Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs [Paperback]

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

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

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Animism as Mimesis
2. To Kill or Not to Kill: Rebirth, Sharing, and Risk
3. Body-Soul Dialectics: Human Rebirth Beliefs
4. Ideas of Species and Personhood
5. Animals as Persons
6. Shamanism
7. The Spirit World
8. Leaning and Dreaming
9. Taking Animism Seriously

Notes
References
Index

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