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Comment
From the masters point of view:
hunting is sacrice
Ti m Ingold University of Aberdeen

In their dazzling speculations on reindeer domestication and the origins of sacrifice,

Rane Willerslev, Piers Vitebsky, and Anatoly Alekseyev (2015) left me yearning for the
days when anthropology could unashamedly devote itself to solving the intellectual
conundrums thrown up by detailed cross-cultural comparison. Not only is their article
a fine example of the genre, it is also gratifying to see them return to one of those classic
puzzles which already seemed anachronistic when I was writing about it almost thirty
years ago. The article amply demonstrates that the puzzle is far from dead and buried
but actually very much alive, reinvigorated by the new ethnography that has become
available since Siberia was reopened to Western-trained fieldworkers in the 1990s, and
also by contemporary debates surrounding human-animal relations, animism, and
perspectivism in northern circumpolar societies.
In my essay Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals (Ingold 1986), I
proposed that the cosmologies of circumpolar reindeer hunters and pastoralists are
broadly similar, that the principles of sacrifice are prefigured in the hunt, and that all it
takes to trigger the shift from hunting to pastoralism is a transfer of control over herds
from the animals spiritual masters to humans. Taking their cue from this proposition,
Willerslev et al. maintain that usual explanations of the origins of reindeer domestication, which prioritize considerations of economic gain or ecological adaptation, are not
in themselves sufficient. Whatever economic or ecological incentives may have
favoured domestication, only by attending to cosmological understandings can we
account for how and why these incentives were actually taken up. More particularly,
their argument is that domestication resolved a double bind in which erstwhile hunters
found themselves: how to deal with the discrepancy between the ideal, in which the
docile animal gives itself up, in a spirit of love and beneficence, to the hunter, and the
reality, in which animals are manifestly capricious and bent on escape, and in which
hunters have to resort to deceit and trickery to bring them down. The sacrifice of the
domestic reindeer, in effect, enacts the perfect hunt.
The argument is ingenious; however I am not wholly persuaded by it. To be sure, it
is not hard to see why hunters might have cosmological objections to domestication.
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From the masters point of view 25

The spiritual indomitability of animals, and the dire consequences that can follow from
human attempts to control this spirituality by seeking to capture and tether living
beasts, are recurrent themes of hunting narratives throughout the northern circumpolar region (Ingold 1980: 282; 1986: 271). This may certainly help to explain why some
hunters notably in North America did not become pastoralists. But it does not
explain why others such as in Siberia did. The standard argument is that as
steppe-dwelling peoples, already accustomed to riding on horseback, expanded northwards into the forested taiga, they substituted the reindeer for the horse as a beast of
burden since it was so much better suited to the rough terrain. This argument seems
entirely sensible to me, and I could find nothing in what the authors of the present
article have to say to indicate that there is anything wrong with it. Moreover, it also
helps to explain how people who would never dream of imposing their will on animals
that are not theirs to control could nevertheless do just that when it comes to the
parallel population of animals already incorporated into the human fold.
What other alternative do we have? Should we seriously believe as Willerslev et al.
intimate that hunters remain hunters because the solution to the cosmological double
bind that pastoralists found in the sacrifice of domestic animals has somehow eluded
them? Are we to suppose that hunters are so retarded in their cultural evolution that
they failed to recognize an escape from their existential dilemma that was staring them
in the face? The dilemma, according to the authors, lies in the apparent disjuncture
between ideal and reality, or between what people say and what they do. Hunters say
that animals give themselves up; actually they have to be pursued and tricked into
submission. [W]hen ... pastoralists sacrifice a reindeer, claim the authors, they are
effectively doing what the hunters say they do, but cannot do (Willerslev et al. 2015: 11,
original emphasis). It seems to me, however, that the difference here is rather one of
perspective: indeed I am surprised that the authors do not draw on the well-established
literature on northern perspectivism to which at least one of them has made major
contributions to argue the point. This is that in the hunt, it is not the hunter but the
master of the animals who is sacrificing one of his herd. Thus when pastoralists
sacrifice reindeer, they are doing what hunters say the animal masters do. If you were the
animal master, watching over all that transpires, would not the whole episode of the
hunt appear as the ideal narrative proposes?
Of course from the mortal hunters perspective it appears quite differently after all,
he is but a bit-part player in the process, whose task is absolutely not to sacrifice the
animals but to perform the immolation on the masters behalf, receiving the meat in
return for services rendered. (The master is of course precluded from performing the
immolation himself since killing is equivalent to sexual penetration, and would be
tantamount to father-daughter incest.) Perhaps, in the perspective of the animal
master, the sacrificial victim is even tethered by ropes that are invisible to the hunters.
Indeed, precisely such mystical tethering is explicitly described in the story of the
Yukaghir grandmother (Willerslev et al. 2015: 13) who claimed a magical control over
moose of a kind that could only be rightfully exercised by the animal master. The
master got his revenge, and the granny and her family paid with their lives for her
presumptuousness! The story of the perfect hunt, then, is the animal masters story, as
told by humans. In this story, the master (who is really a spiritual pastoralist) dominates
the animals, but trusts the hunters to do their job, while the hunters trust the master to
provide them with animals to kill and consume, though not without difficulty. What
the hunters fear, or regard with abhorrence, are human sorcerers who play pastoralist
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26 Tim Ingold

with the herds, seeking to dominate them by mystical means or to tether them with
magical ropes and angering the herds rightful masters in the process.
By missing this rather obvious point, Willerslev et al. have succeeded in spinning out
a string of ingenious yet wholly illusory paradoxes.These all centre on the issue of whether,
given the episodic and fraught circumstances of actual encounters with animals, hunters
can establish any kind of social compact with their prey. In a recent contribution to the
journal Current Anthropology, John Knight (2012) argues that they cannot. Those such as
myself, who have suggested that they can, have according to Knight confused the
animals with the spirit master who bestows them: it is with the latter, and not the former,
that relations are established. Where the animals are flesh-and-blood individuals, the
spirit master is the incarnation of an abstract species essence. Willerslev et al. appear to
agree, stating that Knight has a valid point (205: 8). Yet elsewhere, in a comment on
Knights article, Willerslev goes out of his way to discredit it! There can be no simple
opposition,Willerslev argues,between the fleshly and the spiritual.The former is no more
distributed among discrete individuals than the latter is pinned to an abstract category.
Rather,at least among circumpolar hunters,animals in the flesh are the body of the animal
master turned inside out (Willerslev 2012: 351).Another way of putting this, which at least
accords with Inupiaq ideas about the master of the caribou, is that individual animals are
like specks in the masters eye. For mortal hunters, that eye is the sky and the specks are
actual animals (Ingold 2000: 125).
The animal masters story is, of course, also the bears story, since the bear is the
master of the animals. Clearly, therefore, the so-called domestication of the bear is an
entirely different matter from that of the reindeer. Willerslev et al. do recognize that
there is a difference, though Im not sure that they put their finger exactly on what the
difference is. Nor am I convinced by their explanation of the bears curious treatment,
which combines elaborate respect with what looks like utter humiliation (Willerslev
et al. 2015: 14-16). Since this is an exercise in classic anthropology, I wonder whether we
might go back to another classical anthropological theme, namely the joking relationship. The bear is invited in as an honorary guest, but he is also the master of a domain
that is structurally opposed to that of the human, and which humans would rather like
to annex for themselves if only they could. The alliance is tense, to say the least. Could
the bears treatment, like the joking relationship, be an expression of the combination
of friendship and hostility that is the hallmark of structural alliance? This would tie up
very nicely with the observation(Willerslev et al. 2015: 17), concerning the Eveny, that
the tension played out in the oscillating moods of the bear is here played out between
categories of wild and domestic deer. The axis of alliance and opposition is identical in
both cases: in the first it is embodied in the figure of the bear, in the second it is
embodied in the herds that emerge from the bears innards.
Finally, theres the issue that keeps cropping up of trust and domination. I have
argued (Ingold 2000: 61-76) that the relation between hunter and prey is based on a
principle of trust, which rests in turn on a combination of autonomy and dependency.
Domination, on the other hand, through the imposition of the will of one party upon
the other, inevitably compromises the autonomy on which trust is founded. That is why
it is so dangerous for the hunter to play pastoralist with the masters herds. In retrospect, I am fully prepared to admit to weaknesses in the trust to domination account
of the transition from hunting to pastoralism; however, the principal weakness, to
which the present article also succumbs, seems to me now to lie in my conflating two
quite different models of domination. One is the patriarchal model, applicable to Near
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From the masters point of view 27

and Middle Eastern pastoralism as represented in biblical accounts and associated with
the proximate power of ancient kingdoms. The other is the northern circumpolar
model, where the control of the pastoralist over his herd is not at all like that of a ruler
over his subjects but very much like that of the spirit master over animals which are
really just refractions of his own being. If the one kind of domination, which has
provided such a rich repertoire of metaphorical resources for the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, is anthropocentric, then the other, in line with an ontology of animism, could
better be described as anthropomorphic (Viveiros de Castro 2012: 100-1). Might it be
possible, then, to describe the transition from hunting to pastoralism, and with it the
origins of domestication and sacrifice, in terms not of evolutionary progression but of
the exchange of perspectives?
REFERENCES
Ingold, T. 1980. Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: reindeer economies and their transformations. Cambridge:
University Press.
1986. Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals. In The appropriation of nature: essays on
human ecology and social relations, 243-76. Manchester: University Press.
2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.
Knight, J. 2012. The anonymity of the hunt: a critique of hunting as sharing. Current Anthropology 53, 334-55.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere (four lectures given in
the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February-March 1998, introduced by Roy
Wagner). Hau Masterclass Series, Vol. 1.
Willerslev, R. 2012. Comment on Knight, The anonymity of the hunt: a critique of hunting as sharing.
Current Anthropology 53, 350-1.
, P. Vitebsky & A. Alekseyev 2015. Sacrifice as the ideal hunt: a cosmological explanation for the
origin of reindeer domestication. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, 1-23.

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

Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK.
tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk

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

Royal Anthropological Institute 2015