Percepções da presa: caça, sedução e metamorfose entre os Yukaghirs da Sibéria

For the Siberian Yukaghirs prey is seen as a female lover, who needs to “give herself up” to the male hunter out of sexual desire for him. Accordingly, the hunter seeks to seduce prey by transforming his body in its image. However, this attempt is risky and may result in him loosing his original species adherence. For this reason, the process of hunting is opposed within the human encampment by a counter-process, implying the hunter’s attempt to purge otherness from the self and to reconstruct his human personhood. However, even here, the hunter is not just himself, since he is believed to be the incarnation of a dead relative. The point I want to stress is that stable selves or persons are indeed impossible to maintain among the Yukaghirs, where no one is ever just himself, but always someone else as well.Para os Yukaghirs da Sibéria, a presa é vista como uma amante que precisa se “entregar” ao caçador, demonstrando desejo sexual por ele. Consequentemente, o caçador busca seduzir a presa transformando seu corpo na imagem dela. Contudo, esse empreendimento é arriscado e pode resultar na perda de sua aderência à espécie original. Por essa razão, dentro do acampamento humano, o processo de caçar é oposto por um contraprocesso, implicando o esforço do caçador em sanear a alteridade do seu eu e reconstruir sua pessoalidade humana. Ainda assim, o caçador não é apenas ele mesmo, uma vez que ele acredita ser a encarnação de um parente morto. O ponto que desejo ressaltar é que a estabilidade do eu ou da pessoa é, na verdade, impossível de se manter entre os Yukaghirs, onde ninguém é apenas ele mesmo, mas sempre alguém mais

Percepções da presa

Para os Yukaghirs da Sibéria, a presa é vista como uma amante que precisa se “entregar” ao caçador, demonstrando desejo sexual por ele. Consequentemente, o caçador busca seduzir a presa transformando seu corpo na imagem dela. Contudo, esse empreendimento é arriscado e pode resultar na perda de sua aderência à espécie original. Por essa razão, dentro do acampamento humano, o processo de caçar é oposto por um contraprocesso, implicando o esforço do caçador em sanear a alteridade do seu eu e reconstruir sua pessoalidade humana. Ainda assim, o caçador não é apenas ele mesmo, uma vez que ele acredita ser a encarnação de um parente morto. O ponto que desejo ressaltar é que a estabilidade do eu ou da pessoa é, na verdade, impossível de se manter entre os Yukaghirs, onde ninguém é apenas ele mesmo, mas sempre alguém mais

DRØMME, ÅNDER OG KOGNITION

As a child of the Western intellectual tradition, anthropology has tended not to take its informants’ stories about the existence of spiritual beings seriously. Instead, these stories tend to be accounted for by using a terminology drawn from the theories of representation, which take as their premise that we do not have any direct perceptual access to the world, but need to construct it in our minds by means of our language. This article aims at developing a radically different approach to the study of indigenous spiritual knowledge. It draws on insights from the cognitive sciences, which show that concepts can and do exist independently of language and that dreaming shares basic cognitive processes with waking life. It concludes that it is possible that children can develop prototypical concepts about spirits before they develop language. In this case language would not be fundamental for conceptual thought about spiritual beings. &nbsp

Percepções da presa

Para os Yukaghirs da Sibéria, a presa é vista como uma amante que precisa se “entregar” ao caçador, demonstrando desejo sexual por ele. Consequentemente, o caçador busca seduzir a presa transformando seu corpo na imagem dela. Contudo, esse empreendimento é arriscado e pode resultar na perda de sua aderência à espécie original. Por essa razão, dentro do acampamento humano, o processo de caçar é oposto por um contraprocesso, implicando o esforço do caçador em sanear a alteridade do seu eu e reconstruir sua pessoalidade humana. Ainda assim, o caçador não é apenas ele mesmo, uma vez que ele acredita ser a encarnação de um parente morto. O ponto que desejo ressaltar é que a estabilidade do eu ou da pessoa é, na verdade, impossível de se manter entre os Yukaghirs, onde ninguém é apenas ele mesmo, mas sempre alguém mais.For the Siberian Yukaghirs prey is seen as a female lover, who needs to “give herself up” to the male hunter out of sexual desire for him. Accordingly, the hunter seeks to seduce prey by transforming his body in its image. However, this attempt is risky and may result in him loosing his original species adherence. For this reason, the process of hunting is opposed within the human encampment by a counter-process, implying the hunter’s attempt to purge otherness from the self and to reconstruct his human personhood. However, even here, the hunter is not just himself, since he is believed to be the incarnation of a dead relative. The point I want to stress is that stable selves or persons are indeed impossible to maintain among the Yukaghirs, where no one is ever just himself, but always someone else as well

Tiltrædelsesforelæsninger: Tre professorer

Nils Bubandt. Demokrato som selvfølge: Hvad kan antropologi sige om globaliseringen af folkestyret? Andreas Roepstorff. Eksperimentel AntropologiRane Willerslev. Det guddommelige blik: En analyse af „Den Dansende Troldmand“

Disparate Ontologies? Revisiting Descola’s Ontological Schema among Northern Societies

Disparate Ontologies? Takes a critical look at Philippe Descola’s four-field anthropological model for ontologies among hunter-gatherer societies. Descola’s model juxtaposes animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism as reflecting different expressions of interiority and physicality and queries those four ontological concepts as comparative units of analysis. While Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2013) was a ground-breaking exploration of ontological ethnology and anthropological theory, the present work questions whether animism and totemism should be considered as comparable units in cross-cultural anthropological studies. Disparate Ontologies? focuses on the interpretive suitability of the concepts of animism and totemism as comparable variables in comparative analysis by investigating a sample of traditional indigenous societies from the northernmost Northern Hemisphere. The work focuses on ethnographic examples of animism and totemism, as well as cyclical rebirth eschatology and forms of perspectivism in an attempt to provide insights into the similarities and differences of ontological reckonings among diverse peoples across the North

Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans

Despite decades of research, the roles of climate and humans in driving the dramatic extinctions of large-bodied mammals during the Late Quaternary remain contentious. We use ancient DNA, species distribution models and the human fossil record to elucidate how climate and humans shaped the demographic history of woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison and musk ox. We show that climate has been a major driver of population change over the past 50,000 years. However, each species responds differently to the effects of climatic shifts, habitat redistribution and human encroachment. Although climate change alone can explain the extinction of some species, such as Eurasian musk ox and woolly rhinoceros, a combination of climatic and anthropogenic effects appears to be responsible for the extinction of others, including Eurasian steppe bison and wild horse. We find no genetic signature or any distinctive range dynamics distinguishing extinct from surviving species, underscoring the challenges associated with predicting future responses of extant mammals to climate and human-mediated habitat change.This paper is in the memory of our friend and colleague Dr. Andrei Sher, who was a major contributor of this study. Dr Sher died unexpectedly, but his major contributions to the field of Quaternary science will be remembered and appreciated for many years to come. We are grateful to Dr. Adrian Lister and Dr. Tony Stuart for guides and discussions. Thanks to Tina B. Brandt, Dr. Bryan Hockett and Alice Telka for laboratory help and samples and to L. Malik R. Thrane for his work on the megafauna locality database. Data taken from the Stage 3 project was partly funded by Grant #F/757/A from the Leverhulme Trust, together with a grant from the McDonald Grants and Awards Fund. We acknowledge the Danish National Research Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Danish Council for Independent Research and the US National Science Foundation for financial suppor

'An anthropological concept of the concept': reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghir

This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative ‘anthropological concept of the concept’ for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-economic practices and institutions of the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters, living along the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. The Yukaghirs’ moment of creative possibilities is given through the reversibility of every one of their economic practices, informed by the work of a shadow force (ayibii) that aims for the limit. We gain insights from this notion of reversibility to rethink the purchase of the ‘economic’ in our contemporary world, questioning the validity of such ‘conceptual’ descriptions as virtualism or the knowledge economy.Peer reviewe