Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic (Human-Animal Studies, 27)

This book brings together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Through ethnographic essays, the authors illustrate and compare entanglements of human and other-than-human lives. Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Amazon, Andes 1 Decentring the Human in the Social Sciences 2 Persons in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic 3 Domestication 4 The Contributions: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures 2 Moral Gestures: Forms of Life and Forms of Death in Amazonian Waters Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Fish 3 Beyond Nonhuman Animals, towards Techniques 4 Laguista and Pirarucu 5 Coastal Fisherman and Gurijuba 6 Shared Semiotic Materialities of Killing ... and Dying 3 ‘We Want to Kill Caribou, Not to Live with Them’: Inuit Cosmology and Resistance to Herding Abstract Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Following the ‘the Lice of the Earth’ and the Owner of the Caribou 3 Caribou and Non-social Beings: the Danger of the Hunt 4 Following and Respecting the Caribou 5 Conclusion 4 Too Many Onças: Taxonomical Dilemmas among the Karitiana in Southwestern Brazilian Amazon Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Materials and Methods 3 Onças, Jaguars and Distinct Types of Obaky 4 Animals, Monsters, ‘Bichos:’ a Karitiana Bestiary 5 The Richness of the World 5 Pilgrims and Other Sorts of Personifications: Nonhuman Animals Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Knowing through Personifying 3 Rituals of Inclusion and Exclusion 4 Interacting Human and ‘Other-than-Human’ Worlds 5 Interspecies Interpellations 6 Mutually Constituted Ritual Persons in Isluga 7 A Final Discussion 6 The Fragility of Relations of Domestication: Humans, Llamas Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Humans and Llamas in Sud Lípez: a Historical View 3 The Weather and the Andean Ayllu 4 Architectures of Domestication, the Weather-World and Lipeño Herding 5 The Snowfall of June 2002 6 The Rupture and Re-establishment of Relations of Domestication 7 Conclusions 7 ‘They Work for Me, I Work for Them’: Investigatory Attunements and Partnerships Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Perspectivism 3 Partners at Work 4 Gwich’in and Dogs 4.1 Fishing with Babe, Caring for Dogs 4.2 Dogs, Fish and Change 5 Working Dogs in the North 6 Conclusion Acknowledgements Afterword: Concepts that Travel Index This book draws together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Despite contrasts between the ecologies of the different regions, it finds useful comparisons between the ways that lives of human and non-human animals are entwined in shared circumstances and sentient entanglements. While studies of all three regions have been influential in scholarship on human-animal relations, the regions are seldom brought together. This volume highlights the value of examining partial connections across the American continent between human and other-than-human lives.