The trees around the trapline shack were shrouded with animal remains. Skulls, antlers, and cloth packages of smaller bones hung from the trunk and branches, suspended with twine and leather thongs. The skinned carcasses of otters and martens were ranged along the limbs, frozen and twisted so that their naked heads faced the riverbank. Inside, the owner of the shack, a Cree Indian trapper, explained why he hung animal bones and corpses in trees.
I don't scatter my meat all over the place. Like when I skin an animal I don't just throw it outside. I go and hang it someplace. Well, like beaver meat, if you feed it to the dogs, that's here in the bush. But you don't feed a scrub dog outside in town. Those, y' know, dogs running around in town. You don't feed them. You're going to spoil your luck. The next time you go in the bush you don't kill a beaver. Because you're playing with it, playing with the meat if you scatter it all over the place. You got to keep it holy. I mean not to drop your meat, not get blood all over the home. This way you'll be lucky.
Pikisitowin ['purity'], ta-pikisit ['someone will be pure']. You don't i-mitawakit ['someone plays with it']. Like if you scatter it, if you don't pay attention what you do with it. Mess around, throw your skins all over the floor, people stepping on them. Animal respect himself, he doesn't want that. You got to try to keep it dean. Away from people. Especially woman. Woman with the rags on, that's terrible if he [woman] starts stepping on your fur. That's bad maskihkiy ['medicine'].
In a well-known passage, Max Weber defined action as "social insofar as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (1978,1:4). This book forms in part an extended reflection on the limitations of representing foraging or hunting-gathering ethnographically as a mode of social action implicating exclusively human actors. The foragers themselves may experience their productive project quite differently, with determinate consequences for the practical conduct of their foraging. Writing of the Labrador-Quebec Algonquians, Speck (1935a :72) made this observation long ago and with disarming clarity:
To the Montagnais-Naskapi—hunters on the barest subsistence level—the animals of the forest, the tundra, and the waters of the interior and the coast, exist in a specific relation. They have become the objects of engrossing magico-religious activity, for to them hunting is a holy occupation.
Speck identified here a distinctively Algonquian conception of game animals as reactive social others, alternately collaborating in and obstructing the designs of men and women who kill them with guns and traps. In this conception, society embraces rather than excludes animals, and the events of killing and eating them are experienced and talked about as so many ongoing instances of social interaction.
There is nothing unusual in the claim that American Indian foragers ascribe to their animal quarry intellectual, emotional, and spiritual characteristics paralleling in some respects those constitutive of human selves and persons. More novel in this discussion is the conclusion that these definitions of animals traverse the usual ethnographic partitions between "production" and "religion" as, respectively, technical and symbolic practices.
Implicit in the theoretical division of ethnological labor is the ascription to Algonquians and other foragers of distinct and incommensurate conceptions of their quarry. Ecologically oriented analyses of boreal Algonquian foraging strategies represent the hunters' perspective on animals as exclusively instrumental. Conversely, Speck represented hunting as a "holy occupation" but was silent on how this sacredness accrued to the technical conduct of production. Cree conceptions of the social and sacred animal are maximally visible to outsiders when embedded in practices conventionally labeled "religious." Neither the structure of ritual enactments—reverent deposition of animal remains in trees, for example—nor the pragmatic intentions of the ritualists are
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Judul : Grateful Prey Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships
Jenis : Softcopy (bentuk file dalam CD)
Harga : Rp. 3.000,- (Tiga ribu rupiah)
Pikisitowin ['purity'], ta-pikisit ['someone will be pure']. You don't i-mitawakit ['someone plays with it']. Like if you scatter it, if you don't pay attention what you do with it. Mess around, throw your skins all over the floor, people stepping on them. Animal respect himself, he doesn't want that. You got to try to keep it dean. Away from people. Especially woman. Woman with the rags on, that's terrible if he [woman] starts stepping on your fur. That's bad maskihkiy ['medicine'].
In a well-known passage, Max Weber defined action as "social insofar as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (1978,1:4). This book forms in part an extended reflection on the limitations of representing foraging or hunting-gathering ethnographically as a mode of social action implicating exclusively human actors. The foragers themselves may experience their productive project quite differently, with determinate consequences for the practical conduct of their foraging. Writing of the Labrador-Quebec Algonquians, Speck (1935a :72) made this observation long ago and with disarming clarity:
To the Montagnais-Naskapi—hunters on the barest subsistence level—the animals of the forest, the tundra, and the waters of the interior and the coast, exist in a specific relation. They have become the objects of engrossing magico-religious activity, for to them hunting is a holy occupation.
Speck identified here a distinctively Algonquian conception of game animals as reactive social others, alternately collaborating in and obstructing the designs of men and women who kill them with guns and traps. In this conception, society embraces rather than excludes animals, and the events of killing and eating them are experienced and talked about as so many ongoing instances of social interaction.
There is nothing unusual in the claim that American Indian foragers ascribe to their animal quarry intellectual, emotional, and spiritual characteristics paralleling in some respects those constitutive of human selves and persons. More novel in this discussion is the conclusion that these definitions of animals traverse the usual ethnographic partitions between "production" and "religion" as, respectively, technical and symbolic practices.
Implicit in the theoretical division of ethnological labor is the ascription to Algonquians and other foragers of distinct and incommensurate conceptions of their quarry. Ecologically oriented analyses of boreal Algonquian foraging strategies represent the hunters' perspective on animals as exclusively instrumental. Conversely, Speck represented hunting as a "holy occupation" but was silent on how this sacredness accrued to the technical conduct of production. Cree conceptions of the social and sacred animal are maximally visible to outsiders when embedded in practices conventionally labeled "religious." Neither the structure of ritual enactments—reverent deposition of animal remains in trees, for example—nor the pragmatic intentions of the ritualists are
INFO BUKU
Judul : Grateful Prey Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships
Jenis : Softcopy (bentuk file dalam CD)
Harga : Rp. 3.000,- (Tiga ribu rupiah)
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