthropology of Siberia and hunter-gatherers more generally.”—Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov, author of The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia

“Soul Hunters makes a highly original contribution to Yukaghir ethnography, as well as to theoretical discussions about the nature of spiritual knowledge. The work will provide the starting point for several future debates in contemporary anthropology.”—Peter Schweitzer, co-editor of Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination

Aus dem Klappentext

Soul Hunters combines intimate ethnographic knowledge of Yukaghir hunting practices with sophisticated phenomenological analysis and an impressive comparative range. The book critiques and revivifies familiar concepts and interpretive traditions, most notably 'animism' and 'shamanism.' It contains many original comparative arguments and analyses, and the ethnographic examples are always lucidly described. A remarkable book." James Clifford, author The Predicament of Culture

Soul Hunters is a detailed and theoretically original ethnography which will make an important contribution to the anthropology of Siberia and hunter-gatherers more generally. Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov, author of The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia

Soul Hunters makes a highly original contribution to Yukaghir ethnography, as well as to theoretical discussions about the nature of spiritual knowledge. The work will provide the starting point for several future debates in contemporary anthropology. Peter Schweitzer, co-editor of Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination

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Soul Hunters

Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs By Rane Willerslev

University of California Press

Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25217-2

Contents

List of Illustrations.....................................................ixPreface...................................................................xiAcknowledgments...........................................................xv1. Animism as Mimesis.....................................................12. To Kill or Not to Kill: Rebirth, Sharing, and Risk.....................293. Body-Soul Dialectics: Human Rebirth Beliefs............................504. Ideas of Species and Personhood........................................735. Animals as Persons.....................................................896. Shamanism..............................................................1197. The Spirit World.......................................................1418. Learning and Dreaming..................................................1599. Taking Animism Seriously...............................................181Notes.....................................................................193References................................................................205Index.....................................................................221

Chapter One

Animism as Mimesis

Watching Old Spiridon rocking his body back and forth, I was puzzled whether the figure I saw before me was man or elk. The elk-hide coat worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding ears, and the skis covered with an elk's smooth leg skins, so as to sound like the animal when moving in snow, made him an elk; yet the lower part of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along with the loaded rifle in his hands, made him a man. Thus, it was not that Spiridon had stopped being human. Rather, he had a liminal quality: he was not an elk, and yet he was also not not an elk. He was occupying a strange place in between human and nonhuman identities.

A female elk appeared from among the willow bushes with her offspring. At first the animals stood still, the mother lifting and lowering her huge head in bewilderment, unable to solve the puzzle in front of her. But as Spiridon moved closer, she was captured by his mimetic performance, suspended her disbelief, and started walking straight toward him with the calf trotting behind her. At that point he lifted his gun and shot them both dead. Later he explained the incident: "I saw two persons dancing toward me. The mother was a beautiful young woman and while singing, she said: `Honored friend. Come and I'll take you by the arm and lead you to our home.' At that point I killed them both. Had I gone with her, I myself would have died. She would have killed me."

Lifting us into an animated world, this passage sets the scene for this book, which is about the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters on the Upper Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. For us in the West, it is customary to assume that attributes of personhood, with all this entails in terms of language, intentionality, reasoning, and moral awareness, belong exclusively to human beings. Animals are understood to be wholly natural beings, and their behavior is typically explained as automatic and instinctive. Among the Yukaghirs, however, a different assumption prevails. In their world, persons can take a variety of forms, of which a human being is only one. They can also appear in the shape of rivers, trees, souls, and spirits, but above all it is mammals that Yukaghirs see as "other-than-human persons" (Hallowell 1960: 36). Moreover, humans and animals can move in and out of different species' perspectives by temporarily taking on each other's bodies. Indeed, among the Yukaghirs, as we shall see later, this capacity to take on the appearance and viewpoint of another being is one of the key aspects of being a person.

The traditional term for this set of beliefs, whereby nonhuman animals (and even nonanimals such as inanimate objects and spirits) are endowed with intellectual, emotional, and spiritual qualities paralleling those of human persons, is animism. Animism is one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first. It was introduced by Tylor (1929a [1871]: 424) as a way of characterizing the simplest form of religious belief, "the belief in spiritual beings," but it is a term that anthropologists today use with caution, if at all. The reason for this is summarized well by Descola, who writes, "modern anthropology has been extremely reticent on the topic of animism ... perhaps out of an implicit fear of drawing undue attention to an apparently irrational aspect of the life of archaic societies" (1992: 114). It is certainly true that anthropologists have tended to give little credence to accounts, such as that of Old Spiridon, that differ radically from what we would consider "normal." In the early days of the discipline, Victorian scholars would say that if the old hunter were not actually lying, then he must be suffering from delusions of some sort and would be incapable of telling fact from fantasy, or reality from dreams. Other, more recent, anthropologists, by temperament and training inclined to be rather more sympathetic to the indigenous viewpoint, would accept the hunter's story by adding an "as if" to his account-so instead of talking nonsense, the hunter is deemed to be speaking in metaphors, constructing figurative parallels between the two separate domains of nature and culture. However, to say that the hunter is talking "as if" animals were persons is to say that his story should not be taken in a literal way but instead seen as a symbolic statement. The "metaphor model," which has roots in Durkheim's sociology, is to be found everywhere in modern studies of hunter-gatherers. For both models, however, the result remains essentially the same: animals are not really persons, but exist as such only in the mind of the hunter, whose account is therefore not to be taken seriously as founded in reality. By this move, indigenous metaphysics appears to pose no challenge to our ontological certainties, and the anthropologist can get on with his job without having to worry about whether there is any foundation in reality for what people have to say.

In this book, however, I wish to reverse the primacy of Western metaphysics over indigenous understandings and to follow the lead of the Yukaghirs in what they are saying about the nature of spirits, souls, and animal persons. Only in this way can we hope to develop a framework that takes their viewpoints on these matters seriously. This does not imply exoticizing the Yukaghirs as being somehow more knowledgeable or wiser than us. Nor does it imply adopting their beliefs or accepting these beliefs without question. Rather, it involves an honest effort to draw attention to complex patterns of common features and differences between Yukaghirs and ourselves by placing their animistic beliefs and practices in a critical dialogue with our theories of knowledge. The remaining part of this chapter is mostly devoted to sketching out this new approach to the animism "problem." However, before we can embark on this task, which will bring us up against both philosophy and anthropological theory, I need to introduce the people with whom this book is concerned.

THE YUKAGHIRS

The name Yukaghir (alternative spellings: Iukagir, Yukagir, Yukagiry,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520252179
• ISBN 13: 9780520252172
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar