Sacrifice As The Ideal Hunt

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Sacrice as the ideal hunt:

a cosmological explanation
for the origin of reindeer
domestication
R a n e Wil l e r s l e v Aarhus University
Piers Vi te bsky University of Cambridge
Anatoly Alekse ye v M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk
The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer
herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article
argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrice, and for the domestication of the
reindeer as the result of hunters efforts to use sacrice to control the accidental variables of the
hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of trust with prey only through highly controlled ritual
enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated
reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrice functions as an ideal
hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a
process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeers domestication may be based not only
on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.
Introduction: diversied economies but a unied cosmology
Some 2,000-3,000 years ago, the first reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) were tamed in
Siberia. This step was never taken in the American North, where reindeer are called
caribou and exist only in the wild.1 We know almost nothing about how and why the
initial taming happened in Siberia, probably in the Sayan mountains or east of Lake
Baikal, and probably by the ancestors of todays Evenki and Eveny people (Pomishin
1990; Skalon 1956; Vainshtein 1980; Vasilevich & Levin 1951).2 Yet the consequences have
been dramatic: the ability to ride on reindeer radically altered the way people were able
to move and settle throughout North Asia, their modes of production, their distribution of resources, and their organization of labour. Anthony Leeds (1965: 100) has noted
the strong social hierarchy among pastoralists everywhere, and Robert Paine (1971: 166)
has specifically argued that reindeer-exploiting societies show an increased emphasis
on ownership and private property. Tim Ingold has summarized most of these points
when writing that the pastoral mode is the precise opposite of hunting, which is
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , -
Royal Anthropological Institute 2014
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Figure 1. Eveny herders loading saddle-bags onto a reindeer before moving to their early autumn
campsite in the Verkhoyansk Mountains. It is August, the leaves are turning yellow, and the rst snow
will come soon. (Photo by Piers Vitebsky.)
characterized by collective access to resources, indefinite productive targets, generalized

reciprocity, and the absence of any possibility of multiplicative accumulation (1980:
223).
At first, humans rode small numbers of domesticated reindeer to hunt their wild
cousins (sledges came much later: Vainshtein 1980; Vasilevich & Levin 1951). Starting
from Russian colonial times (Krupnik 1993: 160-84) and on into the Soviet twentieth
century, they and other indigenous groups like the Chukchi, Koryak, and Eveny
developed large-scale herds in which most reindeer are kept for meat. While the great
majority of Siberian peoples took on reindeer herding and combined it with hunting,
a few groups like the Upper Kolyma Yukaghir never adopted the domestic reindeer, but
continued living entirely from hunting.3
When the three authors of this article met in 2013 to discuss the transformation from
hunting to pastoralism in Northeast Asia4 and compare notes on different indigenous
groups, major differences in social and economic organization were apparent, even
after seventy years of determinedly homogenizing Communist rule. The Yukaghir
hunters of the Upper Kolyma and the reindeer-herding Chukchi and Koryak of
Chukotka and Kamchatka represent two opposed positions on the hunter-pastoralist
continuum. The Yukaghir, who have no reindeer and among whom a hunter is
expected to share his spoils with the entire community, are highly egalitarian with no
authoritarian leadership or marked differences in personal wealth (Willerslev 2007:
35-42). The Chukchi and Koryak, by contrast, are distinctly hierarchical even today,
with social status largely determined by the number of privately owned reindeer, and
extended families made up of poorer households clustered around a wealthy reindeer
Sacrifice as the ideal hunt 3
Figure 2. Indigenous peoples of Northeast Siberia mentioned in this article. Locations and
boundaries are approximate. Populations are extremely sparse, and interspersed with Russians and
other settlers.
owner. The Eveny of Kamchatka somewhat resemble egalitarian hunters, while those in
Yakutia (Alekseyev 1993; Vitebsky 2005) are somewhere in between, with large herds of
mixed state and private ownership.
However, what we found puzzling is that these radical socio-economic differences
are not reflected on the plane of cosmology, and this is perhaps the greatest mystery
about the hunting-to-pastoral transformation in North Asia. When comparing the
indigenous cosmologies we found close parallels, amounting almost to identity, regardless of economy. All groups in the region are animistic (cf. Pedersen 2001), have similar
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forms of shamanism, and engage with spirit masters of animals and places in the
landscape. All are highly concerned with the ritual treatment of the bones of the dead,
humans and animals alike, so as to ensure their continued rebirths (cf. Willerslev
2013a). Most importantly for the argument pursued here, we established a family
resemblance (Valeri 1994: 104) between hunting and blood sacrifice, as two ritualized
ways of taking life. Indeed, when we compared hunting throughout the region with the
ideal-typical scheme of sacrifice among those who have domestic reindeer, it became
clear that there is a strong resemblance between the ritualized killing of wild animals
and the sacrifice of domesticated reindeer.
We asked ourselves what this similarity on the cosmological plane might tell us
about the causes and mechanisms of the crucial transformation from hunting to
pastoralism. Could it be that rather than marking a radical shift in peoples relationship to animals, this transformation represents a continuation and refinement of the
hunters attitude towards prey? These are the basic questions we set out to explore in
this article. We believe that by studying the complex pattern of common features and
differences between hunting and ritual blood sacrifice, we may find new answers to the
old question about what led to the initial taming of the reindeer.
Cosmology and epochal change
The trigger for the first taming, and thus for beginning the process of domestication,
of the reindeer has long been debated. Almost all explanations are ecological or
economistic, pointing either to a diffusion of technology through imitation of southern
pastoralist cultures based mainly on horse-riding (Ingold 1980: 282-3; Laufer 1917: 118;
Figure 3. Eveny women feeding reindeer with salt to keep them tame. One tradition says that wild
reindeer were rst attracted by the salt in womens urine. Today tame reindeer still pester anyone
trying to urinate in peace. (Photo by Piers Vitebsky.)

Vainshtein 1980; Vasilevich & Levin 1951) or to ecological adaptation, favouring increasingly efficient patterns of environmental exploitation (Bogoras 1924: 234; Hatt 1918;
Krupnik 1993: 166; Sirelius 1916; Zeuner 1963: 46). Thus, the historical forces of cause
and effect are related to adaptive and technological operations, rather than
to spiritual belief. Indigenous cosmology generally appears as secondary to the environmental and technological conditions of life, so that it cannot in itself initiate any
epochal change. The Danish cultural geographer Gudmund Hatt, once a major player
in this debate, scathingly declared that to search for the origin of purely economic
forms in ... religious ideas or practices ... is about as preposterous as to regard a tree as
the natural result of the lianas and epiphytes it carries (1918: 253).
However, we believe that Hatts analogy is itself preposterous. Some of the major
shifts in history, and indeed in our own day, occur through religious or other ideological pressure. Why should the triggers for the domestication of reindeer not have
included cosmological or spiritual elements (cf. Kwon 1998: 125 n. 7)?
This is not to deny that economic and ecological factors may have played an important part in the transition from hunting to pastoralism. However, these do not reveal
what elements in the cosmology of local hunters allowed them to start taming their
principal game, the reindeer. The argument in terms of efficient resource management
is not sufficient, since, as we shall see, there are key elements in hunters cosmology that
work directly against any form of taming. Thus, the impetus for early reindeer domestication is as much a cosmological puzzle as an economic one.
It is this cosmological puzzle that we set out to resolve here by systematically
comparing the two basic ritual modes of killing animals in the Siberian North, hunting
and sacrifice. The intricate parallelisms, contrasts, and criss-crossings that we detected
between these suggest that it makes little sense to identify sacrifice solely with the use
of domestic animals. Our approach implies a break with a mainstream literature that
insists on a radical contrast between sacrifice and hunting (Valeri 1994: 111): according
to this literature, sacrifice by definition involves the ritual slaughter of a domestic
animal and thus is a phenomenon of pastoral peoples. Since one can sacrifice only what
one owns, it makes no sense to propose that hunters involve their wild animals in
sacrifice. Hunting is customarily seen as a predatory activity, implying that the animal
killed has no sacramental value (Valeri 1994: 111). As claimed by Jonathan Z. Smith, a
historian of religion to whose work we shall return below, Animal sacrifice appears
to be, universally, the ritual killing of a domesticated animal by agrarian or pastoralist
societies (1987: 197, original emphasis; see also Jensen 1963: 163-90).
However, this conventional contrast between hunting and sacrifice has been challenged by other scholars who argue convincingly for a plausible grounding if not
origin of ritual blood sacrifice in hunting as a ritual act (Burkert 1972: 12-22; Howell
1996: 15-16; McKinnon 1996; Meuli 1946; Valeri 1994). We start from Ingolds article
Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals, in which he compares hunting
and sacrifice by situating both within a broader unified circumpolar cosmology, bringing together materials from both Eurasia and North America. Ingolds conclusion, from
a somewhat Frazerian treatment of the subject (1986: 244), is that the hunting and
pastoralist cosmologies run so close to one another that each can, in fact, be seen as a
model of the other:
[T]he sacrificial rite is already prefigured in native conceptions surrounding the conduct of hunting.
All that is necessary to bring it out is to transpose mastery over herds from non-human to human

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persons, which is of course a corollary of their domestication, and marks the transition from a
hunting to a pastoral economy (1986: 272).
This quote anticipates Ingolds later article From trust to domination, in which he
suggests that pastoralist societies fundamentally reconfigure the productive relations
between animals and humans, replacing trust between hunters and prey with domination by herders over livestock (Ingold 2000: 70-1). Trust refers here to the widely
reported idea among hunting peoples that a successful kill of an animal is the result of
its own collusion in being taken (2000: 69). Domination, by contrast, refers to a
situation in which the herdsman himself takes life-or-death decisions concerning what
are now his animals [as] protector, guardian and executioner (2000: 72).
We shall use Ingolds pioneering analysis for further exploring the transition from
wild reindeer hunting to reindeer domestication, while squeezing his Frazerian overview of the circumpolar North down to a tighter focus on the Siberian Northeast. In
proposing a fundamental ritual identity between killing in the hunt and in sacrifice,
Ingolds thesis supports our view that a major contributory cause of reindeer domestication may lie in cosmological concerns, rather than just in ecological adaptations and
the diffusion of technology.
However, Ingolds schema needs further refinement. His model of reindeer herding,
which is based largely on his own fieldwork in Finland (Ingold 1976), was elaborated in
the 1970s and 1980s. However, he did not read Russian, and before the 1990s there was
very little information available in Western languages on the Russian North, where
most of the worlds domesticated reindeer live. Ingold drew on old classical studies by
scholars such as Waldemar Bogoras (1904-9) and Waldemar Jochelson (1908), but since
then a large body of new ethnographic information has become internationally available. Also the notion of domestication, in the conventional sense of selective breeding,
cannot easily be applied to Siberia, despite traditional practices and the Soviet state
farms scientific management regimes. Apart from the few reindeer that have their own
names and are trained to carry people and luggage, pull sledges, or be milked, most
of the other animals form what may be called a lumpen herd. They are only semidomesticated and certainly not tamed, since they can be caught only by lasso and if
unattended may revert to a feral or semi-wild state (Vitebsky 2005: 25, 377). To complicate the picture still further, our ethnographic examples from Northeast Siberia will
show that the distinction between trust and domination is quite clearly more ambiguous than Ingold proposes.
The hunted animal gives itself up
However, it is not only the concept of domestication which needs refinement: so does
our understanding of hunting. Does a hunted animal really give itself up to be killed
in a relationship of simple trust? It is true that ethnographic reports have promoted a
particular image of hunting in the circumpolar North as based not on predation but on
an intimate, mutualistic, and even non-violent relationship of reciprocal sympathy and
sharing between hunter and prey in which every aspect of violence is screened out.
Heonik Kwon describes how a group of Evenki called Orochon abandon ordinary
speech in favour of a special linguistic code which deliberately conceals the reality of
being a human predator (Kwon 1998: 118; see also Anderson 2002: 125). David Anderson
writes that for Evenki ... the [reindeer] which shares its body with the hunter and his
or her kin is thought to agree to surrender itself for consumption as part of a common
struggle to preserve life (2004: 14). Likewise, the Eveny hunter described by Willerslev
and Ulturgasheva declares to the killed animal: You came to me out of your own
free will, please have pity on us and do not harm us (2012: 55). Often, the violence is
transformed into erotic imagery. Among the Eveny of Yakutia, a successful hunt is
foretold by an erotic dream involving the daughter of the master of the animals
(Vitebsky 2005: 265, 302, 346). Willerslev (2007: 101) describes how the Yukaghir hunters soul travels in dreams to the animal spirit and the two have sexual intercourse. The
feeling of lust evoked in the spirit is then extended to the animal prey, which the next
morning will run towards the hunter expecting a sexual climax. Similarly, Jochelson
writes that the Yukaghir hunt depends on the goodwill not only of its guardian spirit
but also of the animal itself, which must like the hunter (Jochelson 1926: 146). The
hunters clothing is also part of the seduction of the prey, and must be carefully and
beautifully made to please the spirit of the animals (Chaussonnet 1988: 210).
Indeed, when reading through ethnographic accounts of Siberian hunting, one
could conclude that the successful hunter achieves his goal, not primarily through
practical skill, but rather through an intimate relationship of trust with the animal and
its associated spirit. Ingold draws on similar accounts from the Eurasian and American
North when writing that
a hunt that is successfully consummated with a kill is taken as proof of amicable relations between the
hunter and the animal that has willingly allowed itself to be taken. Hunters are well-known for their
abhorrence of violence in the context of human relations, and the same goes for their relations with
animals: the encounter, at the moment of the kill, is to them essentially non-violent (2000: 69,
original emphasis).5
Words, deeds, and the ideal hunt
However, can we really take at face value these standard ethnographic reports that
indigenous hunting is based on trust and non-violence? Or is this perhaps an example
of anthropologists staying too much inside the informants models or at least staying
too much with what they appear to be saying in their official discourse?
As anthropologists, we know there may be important discrepancies between what
people do and what they say or think they do (cf. Bourdieu 1994: 141). As an extreme
example, the bear is held in awe throughout the circumpolar North as an animal of
exceptional spiritual power, and is given epithets like Lord of the Forest (Willerslev &
Pedersen 2010: 269-73). The great summary of all this is Irving Hallowells classic essay
Bear ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere (1926). Hallowell describes how
indigenous peoples around the entire circumpolar North see bear hunting as a sacred
act that must be performed according to strict rules of etiquette (we shall turn to bear
sacrifice below). Knives and spears must be used (not guns), the hunter must sing to the
bear, it must be tackled in a fair stand-up fight or hand-to-hand combat, and the fatal
wound must be bloodless.
Is all this plausible? In an influential essay, The bare facts of ritual, Smith questions
Hallowells account: Can we believe that any animal, once spotted, would stand still
while the hunter recited dithyrambs and ceremonial addresses? Or ... sang love songs?
... Is it humanly conceivable that a hunter ... will not boast of his prowess? (1988: 60).
Smiths answer, derived from the armchair on the grounds of common sense and
our [sic] sense of incredulity, our estimate of plausibility, is No: all Hallowells
sources are an idealized fiction. In less extreme critiques, Anderson (2002: 127) also
criticizes the idea that animals surrender themselves freely, and Knight objects to the
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hunting-as-sharing hypothesis promoted by Ingold (2000) and Nurit Bird-David

(1992), on the grounds that hunting is a relatively short-lived event that happens in the
here and now, whereas a relationship consists of a series of interactions and therefore
exists over a longer span of time (Knight 2012: 336).
We agree with Knight that human-animal co-sociality is found rather with
pastoralists, whose animals have shed their fear of humans as predators (2012: 343), and
will make use below of Smiths notion of idealization (though he is quite wrong when
his common sense leads him to expect a hunter to boast of his prowess that would be
a sure way to anger the animals and their spirits, cf. Kwon 1998: 116; Vitebsky 2005: 269;
Willerslev 2007: 38). But we are not keen on the way this kind of no-nonsense critique
tends to reduce hunting to a rational, practical act of predation (similarly to ecologistic
theories about the domestication of reindeer). None the less, it is hard to deny that Smith
and Knight have a valid point. Such approaches challenge the standard ethnographic
reports of trust between hunter and prey, and force us to pause and consider what we
really mean when saying that animals give themselves freely so that hunting is essentially
non-violent. Why is it that the selfsame ethnographies that describe animals as willing
prey often also present drawings of an arsenal of devious spring traps, deadfalls, and
self-triggering crossbows, designed to catch animals unaware (see Bogoras 1904-9: 13847; Jochelson 1926: 378-82; Willerslev 2012: 193-200)? Worse, Hitoshi Watanabe (1973: 35)
reports how the Ainu used to kill the brown bear by using poisoned arrows. There is no
sign here of the animals eagerness to surrender themselves.
But the answer is not to ignore the evidence as Smith does and aim for a crude Yes
or No. In fact, indigenous hunters know very well that they do not actually hunt the
way they say they hunt, making the animal surrender itself through songs, clothing, and
eroticism. So why do they talk as if this is what they do? We suggest that hunters
discourses about hunting, which are then passed on by anthropologists, do not so much
denote the hunt as it is but rather represent an ideal, which stands in conscious contrast
to the course of things during actual hunting. The notion of the ideal or perfect hunt
is part of Smiths general view of the work of ritual, which deals with the issue of
relating that which we do to that which we say or think we do and takes upon itself the
laborious task of patching up holes and stopping gaps (1987: 194).
Smiths notion of an ideal hunt echoes Ingolds notion of trust. But unlike Ingold,
Smith does not believe that this exists in everyday reality. Smith is presumptuous when
he uses his armchair scholars common sense to deny any ethnographic evidence
which defies his prejudices, but helpful when he questions the actual performance of
songs and literal non-violence. The implication we take from this is that the hunter is
trapped in a sort of irreducible paradox or double bind. The term was made famous by
Gregory Bateson (2000 [1972]: 206-8; Bateson, Jackson, Haley & Weakland 1956) and
refers to a communicative matrix in which two messages or rules negate each other,
each on a different logical level, and yet neither of them can be ignored or defied. This
contradiction can give rise to extreme anxiety, since no matter what a person does, he
cant win (Bateson et al. 1956: 251): If you do not do A, you will be damned. But if you
do do A, you will also be damned. Many double binds are further complicated in that
they involve different logical levels, so that what you must do (in order to survive or be
safe) on one level threatens your survival or safety on another. According to Bateson,
double binds are at the root of both creativity and schizophrenia (to say nothing of
ritual). The difference is whether or not one is able to identify and break out of the bind
by reducing its intensity or shifting the nature of the double-binding relationship.
Figure 4. Killing a brown bear in the wild is usually a messy affair, since the variables of the hunt
cannot easily be controlled. (Photo by Rane Willerslev.)
We draw attention to the double bind here because in the hunters ongoing relationship with animal prey there is a recurrent paradox: on the one hand, the hunting
ideal represents a supreme spiritual law, and there is a widespread belief that animals or
their spirit owners take serious offence if the animals are not treated correctly with all
sorts of ritual niceties (Kwon 1998; Vitebsky 2005: 263-4; Willerslev 2004b; 2007: 129;
Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55). On the other hand, the actual conditions of
hunting make it difficult and often impossible to live the ideal. This is why everyday
practical hunting is subject to another set of rules that contradict the highly moralized
ethos of hunting, but which for pragmatic reasons are tacitly accepted. Such are the
hunters killing of prey by means of physical force, cunning traps, or magical tricks. At
the heart of the hunters double bind lies the problem of the animals inherent fear
of predators, which makes it force the hunter on long and exhausting chases before he
finally takes it down in a messy killing. This discrepancy between the ideal, in which the
docile animal gives itself up to the hunter, and the reality in which animals are manifestly capricious and bent on escape, and in which hunters have to resort to brutality
and deceit to bring them down, is a prevalent theme in the mythology of Siberian
peoples. Yukaghir and Eveny myths are full of stories of how every aspect of violence in
hunting must be relegated to absolute silence, otherwise terrible things will happen to
the hunter and his kin (cf. Jochelson 1926: 177). Eveny hunters must never say I killed
a bear but use coded euphemisms such as I obtained a child (Vitebsky 2005: 269).
Likewise, Yukaghir hunters use coded expressions to avoid naming the hunted moose
(elk) by its real name, and instead of the word kill they make a downward movement
with their hands to indicate that the animal has fallen. Hunters will not sharpen a knife
or clean a gun on the day of the hunt, as this would reveal their violent intention and
provoke the anger of the animal spirits (Willerslev 2001; Willerslev 2007: 100-1).
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The ideal hunt fullled in sacrice
This double bind, reflecting a discrepancy between words and deeds in hunting, may
well be the archetypal tension of life in the circumpolar North, where everyones
survival depends on animal economies that are highly moralized. This tension finds
expression in numerous actions and operates across a range of domains from the
psychological to the cosmological. We argue that the need to overcome this double bind
may have been a key motivator in transforming the actual hunt into the highly controlled pattern of ritual blood sacrifice. This would explain why the ideal hunt has the
same logic as the typical scheme of sacrifice among pastoralists, and furthermore it
suggests that the urge to sacrifice may have been a significant driver behind the domestication of the reindeer.
Both hunters and herders depend on the animals meat for food, and both believe
that its soul will go to the spirits and be recycled into a new body of the same species
(Ingold 1986: 246; Jordan 2003; Pedersen and Willerslev 2012: 477; Vitebsky 2005: 263;
Willerslev 2007: 31-2; 2009: 696). Both are equally concerned to ensure this reincarnation by treating the carcass in accordance with strict rules, especially the bones, which
are widely thought to contain the animals soul and its potential for rebirth. Thus the
animals death is at once an act of destruction and a rite of renewal, and it may be this
which lies behind the talk of non-violence. The stock of animal souls is finite and the
shocking boast that I killed an animal would block its rebirth for ever.
To support our thesis that ritual blood sacrifice is the lived-out equivalent of the
ideal hunt, we shall take a closer look at how a sacrificial victim is ritually treated. We
shall start with reindeer sacrifice among the Chukchi and Koryak, who are well known
to Willerslev through direct observations, and whose sacrificial practices have also been
well documented in the classical works of Bogoras (1904-9: 368-85), Harald Sverdrup
(1939: 135-75), and Jochelson (1908: 87-97).
A dead persons sledge reindeer is sacrificed at the grave, as are tens of other ordinary
reindeer at an autumn ritual for the dead. Such reindeer must be perfect and unblemished, with no limp or broken antlers. People dress in their finest fur clothing, highly
decorated with coloured bands and beadwork, to please not only other humans but also
the reindeer, which is said to take pleasure from its owners colours (cf. Rethmann 2001:
136). The reindeer is captured from the herd by lasso and dragged to the sacrificial place.
People sing to calm the animal down, saying that it must not be frightened but be a
willing victim, otherwise the sacrifice will not be accepted by the spirits (cf. Jochelson
1908: 94). It is of paramount importance that the reindeer stands stock-still and does
not resist. If it is not killed at the first blow, this means that the spirits do not accept the
sacrifice (Jochelson 1908: 94). The reindeers head is placed so that it faces the direction
of the receiving spirits (Bogoras 1904-9: 368; Sverdrup 1939: 168). A branch of willow is
put under its hindquarters as a bed so that it does not get cold, and water is smeared
on its nose to quench its thirst. After a short prayer,This is for you (Jochelson 1908: 98),
or Oh High Spirits, this is for you, make the herds thrive (Willerslev 2013b: 145),
the entire animal is cooked and eaten by everyone.
We see how the sacrificial ritual is equivalent to the hunt in key respects. The
beautiful clothing to please the animal, the singing, the identical etiquette in the
treatment of the animals corpse, and the sharing of meat with kin and neighbours
are all well documented among the regions hunters too. Also, the prayers contain
essentially the same appeal for success and luck. For example, the Yukaghir hunter
will feed the seasons first sable with food and drink and lay it on a small bed, saying:
Figure 5. Ritual blood sacrice achieves what hunters say they do but cannot do: a Chukchi man in
northern Kamchatka has killed a perfect white reindeer with a single blow to the heart. Note that the
animal was not tethered. (Photo by Rane Willerslev.)
Go and say to your kin how well you have been treated and let them come to my
house in great numbers (Willerslev 2012: 77). Above all there is the same common
idea that the animal is not killed as an act of violence, but rather freely offers itself
to them.
However, while the cosmological make-up of hunting ritual and sacrifice are very
similar, they differ greatly regarding human control (Ingolds domination). This is the
key transformation within different variants or fulfilments of a basic north Siberian
cosmology. Ritual perfection is difficult or impossible to achieve in actual hunting,
not least because the animal is unlikely to respond in the required ritual manner. In
sacrifice, by contrast, all the accidental variables are controlled, so that the animal is
compelled to play its part rather than run away, just as it is (usually) compelled to
assume the correct posture which makes it possible to kill it among the Chukchi and
Koryak with a smooth clean blow to the heart. Among the Eveny of Yakutia, a sacrificial
reindeer is generally not pierced but strangled with a lasso in order to avoid actual
bloodshed. Thus when these pastoralists sacrifice a reindeer, they are effectively doing
what the hunters say they do, but cannot do: killing it in an essentially non-predatory
manner. Indeed, Smith is right that a wild animal does not wait while the hunter sings
to it or makes a speech, but he misses the clue to the imagination behind this idea. In
hunting, what always falls short of the ideal is the performance; in sacrifice the theatrical tableau is complete.
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Magic and sorcery in the ideal hunt
It is here that we can see how sacrifice can represent the perfect hunt, in which all the
distressing elements of unpredictability, accident, and chance are factored out. This
allows hunters successfully to solve the discrepancy between word and deed, between
their cosmological ideal and their actual behaviour. We believe that this is a strong
motive to push hunters towards developing a pastoralist regime, and that it could
plausibly have been a driver historically.
However, within its overarching common cosmology, Northeast Siberia remains
very diverse. Even though the domestication of reindeer now predominates in the
region, there are some groups, such as the Upper Kolyma Yukaghir, who have not gone
down this route but have confined themselves to hunting without the aid of reindeer
for transport. Even the Evenki and Eveny still combine hunting with their large-scale
reindeer herding. Despite the apparently perfect sacrificial scheme, why do some of
these hunters not adopt it? Are they aiming at a similar result without domestication?
In our view, sacrifice is only one of a wider range of ways of overcoming the hunters
double bind. There are alternative methods of control which amount to a non-material
counterpart to the technology of traps, but are more directly targeted at influencing
the volition of the animal rather than just ambushing its flesh. The Eveny use secret
language when hunting so that eavesdropping animals will not recognize their own
names (Vitebsky 2005: 268-9). The Yukaghir lure sable by bribing the spirits with
bottles of vodka left along their trap lines (Willerslev 2012: 78) or by asking God or a
saint for help: I stand here, Gods servant. I make the sign of the Cross and walk in
prayer for blessing. I set the trap for the black sable. May it bring me luck! (Willerslev
2012: 90).
Another important technology is sympathetic magic, a term that was famously
introduced by James Frazer. This is based on the principle that like produces like, or
Figure 6. Yukaghir hunter with dying moose. (Photo by Rane Villerslev.)

that an effect resembles its cause. [So] the magician infers that he can produce any
effect he desires merely by imitating it (Frazer 1959 [1911]: 52). Frazer assigned sympathetic magic to a mistaken form of causal thinking, but Michael Taussig (1993; see also
Willerslev 2004a) argues rather that it is a particular way of perceiving things. To mimic
something is to be sensuously filled with that which is imitated, yielding to it, mirroring
it and hence imitating it bodily. It is, Taussig claims, a particular and powerful way
of comprehending, representing, and above all controlling the surrounding world
(Willerslev 2004a: 638-9).
We find evidence of this type of magic all over Siberia. The Evenki, Mansi, Ket, and
Khanty carve figures of prey, on the principle that if the pictorial soul is in the hunters
possession the animal itself will follow soon (Lissner 1961: 245). The Ainu call this
magic for binding up ... the life, spirit or soul of a person [human or animal alike]
(Batchelor 2013: 25). An elderly Yukaghir hunter explained to Willerslev (2007: 125-6)
how his mother could control a moose by imitating it. She would walk around on her
hands and knees, grunting and swinging her head back and forth like a real moose.
When she started eating a willow bush that had been placed in the middle of the room,
the father would hand the narrator (who was a small boy at the time) a wooden bow
and a blunt arrow with which he would shoot his grandmother in the heart. She would
kick her legs like a dying moose, and then direct the hunters to a particular spot in the
forest where she had tied up the moose. Sure enough, the moose stood motionless, as
if carved out of a rock. This image of immobility is strikingly similar to the way
a domestic reindeer is captured by lasso, tied up and unable to run away during a
sacrificial slaughter, and we interpret these techniques as a hunters counterpart to
taming, as a way of calling forth the animals self-surrender. This lends further support
to our idea that domestication of the reindeer is about exerting a control which is
spiritual as much as economic.
However, Yukaghir call this pakostit, playing dirty tricks, and the same informant
emphasized that what the grandmother did was a great sin for which her family would
eventually pay with their lives. Similarly, the specialist Yukaghir hunter, xanice (persecutor, Jochelson 1926: 122), is feared for his magical powers as he compels a wild
reindeer or moose to run towards him by imitating its bodily movements. But though
he is successful in providing meat to his family, he too will end up the same way
(Willerslev 2007: 47-9; 2012: 135).6
This returns us to the hunters double bind. On the one hand, hunting magic echoes
(or, in evolutionary terms, prefigures) sacrificial slaughter, in that it induces the animal
to act out an acceptance of its own death. On the other hand, this magic is considered
a sin that attracts spiritual retaliation, exactly because it manipulates the animals free
will through domination. Thus, while the ideal hunt denotes everything that is good
and fair about hunting, the moment it is applied in real life by tying down the animal
it switches into something negative, a kind of sorcery. How can this be?
Here we return to Ingolds distinction between trust and domination. With trust,
the animal allows itself to be taken willingly (Ingold 2000: 69) and any attempt
to impose a response ... would represent a betrayal and a negation of the relationship
(2000: 70, original emphasis). Ingold also argues that trust is decidedly double-edged in
that it always harbours an element of risk that the other may not act favourably
towards you, as hoped, or that it may even be hostile (2000: 70). This is the dark side
of the trust relationship that we see acted out when a hunter secures the immobility of
an animal through sympathetic hunting magic. It may appear as if the animal freely
14 Rane Willerslev
ET AL.
gives itself to him, but in actual fact its favourable response is elicited by magical
deception. The magic is a form of sorcery, and it is this which is the real betrayal of
trust. The hunters themselves see it this way too. The Yukaghir, for example, with their
absence of pastoralism, fear the Eveny as sorcerers, since they use their magic to do what
only Khozyain (the spirit master) should be doing by riding on the reindeers back: Its
a great sin and the reason why the Eveny suffered much hunger in the past. Khozyain
likes his children [the wild reindeer] to run free (Willerslev field notes).
So not only are the hunters left with the ideal of a perfect hunt that they cannot live
up to. It now appears that this cannot be solved by using imitative hunting magic,
however attractive this may be, since this deception undermines the moral principle
of trust on which the ideal is based and turns it into a dirty and underhand kind of
domination. Hunters are forever trapped with the frustration of a double bind that
forces them to celebrate an ideal that they can never live up to. This is true of many,
perhaps all, religious and ethical systems as they come up with elaborate compromises
to reconcile high ideals with the constraints of everyday reality. Within this dilemma
the sacrifice of a domesticated reindeer seems a good solution, as it creates an apparent
co-operation which is less erratic and dangerous than that induced by sympathetic
hunting magic. And indeed, this corresponds closely to the solution found in the
ancient biblical and Graeco-Roman pastoral worlds which underlie much general
theorizing about sacrifice, where an animal should show its acquiescence, for example
by eating from a handful of grain before it is killed (Burkert 1972).
But even here, the sacrificial reindeer, selected and calmed from the general herd, is
constrained by being tied up. Can there be a way of inducing co-operation that relies
neither on illegitimate magic nor on physical force? People in Northeast Siberia have
also found other elaborate solutions to this problem, and we have identified two of
these as being of particular significance. The Eveny in Yakutia have special co-operative
reindeer which are believed to sacrifice themselves, while groups in the Amur region,
who mostly have no reindeer, place a bear in a partially tamed position before sacrificing it. The angry mood of a bear undergoing sacrifice is, as we shall see, quite
different from that of a self-sacrificing reindeer. But we shall argue that these contrasting moods are part of the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as a perfect
hunt. This happens through the creation of an appearance of acquiescence which
appears to be more unambiguously under human control than the acquiescence which
is claimed for the wild animal in the hunt, or even for an ordinary kind of reindeer in
sacrifice.
We shall describe the two cases in turn, starting with the bear.
Suckling and sacricing the bear
In the Amur Gulf area of the Siberian Far East and northern Japan, the indigenous
Nivkh, Orochon, Nanay, Ainu, and some Evenki until recently staged an annual bear
festival. Whereas comparable bear festivals in western Siberia, for example among the
Khanty (Jordan 2003: 115-24), are performed after a bear is killed in a hunt, in this
region a bear cub is captured in the wild and reared to adulthood in a quasi-tamed
state, before finally being sacrificed in an elaborate ritual in which it appears to collude
in its own death. The captured cub is reared in a domestic setting where the women
suckle it (Paproth & Obayashi 1966: 218) and it acts as playmate for their children. After
a couple of years, when it has grown too big to be kept out in the open, the bear is
confined to a cage. Here it is fattened for another two or three years, given the best of
foods, and addressed as an honourable member of the human community.
On the day of the bears killing, it is treated in exactly the same way as the reindeer
in the Chukchi and Koryak sacrifice described above. People put on their best garments
decorated with colours, elaborate beadwork, and ornaments (Kwon 1993: 94). They sing
for the bear to please it, and offer it food and drink. There is a similar parallelism in the
killing itself. The bear is tied to a pole and ceremonially addressed, being asked for
future wealth and luck. It is finally shot dead with an arrow fired at close range by the
best hunter directly into its heart. Its body is placed on a bed made of willow (Kwon
1993: 93) and people are careful to ensure that no blood is spilled on the ground, as this
would symbolize murder (Batchelor 1967 [1909]: 208). Its body is cooked and eaten on
the spot, its head with the fur attached is turned towards the mountains, and it is sent
off with food and beautiful presents to report to the spirits how well it has been treated.
Finally, the bones of the bear are carefully reassembled into the original order to ensure
its future reincarnation: The bear that comes from the mountains is believed to
return to his world and thereafter to return to be hunted again and again (Kitagawa
1961: 140).
In his essay on the bare facts of ritual, Smith moves on from ordinary bear hunting
to this specialized sacrifice, and interprets this bear festival as a ritualized way of closing
the incongruity between words and deeds, between hunters statements of how they
ought to hunt and their actual behavior while hunting (Smith 1988: 63). It is this ritual
which leads him to the idea of the perfect hunt: the humans are in control of all the
variables and this assures a reciprocity between hunter and hunted that the actual hunt
cannot achieve (1988: 64).
While we follow Smith this far, we see from a closer reading of the evidence (which
he dismisses anyway whenever it does not match his common sense) that he ignores key
ethnographic facts which reveal the bear festivals affinity with ritual blood sacrifice,
and thus its importance for our understanding of domestication in this region. What he
misses is that in between the many demonstrations of respect and worship, the bear is
deliberately teased and tormented in order to make it growl in fury. Thus Ivar Lissner
(1961: 234), who observed the bear festival among the Nivkh, describes how the bear is
tormented with a long stick while being addressed in the friendliest of terms. Young
boys also pelt the bear with stones to make it roar (Lissner 1961: 235). Batchelor (1967
[1909]: 206-11; see also Seligman 1963: 170) reports a similar tormenting among
the Ainu, who shoot at the bear with blunt arrows and thrash it with a rod, so that it
becomes thoroughly enraged. The wilder the bear becomes the more delighted do
people get (Batchelor 1967 [1909]: 208). However, when it is eventually shot in the
heart with a real, deadly arrow, they must be careful not to allow the poor beast to
utter any cries during its death struggles, for this is thought to be very unlucky (1967
[1909]: 209).
These seemingly minor details make a huge difference, since they suggest that the
aim of the ritual is not simply to bring the bear under control, which is the point of
Smiths interpretation. Rather, what is exposed is the ambiguity surrounding the
hunting project more generally, in which hunters depend on the animals favourable
response, yet where this response has to come entirely at the volition of the animal itself.
We suggest that the importance of the bears growling from fury is not its humiliation,
as has been assumed by observers of the festival (Batchelor 1967 [1909]; Lissner 1961:
234), but quite the opposite: it renders beyond any doubt that its death is not enforced
16 Rane Willerslev
ET AL.
upon it either by magical means or by superior force. The bears struggle asserts that it
is not a slave to be commanded at the will of others, but a genuinely sovereign free spirit.
Only at the moment of death must it cease to show fury, since this would turn the signs
of its sovereignty into a defeat and humiliation, and thus a refusal to co-operate.
In this way, the hunters achieve what is impossible to achieve through either imitative magic or regular reindeer sacrifice, namely a strong display of the animals free
willpower, even while it undergoes death at their hands. In the bear festival, the
ultimate act of domination also paradoxically becomes the ultimate act of trust. The
two principles are no longer mutually exclusive (Ingold 2000: 73), but combine to
cover both sides of the same double bind. It is this conflation that allows hunters to
capture the bear, tame it, and finally sacrifice it while still fulfilling their governing ethos
of trust between human and animal.
The bear festival as the origin of reindeer domestication
What is it about the bear that makes it so significant? Even without this specialized
festival, why is the bear hunt even more highly ritualized than any other hunt? It is not
that the indigenous peoples depend on it as an important food reserve, as suggested by
Frazer (1959 [1911]: 185) and also implied by Smith. Rather, it is because the bear holds
a very special cosmological status, here as among other circumpolar peoples (Willerslev
& Pedersen 2010: 269-73). Indeed, this is the point of Hallowells masterly overview.
Both Lev Shternberg (1999 [1905]: 175) and Sergey Shirokogoroff (1935: 76) mention
that the Nivkh and Evenki in this area believe that the bears spirit controls the spirits
of other animals. Likewise, Kwon writes that for the Orochon, all the wild animals
(siro) are actually bi boyoni which means all the descendants of the bear and when
Orochon hunters acquire game in the forest, what is killed by them is a child of the
bear (1993: 95, cf. 172). In other words, the bear represents the sacred prey par
excellence, embodying, so to speak, all other wild animal species within it, in much the
same way as the spirits of the Nuer are regarded as refractions of a single conception
of God (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 107).
By taming the bear for this festival, we suggest that the hunters open up a new format
(and perhaps historical stage) in relations between animals and humans. The bear
festival transforms the most powerful being of the forest, which encompasses all other
wild animals, into a domestic being. It is not just an enactment of the ideal hunt, but a
totalizing act of taming all animals, not least the wild reindeer on which these hunters
actually depend for food. There may even be an additional, more specific link to the
origin of domestic reindeer. Almost all scholars agree that reindeer domestication
began with the Evenki. Some also argue that it was with the Evenki in this Amur region
(Vasilevich & Levin 1951), and even that the Evenki originated here (Vasilevich &
Smolyak 1956: 623) before riding their reindeer to spread so widely across Siberia.
However that may be, the Evenki in this region also staged the bear festival and have an
origin myth in which the domestic reindeer originated in a self-sacrifice by the bear,
who instructed a human to spread my fur in a pit, hang my intestines on a slanting tree
(Vasilevich 1963: 71). The human did so and the next morning the little valley was full
of domestic reindeer (Vasilevich 1963: 71).
The self-sacricing reindeer of the Eveny
The Eveny further west in Yakutia, described by Alekseyev (1993) and Vitebsky (2005),
show a similar reverence for the bear but make no attempt to capture or sacrifice it.
None the less they, too, consider the bear to be the master of the wild animals that are
controlled by a spirit owner, who in this region is an old man called Bayanay. Wild
reindeer, like the bear, are subject to the regions overarching logic of hunting. They are
swift and elusive, capricious and inscrutable like Bayanay himself. In hunting them one
must find an uneasy balance between cultivating Bayanays favour and using techniques of deceit like secret language.
But when reindeer play the role of personal companions a different kind of significance emerges, and Eveny thinking offers compelling evidence that this may be how
they were originally tamed. In Eveny myth one group of primal reindeer in trouble was
helped by a compassionate human (Vitebsky 2005: 26-7). In response the reindeer
offered to serve humans ever after in exchange for protection from wolves. But another
group refused to give up their freedom and preferred to face the risks of predators for
themselves. Here, the tension between co-operation and resistance, which in the Amur
region is played out within the oscillating moods of the captured bear, is split between
the categories of wild and domestic reindeer. Though Eveny are perfectly aware that
they belong to the same species, there is no single species name that encompasses buyun
(wild reindeer) and oron (domesticated reindeer).7 The distinction is not morphological but behavioural, in terms of their different potential for sustaining a relationship
with humans.
Apart from the large general domestic herd which emerged in colonial and Soviet
times, there are two kinds, or degrees, of special domestic reindeer. Firstly, each Eveny
person has a few transport reindeer, each of them individually named and trained to
carry a saddle with a human passenger on its back in a close partnership of shared
mobility. When a person dies, his or her favourite riding deer is sacrificed on the grave
and every bone is gathered together so that the reindeer can carry its rider around in the
next world (Vitebsky 2005: 328-30). But there is another kind of reindeer which has an
even closer relationship with humans. Each person has a consecrated reindeer called a
kujjai (Alekseyev 1993: 63-72; Vitebsky 2005: 278-81, 427). A kujjai has special features,
such as extraordinary colour markings or strange hypnotic eyes. It is the most magical
kind of reindeer, and at the same time the one with the most intense attachment to a
human partner. Far from carrying anyone, it must not be tethered, ridden, or eaten, but
must live a life of ease, just wandering in the forest (Vitebsky field notes). Your kujjai
is like an animal double, and takes on the illness and misfortune which would otherwise
have hit you: thus when one mans kujjai was beaten, corresponding bruises appeared
on his own buttocks. When you are threatened by a serious danger, your kujjai stands
in front of you and takes the blow. When it dies, you may never know what the danger
was, but you can be sure that it gave its own life to save yours. You must then acquire
a new kujjai to keep up the same level of protection.
This seems a clear parallel to the wild animal that gives up its life to hunters so
that humans can continue living. But in becoming a personal bodyguard, the kujjai
takes a crucial further step. There is a general Eveny idea that one life-form can serve
as a substitute for another. Everyone tells stories of how a dog, horse, or even another
human has died in an accident or other misfortune as a substitute for someone else
(Vitebsky 2005: 275-8). But all these stories show that the animal and even the
human victim is a hapless, unconscious substitute (I cursed the Communist Party
Secretary, but his soul was too strong so it bounced off and killed someone else
instead). Only the kujjai knows what is going on, and deliberately takes the initiative
to offer itself.
18 Rane Willerslev
ET AL.
Figure 7. Eveny man travelling with saddle and sledge, December, at minus 60 celsius. When he
dies, one or more of the lead reindeer will be sacriced at his grave, to carry him into the next world.
(Photo by Piers Vitebsky.)
This is the richest form of the long-term relationship that Knight (2012: 343) talks
about between an animal and a human for whom it must die. But Knights argument
concerns a relationship between a human and livestock which has been bred for
submission. Rituals of the hunt try to mask the clash of interest between human and
animal but ultimately, we argue, they cannot square this circle. The kujjai solves this
impasse through its awareness, greater even than the awareness of its human partner, as
it (supposedly literally) sacrifices itself for that partners sake, of its own autonomous
volition. The kujjai fully harmonizes its own interests with that of its human partner.
It has sovereignty, but it is not brought into a human relationship kicking and screaming, like the semi-tamed bear. The sovereignty which in wild animals is manifested
through elusiveness, the inscrutability of Bayanay, or the rage of the caged bear is
transformed into the kujjais compassion and willingness to protect. The kujjais entire
life is a sacrifice waiting to happen, and the moment of its death is the culmination of
its human relationship and the realization of this destiny. The kujjais self-immolation
acts out a domesticated counterpart to the moment when a wild animal offers itself to
be killed, and is an even better enactment of that perfect hunt.
In utilitarian evolutionalist accounts, the riding deer was the first stage of ancient
domestication, a step which was taken for ecological or economic reasons. But the
kujjai has an equally plausible claim on cosmological grounds. The human domination of the mass herd is a by-product of the industrialization of herding under the
Russian empire and later the Soviet state farm. But this is exactly how these herders do
not see the saddled reindeer, and even less the kujjai. Rather, they invert Ingolds model
of the transition from trust to domination. The kujjai is hyper-domesticated, to a point

which makes it hard to call this a domination. The primal reindeer that sought domestication were offering humans a social contract, so that one could almost say it was the
reindeer who domesticated us. The trust between a herder and his kujjai is more sure
than that between a hunter and his prey. Rather than from trust to domination,
the progression is from unpredictability to reliability, and from evasiveness to trust.
Conclusion
In the shift from hunting to sacrifice, we propose the bear and the kujjai as alternatives
to the materialist form of ecologism and economism offered by more usual theories of
domestication, thus taking the hunters double bind seriously as a prime mover in the
development of new subsistence forms. Though we believe that these two cases can
shed light on the transition to the domestication of reindeer, these are not necessarily
to be understood as evolutionary stages in a single unilinear development. Rather,
they represent two possible routes, both of which are still active as current or recent
ritual modes of dealing with animals among groups of indigenous people in Northeast
Siberia. Their importance for history, ecology, and human-animal studies is that they
demonstrate how the domestication of the reindeer need not be simply an issue of
technological diffusion and ecological adaptation. It could equally well be a side-effect
of the playing out of tensions in the cosmology of hunting, a playing out which
originally served quite different ends than domestication, namely as a ritual means to
close the gap between words and deeds. Our theory also takes account of indigenous
rationales. Indigenous peoples, just like scientists, are very interested in origins. But
whereas scientists tend to generate materialist narratives, local people are also open to
spiritual explanations. We suggest that the natives may not be so wrong after all, even
in scientific terms.
NOTES
This article is the outcome of many years of research by each co-author. We are grateful to a wide range of
local informants and friends in the field, and to our respective institutions for long-term support.
1
Except for some Siberian domestic reindeer introduced to Alaska in 1891 (Jernsletten & Klokov 2002:
73-83).
2
Indigenous groups have various alternative names and spellings (Funk & Sillanp 1999). Eveny is a
Russianized plural of Even, who are distinct from the closely related Evenki.
3
Many communities have also moved in and out of an existence as hunters, after losing their reindeer
through raids or diseases (see Bogoras 1904-9: 618; Jochelson 1908: 434).
4
The term Siberia is generally used loosely for all of Russia east of the Urals. In this article we are
specifically concerned with the eastern end of this region (see Fig. 2), sometimes also called the Russian Far
East. In broader geographical terms, this is Northeast Asia.
5
The literature on the American North is filled with identical motifs about how animal prey must offer
itself freely to the hunter (e.g. Brightman 1993; Tanner 1979: 138; Walens 1981: 30). The Cree equate hunting
with compassion and lovemaking (Brightman 1993; Tanner 1979). Likewise, a Kwakiutl hunter, when he
dreams of copulating, immediately gets out of bed and goes hunting (Walens 1981: 132). The Naskapi hunter
sings for the caribou (Speck 1977 [1935]: 81) and the Naskapi, Montagnais, and Quebec-Labrador Cree used
to paint their caribou-skin coats with designs to please the caribou (Burnham 1992: 59). However, our
argument here concerns only Siberia, where the reindeer was domesticated, becoming a mainstay of most
indigenous cultures, and thereby opening up the issue of sacrifice alongside hunting.
6
Among numerous examples in the American North, the Rock Cree would similarly sing and drum to a
drawing of a moose to make the animal foolish so that hunters could kill it easily (Brightman 1993: 191).
They, too, likened sympathetic hunting magic to witchcraft and practised it with secrecy and fear (Brightman
1993: 192, 200).

20 Rane Willerslev
ET AL.
7
We have consulted dictionaries of several indigenous languages in the Eurasian North, and though the
words are different, we have found the same situation in every one.
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Du sacrice comme chasse idalise : une explication cosmologique de la

domestication du renne
Rsum
Il existe entre la cosmologie des peuples de chasseurs et celle des leveurs de rennes du Nord-est de la
Sibrie des parallles frappants, dans lesquels on peut trouver quelques indices relatifs au passage de la
chasse au pastoralisme. Les auteurs avancent lide quil y a une identit structurelle entre chasse et sacrifice
et que le renne a t domestiqu par des chasseurs tentant de matriser les alas de la chasse au moyen du
sacrifice. Les chasseurs ne peuvent mettre en pratique leur thos de la confiance avec la proie que dans
le cadre dactes rituels strictement contrls. Nous en dcrivons deux : la clbre fte de lours dans la
rgion de la baie de lAmour, et le renne sacr des vnes. Ces deux rituels expriment la mme logique
densemble : celle du sacrifice fonctionnant comme une chasse idale. Lanimal est impliqu dans une
relation non pas de domination mais de confiance, tout en subissant un processus dapprivoisement.
Nous suggrons, par consquent, que la domestication du renne na pas t motive seulement par des
adaptations cologiques ou conomiques, mais aussi par la cosmologie.
Rane Willerslev is Professor of Anthropology and Fellow of the Arctic Research Center and Aarhus Institute
of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University. He is the author of Soul hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood
among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the run in Siberia (University of
Minnesota Press, 2012).
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Buildings 1630-1632, Hegh Guldbergs Gade 6B, DK-8000 Aarhus C,
Denmark. rane@mail.dk


Piers Vitebsky is Head of Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. He is the author
of Reindeer people: living with animals and spirits in Siberia (Houghton Mifflin/HarperCollins, 2005) and
Dialogues with the dead: the discussion of mortality among the Sora of eastern India (Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1ER, UK. pv100@
cam.ac.uk
Anatoly Alekseyev is an indigenous Eveny hunter and reindeer herder, and now also a lecturer in anthropology at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. He is the author of The forgotten world of the ancestors
(Sitim, 1993) and Native hearth (Sakhapoligrafizdat, 1999) (both in Russian).
Faculty of History, M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University, 58 Belinsky Street, 677000 Yakutsk, Russia.
alexeev.anatoli@gmail.com


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Sacrice as the ideal hunt:

Introduction: diversied economies but a unied cosmology

characterized by collective access to resources, indefinite productive targets, generalized

Sacrifice as the ideal hunt 3

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Words, deeds, and the ideal hunt

hunting-as-sharing hypothesis promoted by Ingold (2000) and Nurit Bird-David

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The ideal hunt fullled in sacrice

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Magic and sorcery in the ideal hunt

Figure 6. Yukaghir hunter with dying moose. (Photo by Rane Villerslev.)

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Suckling and sacricing the bear

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of the transition from trust to domination. The kujjai is hyper-domesticated, to a point

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Du sacrice comme chasse idalise : une explication cosmologique de la

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