HUNTERS AND PREY RELATION

Hunters and Prey Relation

Hunters and Prey Relation

Trust and Anthropology

Marcel Mauss' analytic on giving economies can be profitably applied to the study of the way modern capitalist society funds its trusts of responsibility. The study of hunter-gatherer societies has in fact benefited from this use of the Maussian framework for quite some time now (e.g. Bird-David 1990; Ingold 2000). Tim Ingold, for example, has described hunter-gatherers' relationship to the environment as an economy of trust (Ingold 2000). Unlike Euro-Americans, who objectify the environment as an alienated presence to their humanity, hunter-gatherers conceive of themselves as co-participants in a non-divisible social nature, along with other forms of life such as spirits and animals. One's relationship to the environment and its life-forces takes therefore the form of a mode of engagement rather than the exercise of power and control. In this light, hunting is not seen as a coercive operation, an encroachment or intervention upon the alienated and objectified animal. As Ingold puts it, animals 'are not just ''there'' for the hunter to find and take as he will: rather they present themselves to him' (Ingold 2000: 71). Rather than an act of violence, hunting is seen as a process of negotiation, one of the many forms that the 'sharing' of the environment between equal co-dwellers may take. Ingold argues that in this 'cosmic economy of sharing' (Bird-David 1992) relationships between co-dwellers are therefore based on an underlying principle of trust. Unlike other forms of cooperative relationships (cf. Gambetta 2000b), like confidence, trust 'presupposes an active, prior engagement with the agencies and entities of the environment on which we depend; it is an inherent quality of our relationships towards them' (Ingold 2000: 71). Trust, then, emerges as the natural disposition informing hunters' relationships to animals in a world underwritten by 'the willingness to give' (Ingold 2000: 71).

Despite the emphasis on the flow of trust that informs sharing as a giving economy, Ingold recognizes that hunters' relationships with animals contain an element of risk too. 'Trust', he writes, 'always involves an element of risk - the risk that the other on whose actions I depend, but which I cannot in any way control, may act contrary to my expectations' (Ingold 2000: 70). Yet we know from the preceding discussion on cultural systems of blaming and corporate models of knowledge-management that risk is not something internal to relationships. Relations appear as risky only under certain systems of moral accountability. So what would an economy where trust and risk are external to the work of relations look like? In other words, what would lie after trust (and risk) if these were the forms that relationships took when they emptied themselves out? What follows draws its theoretical impetus from Rane Willerslev's ethnography of Yukaghir hunting cosmology (Willerslev 2007).

Hunting and Gathering

For the vast, overwhelming majority of time in which human beings have existed—97% to 99% of the period since the first hominids appeared—they lived in a type of society commonly known as hunting and ...