Soul hunters : hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Soul hunters : hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
University of California Press, c2007
- : pbk
- : cloth
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Note
Bibliography: p. 205-219
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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" world - one 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.
Table of Contents
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
by "Nielsen BookData"
