Rane Willerslev

Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans

Despite decades of research, the roles of climate and humans in driving the dramatic extinctions of large-bodied mammals during the Late Quaternary period remain contentious. Here we use ancient DNA, species distribution models and the human fossil record to elucidate how climate and humans shaped the demographic history of woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison and musk ox. We show that climate has been a major driver of population change over the past 50,000 years. However, each species responds differently to the effects of climatic shifts, habitat redistribution and human encroachment. Although climate change alone can explain the extinction of some species, such as Eurasian musk ox and woolly rhinoceros, a combination of climatic and anthropogenic effects appears to be responsible for the extinction of others, including Eurasian steppe bison and wild horse. We find no genetic signature or any distinctive range dynamics distinguishing extinct from surviving species, emphasizing the challenges associated with predicting future responses of extant mammals to climate and human-mediated habitat change.

A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

It is commonly thought that human genetic diversity in non-African populations was shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50-100 thousand yr ago (kya). Here, we present a study of 456 geographically diverse high-coverage Y chromosome sequences, including 299 newly reported samples. Applying ancient DNA calibration, we date the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) in Africa at 254 (95% CI 192-307) kya and detect a cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time interval at 47-52 kya, consistent with a rapid initial colonization model of Eurasia and Oceania after the out-of-Africa bottleneck. In contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males.

Can Film Show the Invisible

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

Introduction. Value as theory: Comparison, cultural critique, and guerilla ethnographic theory

The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an anti-theory of value. The two perspectives derive from two different visions for anthropology, which differ radically on how they see the relationship of the discipline to other disciplines and to the history of ideas more generally. Where these views converge, however, is on the aim of exploring the potential of value as theory. In both perspectives, value is seen as a powerful concept that can generate new ethnographic questions and insights and can provide a crucial dimension to cultural critique.

The Soul of the Soul Is the Body: Rethinking the Concept of Soul through North Asian Ethnography

As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the “consequence of blur,” this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor’s famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul’s fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Darhads of Mongolia, are reversible: persons can turn themselves inside-out as their inner souls and outer bodies cross over and become one another.

The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity

This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the “dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness. Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love. 2009 meeting of GDAT

Two spectres haunt the debate this year, the motion of which is ‘the anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love’. The first is that oft-encountered bugbear ‘ethnocentrism’ – Jeanette Edwards asks: ‘Could it be that the search by some anthropologists for love, the determination to find love in the ethnographic record, is because they are also in love with the idea of love?’ In other words, are some anthropologists fixated on love because of its important place in the Euro-American tradition and in ideologies of the individual? A converse trend is the concern that forms or expressions of romantic love in various non-Western locales are influenced by (or even a product of) Westernization and globalization. Critique of Anthropology 31(3) 210–250 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X11409732 coa.sagepub.com

God on trial: Human sacrifice, trickery and faith

What would the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value or the other is captured by its own shadow and flips into its contrary. This reversibility takes place against a “paramount value” shared by both traditions: the necessary hierarchical distance between humanity and divinity. All of this allows us to reconsider Abraham’s trial in a manner that is precisely contrary to most prevailing interpretations—namely, as an act in which God is put on trial by Abraham.

Prologue: Value as theory Value, action, and critique

In the introduction to part one of this special issue we addressed the thorny question of whether an anthropological theory of value is needed or indeed possible at all. By way of a Socratic debate, we argued respectively for one of two opposite positions. Ton Otto suggested that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory and he was in favor of bringing the papers together from a “history of ideas” perspective, thereby tracing how the authors’ varied perspectives and approaches to questions of value advanced particular—and easily specified—trends in social theory. Rane Willerslev, to the contrary, proposed that anthropology is an ethnographically driven discipline, which can only produce idiosyncratic “antitheories” of value. In Willerslev’s view, anthropologists are and should be, primarily, warriors of the periphery—that is, “guerrilla warriors,” using indigenous conceptual productions as tactics to fight dominant theoretical traditions. The debate reflects an underlying disagreement, which runs through the collection of articles themselves, about the place of anthropology in relation to other disciplines and, in particular, whether anthropology is primarily theory-driven or ethnography-driven, and whether or not these two abstractions (“theory” and “ethnography”) can be reconciled. This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

Half-Trust and Enmity in Ikland, Northern Uganda

This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat- and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. “Half-trust,” as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. While the Ugandan groups have been disarmed by their government, the Kenyan Turkana, armed with AK-47s, are allowed into Ugandan territory for pasture during drought, and some Turkana take violent advantage of this power imbalance as they leave. Paradoxically, intervention by Ugandan state institutions that, in the name of peaceful coexistence, welcome the Turkana in Uganda has led to the escalation of conflict, while tribal “half-trust” has kept it relatively limited.