Cunning as... a Wolf

Abstract

Recent anthropological reasoning fostered by the ontological turn debate, has tackled the issue of multispecies ethnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives. Focused on the changing contours of the ‘nature’ wriggling within whatever ‘human nature’ might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995, 94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and animals. In my paper I will take into account relations and connections between wolves and humans among hunters in Sakha-Yakutia, Eastern Siberia.

Keywords

• Anthroology of animals. Human-nonhuman others. Multispecies relations. Siberia. Wolves