Charles Stépanoff

Human-animal “joint commitment” in a reindeer herding system

This study explores the grounds and paradoxes of cooperative interaction in a reindeer herding system in Southern Siberia. While the majority of human activities are joint activities where goals or actions of participants require transparency and common knowledge, this article asks to what extent it is possible to build a cooperative interaction with minimal shared knowledge and poor means of communication. The article shows how, despite a lack of a clearly shared plans of action, herders are able to induce reindeer to come back spontaneously to the camps through nonverbal communication, even though reindeer graze freely and autonomously most of the time. Herders come to rely on reindeer’s cognitive skills and desires and, more generally, on animal autonomy in order to keep their herd engaged with them. Paradoxically, humans can domesticate reindeer only if they keep them wild. Yet, in spite of a relation marked by communicational opacity and radical asymmetry, reindeer and men are able to maintain an ongoing cooperative context that allows them to carry out extremely complex joint activities, such as riding.

The rise of reindeer pastoralism in Northern Eurasia: human and animal motivations entangled

Explanatory models of how domestic animals entered human societies often focus on human choices and overlook the role of animal agency in this process. After discussing the dichotomy between nature and society in these models and in anthropology, this article examines the respective roles of animal and human motivations and agencies in the advent of reindeer pastoralism in the Eurasian Arctic. Based on recent multidisciplinary approaches, it hypothesizes an intensification process whereby reciprocal adaptations by reindeer and people gave rise to new hybrid herding socialities. It proposes a holist interpretation that takes account of the triadic nature of the ‘pastoral niche’, characterized by an interaction between humans, animals, and the landscape.

Animal Autonomy and Intermittent Coexistences: North Asian Modes of Herding

Leading anthropological theories characterize pastoralism as a relation of protective domination in which humans drive, protect, and feed their livestock and dispose of its life. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork performed among six different husbandry systems throughout North Asia, we challenge this interpretation by showing that indigenous techniques tend to rely preferentially on animal autonomy and a herd’s capacity to feed and protect itself. In defining five modes of herding, in each of which the proportions of human and animal agencies differ, we explore the issue of the stability of the herder-livestock bond in a nomadic context with loose human intervention. Our argument is that the shared nomadic landscape is the common ground that enables a balance between animal autonomy and human-animal engagement in cooperative activities. We propose the notion of intermittent coexistence to describe the particular kind of human-animal relationship built and maintained in North Asian husbandry systems.

Transsingularities: the cognitive foundations of shamanism in Northern Asia

In Tuva (Southern Siberia), people expect that each class of beings contains singular individuals that distinguish themselves by atypical bodily and behavioural features and capacities. Among humans, such beings are shamans, but Tuvans also identify shamans among animals and trees. Even in the landscape, some atypical places are strong personalities. I call ‘transsingularity’ the supposed relationship that connects all these singular beings across their different classes. This treatment of atypical beings, which is widespread among Northern Asian traditions, is based on a ‘singularity detection device’, an inferential schema that links individuality and categorial norm in a specific way. This cognitive device sheds light on representations about metamorphosis as well as on interactional strategies between clients and shamans. The singularity detection device, as opposed to categorial thinking, appears to be at the foundation of Northern Asian shamanism. Finally I suggest that it may also play a role in animist cosmologies in other regions of the world.