Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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 sacrifice, and for the domestication of the
reindeer as the result of hunters’ efforts to use sacrifice 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 sacrifice 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 reindeer’s domestication may be based not only
on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.
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 first snow
will come soon. (Photo by Piers Vitebsky.)
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, regard-
less of economy. All groups in the region are animistic (cf. Pedersen 2001), have similar
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 people’s relation-
ship 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.
Figure 3. Eveny women feeding reindeer with salt to keep them tame. One tradition says that wild
reindeer were first attracted by the salt in women’s 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 increas-
ingly 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 envi-
ronmental 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 Hatt’s analogy is itself preposterous. Some of the major
shifts in history, and indeed in our own day, occur through religious or other ideologi-
cal 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 impor-
tant 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 domes-
tication 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 chal-
lenged 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 Ingold’s article
‘Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals’, in which he compares hunting
and sacrifice by situating both within a broader unified circumpolar cosmology, bring-
ing together materials from both Eurasia and North America. Ingold’s 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
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 Ingold’s 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 ‘domi-
nation’ 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 Ingold’s pioneering analysis for further exploring the transition from
wild reindeer hunting to reindeer domestication, while squeezing his Frazerian over-
view 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,
Ingold’s thesis supports our view that a major contributory cause of reindeer domes-
tication may lie in cosmological concerns, rather than just in ecological adaptations and
the diffusion of technology.
However, Ingold’s 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 world’s 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 avail-
able. 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
farm’s 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 semi-
domesticated 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 com-
plicate the picture still further, our ethnographic examples from Northeast Siberia will
show that the distinction between ‘trust’ and ‘domination’ is quite clearly more ambigu-
ous than Ingold proposes.
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 hun-
ter’s 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
hunter’s 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
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 rela-
tionship 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 animal’s 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 mani-
festly 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).
Figure 5. Ritual blood sacrifice 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 (Ingold’s ‘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 theat-
rical tableau is complete.
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 sympa-
thetic 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 hunter’s
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 hunter’s counterpart to
‘taming’, as a way of calling forth the animal’s 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, xani’ce (‘per-
secutor’, 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 animal’s 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 Ingold’s 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
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: ‘It’s
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 sacri-
ficing 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 contrast-
ing 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.
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 bear’s 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 festival’s 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
Smith’s interpretation. Rather, what is exposed is the ambiguity surrounding the
hunting project more generally, in which hunters depend on the animal’s favourable
response, yet where this response has to come entirely at the volition of the animal itself.
We suggest that the importance of the bear’s 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
upon it either by magical means or by superior force. The bear’s 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 imita-
tive magic or regular reindeer sacrifice, namely a strong display of the animal’s 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.
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 region’s 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 Bayanay’s favour and using tech-
niques of deceit like secret language.
But when reindeer play the role of personal companions a different kind of signifi-
cance 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 morphologi-
cal 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 man’s 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.
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 sacrificed 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 Knight’s 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 partner’s 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 scream-
ing, 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 kujjai’s compassion and willingness to protect. The kujjai’s 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 kujjai’s 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 ‘domina-
tion’ 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 Ingold’s model
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 & Sillanpää 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).
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.
REFERENCES
Alekseyev, A. 1993. Zabyty mir predkov [The forgotten world of the ancestors]. Yakutsk: Sitim.
Anderson, D.G. 2002. Identity and ecology in Arctic Siberia: the number one reindeer brigade. Oxford:
University Press.
——— 2004. Reindeer, caribou and ‘fairy stories’ of state power. In Cultivating Arctic landscapes: knowing and
managing animals in the circumpolar North (eds) D.G. Anderson & M. Nuttall, 1-16. New York: Berghahn.
Batchelor, J. 1967 [1909]. The Ainu bear sacrifice. In From primitives to Zen: a thematic sourcebook on the
history of religions (ed.) M. Eliade, 206-11. London: Collins.
——— 2013. Sympathetic magic of the Ainu: the native people of Japan. Unknown location: Pierides Press.
Bateson, G. 2000 [1972]. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University Press.
———, D. Jackson, J. Haley & J. Weakland 1956. Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioural Science
1, 251-4.
Bird-David, N. 1992. Beyond the original affluent society: a culturalist reformulation. Current Anthropology
33, 25-47.
Bogoras, W. 1904-9. The Chukchee: Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. VII (American Museum of Natural
History Memoir 11). Leiden: E.J. Brill.
——— 1924. New problems of ethnographical research in polar countries. In Proceedings of the 21st Inter-
national Congress of Americanists, 226-46. The Hague.
Bourdieu, P. 1994. Practical reason: on the theory of action (trans. R. Johnson). Cambridge: Polity.
Brightman, R. 1993. Grateful prey: rock Cree human-animal relationships. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Burkert, W. 1972. Homo necans: the anthropology of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and myth (trans. P. Bing).
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burnham, D.K. 1992. To please the caribou. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Chaussonnet, V. 1988. Needles and animals: women’s magic. In Crossroads of the continents: cultures of
Siberia and Alaska (eds) W. Fitzhugh & A. Crowell, 209-27. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1956. Nuer religion. Oxford: Clarendon.
Frazer, J. 1959 [1911]. The golden bough: a study in magic and religion (Abridged edition). London: Macmillan.
Funk, D. & L. Sillanpää (eds) 1999. The small indigenous nations of northern Russia: a guide for researchers
(in English and Russian). Vaasa: Åbo Akademi University.
Hallowell, I. 1926. Bear ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere. American Anthropologist 28, 1-175.
Hatt, G. 1918. Rensdyrnomadismens elementer [The elements of reindeer nomadism]. Det Kongelige
Geografiske Selskab VII, 241-69.
Howell, S. 1996. Introduction. In For the sake of our future: sacrificing in eastern Indonesia (ed.) S. Howell,
1-26. Leiden: Research School CNWS.
Ingold, T. 1976. The Skolt Lapps today. Cambridge: University Press.
——— 1980. Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers. Cambridge: University Press.
——— 1986. Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals. In The appropriation of nature: essays on
human ecology and social relations, 242-76. Manchester: University Press.
——— 2000. From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In The perception
of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, 61-76. London: Routledge.
Jensen, A.E. 1963. Myth and culture among primitive peoples (trans. M.T. Choldin & W. Weissleder). Chicago:
University Press.
Jernsletten, J.L. & K. Klokov 2002. Sustainable reindeer husbandry. Tromsø: Centre for Saami Studies.
Jochelson, W. 1908. The Koryak (ed. F. Boas). New York: Memoir of the American Museum of Natural
History.
——— 1926. The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus (ed. F. Boas). New York: Memoir of the American
Museum of Natural History.
Jordan, P. 2003. Material culture and sacred landscape: the anthropology of the Siberian Khanty. Walnut Creek,
Calif.: AltaMira Press.
Kitagawa, J. 1961. Ainu bear festival (Iyomante). History of Religions 1, 95-151.
Knight, J. 2012. The anonymity of the hunt: a critique of hunting as sharing. Current Anthropology 53, 334-55.
Krupnik, I. 1993. Arctic adaptations: native whalers and reindeer herders of northern Eurasia. Hanover:
University Press of New England.
Kwon, H. 1993. Maps and actions: nomadic and sedentary space in a Siberian reindeer farm. Ph.D. thesis,
University of Cambridge.
——— 1998. The saddle and the sledge: hunting as comparative narrative in Siberia and beyond. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4, 115-27.
Laufer, B. 1917. The reindeer and its domestication. Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association
4: 2, 91-147.
Leeds, A. 1965. Reindeer herding and Chukchi social institutions. In Man, culture and animals (eds) A. Leeds
& A. Vayda, 87-128. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lissner, I. 1961. Man, god and magic. London: Jonathan Cape.
McKinnon, S. 1996. Hot death and the spirit of pigs: the sacrificial form of the hunt in Tanimbar Island. In
For the sake of our future: sacrificing in eastern Indonesia (ed.) S. Howell, 337-49. Leiden: Research School
CNWS.
Meuli, K. 1946. Griechische Opferbräuche. In Phylobolia für Peter von der Mühll, 185-288. Basel.
Paine, R. 1971. Animals as capital: comparisons among northern nomadic herders and hunters. Anthropo-
logical Quarterly 44, 157-72.
Paproth, H. & T. Obayashi 1966. Das Barenfest der Oroken auf Sachalin. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 91: Part
2, 211-36.
Pedersen, M.A. 2001. Totemism, animism and North Asian indigenous ontologies. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 7, 411-27.
Pedersen, M.A. & R. Willerslev 2012. “The soul of the soul is the body”: rethinking the concept of soul
through North Asian ethnography. Common Knowledge 18, 464-86.
Pomishin, S.B. 1990. Proiskhozhdenie olenevodstva i domestikatsiya severnogo olenya [The origin of reindeer
herding and the domestication of the reindeer]. Moscow: Nauka.
Rethmann, P. 2001. Tundra passages: history and gender in the Russian Far East. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press.
Seligman, B.Z. 1963. Appendix II: The bear ceremony. In Ainu creed and cult, N.G. Munro (ed. B.Z.
Seligman), 169-71. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shirokogoroff, S.M. 1935. The psychomental complex of the Tungus. Peking: Peking Press.
Shternberg, L.I. 1999 [1905]. The social organization of the Gilyak (ed. B. Grant) (Anthropological
Papers of the American Museum of Natural History). New York: American Museum of Natural
History.
Sirelius, U.T. 1916. Über die Art und Zeit der Zähmung des Renntiers. Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne,
Helsinki 33: 2.
Skalon, V.N. 1956. Olennyye kamni Mongolii i problema proiskhozhdeniya olenevodstva [Reindeer
stones of Mongolia and the problem of the origin of reindeer herding]. Sovetskaya Arkheologiya 25,
87-105.
Smith, J.Z. 1987. The domestication of sacrifice. In Violent origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan
Z. Smith on ritual killing and cultural formation (ed.) R.G. Hamerton-Kelly, 191-205. Stanford: University
Press.
——— 1988. The bare facts of ritual. In Imagining religion: from Babylon to Jonestown, 53-65. Chicago:
University Press.
Speck, F.G. 1977 [1935]. Naskapi: savage hunters of the Labrador Peninsula. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Sverdrup, H.U. 1939. Among the tundra people (trans. M. Sverdrup). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tanner, A. 1979. Bringing home animals: religious ideology and mode of production of the Mistassini Cree
hunters. St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and alterity: a particular history of the senses. New York: Routledge.
Vainshtein, S.I. 1980. Nomads of South Siberia: the pastoral economies of Tuva. Cambridge: University Press.
Valeri, V. 1994. Wild animals: hunting as sacrifice and sacrifice as hunting in Huaulu. History of Religion 34,
101-31.
Vasilevich, G.M. 1963. Early concepts about the universe among the Evenks. In Studies in Siberian shaman-
ism (ed.) H.N. Michael, 46-83 (Arctic Institute of North America, Anthropology of the North, Translations
from Russian Sources 4). Toronto: University Press.
——— & M.G. Levin 1951. Tipy olenevodstva i ikh prioiskhozhdeniya [Types of reindeer herding and their
origins]. Sovetskaya Ethnografiya 1, 63-87.
——— & A.V. Smolyak 1956. The Evenks. In The peoples of Siberia (eds) M.G. Levin & L.P. Potapov, 620-54.
Chicago: University Press.
Vitebsky, P. 2005. Reindeer people: living with animals and spirits in Siberia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin;
London: HarperCollins.
Walens, S. 1981. Festing on cannibals: an essay on Kwakiutl cosmology. Princeton: University Press.
Watanabe, H. 1973. The Ainu ecosystem: environment and group structure. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Willerslev, R. 2001. The hunter as a human kind - hunting and shamanism among the Upper Kolyma
Yukaghirs. Journal of North Atlantic Studies 4, 44-50.
Willerslev, R. 2004a. Not animal, not not-animal: hunting, imitation, and empathetic knowledge among
the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 10, 629-52.
——— 2004b. Spirits as ready to hand: a phenomenological study of Yukaghir spiritual knowledge and
dreaming. Anthropological Theory 4, 395-418.
——— 2007. Soul hunters: hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
——— 2009. The optimal sacrifice: a study of voluntary death among the Siberian Chukchi. American
Ethnologist 36, 693-704.
——— 2012. On the run in Siberia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— 2013a. Rebirth and the death drive: rethinking Freud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’ through a
Siberian time perspective. In Taming time, timing death: social technologies and ritual: Studies in death,
materiality and the origin of time, vol. 1 (eds) D. Refslund & R. Willerslev, 79-98. London: Ashgate.
——— 2013b. God on trial: human sacrifice, trickery, and faith. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3: 1,
140-54.
——— & M.A. Pederson 2010. Proportional holism: joking the cosmos into the right shape in North Asia.
In Experiments in holism: theory and practice in contemporary anthropology (eds) T. Otto & N.O. Bubandt,
262-78. Oxford: Blackwell.
——— & O. Ulturgasheva 2012. Revisiting the animism versus totemism debate: fabricating persons
among the Eveny and the Chukchi of north-eastern Siberia. In Animism in rainforest and tundra: person-
hood, animals, plants and things in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (eds) M. Brightman, V.E. Grotti &
O. Ulturgasheva, 48-68. New York: Berghahn.
Zeuner, F.E. 1963. The Pleistocene period: its climate, chronology and faunal successions. London: The Ray
Society.
Résumé
Il existe entre la cosmologie des peuples de chasseurs et celle des éleveurs de rennes du Nord-est de la
Sibérie des parallèles frappants, dans lesquels on peut trouver quelques indices relatifs au passage de la
chasse au pastoralisme. Les auteurs avancent l’idée qu’il y a une identité structurelle entre chasse et sacrifice
et que le renne a été domestiqué par des chasseurs tentant de maîtriser les aléas de la chasse au moyen du
sacrifice. Les chasseurs ne peuvent mettre en pratique leur éthos de la « confiance » avec la proie que dans
le cadre d’actes rituels strictement contrôlés. Nous en décrivons deux : la célèbre fête de l’ours dans la
région de la baie de l’Amour, et le renne sacré des Évènes. Ces deux rituels expriment la même logique
d’ensemble : celle du sacrifice fonctionnant comme une chasse idéale. L’animal est impliqué dans une
relation non pas de domination mais de confiance, tout en subissant un processus d’apprivoisement.
Nous suggérons, par conséquent, que la domestication du renne n’a pas été motivée seulement par des
adaptations écologiques ou économiques, 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, Høegh 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 anthropol-
ogy 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