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?

Rane Willerslev argues for a fundamental 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 practice their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual enactments. Willerslev describes 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 domestication. Willerslev therefore suggest that the reindeer’s domestication may be based not on ecological or economic adaptations, but rather on cosmology.

ARCTIC SOCIAL SCIENCE SEMINARS
Seminar 1
Rane Willerslev, Aarhus University