Hunting Ideology and Ritual Treatment of Animal Remains in Hunter-Gatherer Societies: An Enactive Anthropological Approach

Abstract

Ritual treatment of animal remains after hunt and consumption as an act of reciprocity with animal persons is a widespread practice among ethnographically documented northern hunter-gatherer societies. Often these practices and their associated set of beliefs are discussed as part of a broader complex of circumpolar cosmology and religion which is assumed to have arisen from historical continuities within the region and is assigned considerable time depth on that basis. However, the aforementioned practices and beliefs are by no means unique and can also be attested among various tropical hunter-gatherer groups. By way of a critical discussion of the “ontological turn” and enactivist theory, this paper suggests that, rather than through historical connections, the hunting rituals and beliefs may be better explained within the context of developmental histories of structural coupling between hunter and prey affected by bodily and empathic resonance and the complexity of the relation between epistemology and ontology.