Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic: (27 Human-Animal Studies)

This book draws together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Despite contrasts between the ecologies of the different regions, it finds useful comparisons between the ways that lives of human and non-human animals are entwined in shared circumstances and sentient entanglements. While studies of all three regions have been influential in scholarship on human-animal relations, the regions are seldom brought together. This volume highlights the value of examining partial connections across the American continent between human and other-than-human lives.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic Regions of the Americas  Jan Peter Laurens Loovers and Maggie Bolton 2 Moral Gestures: Forms of Life and Forms of Death in Amazonian Waters  Carlos Emanuel Sautchuck 3 ‘We Want to Kill Caribou, Not to Live with Them’: Inuit Cosmology and Resistance to Herding  Frédéric Laugrand 4 Too Many Onças: Taxonomical Dilemmas among the Karitiana in Southwestern Brazilian Amazon  Felipe Vander Velden 5 Pilgrims and Other Sorts of Personifications: Nonhuman Animals as Ritual Participants in Isluga, Northern Chile  Penelope Z. Dransart 6 The Fragility of Relations of Domestication: Humans, Llamas, and Unseasonal Snow in the Bolivian Andes  Maggie Bolton 7 ‘They Work for Me, I Work for Them’: Investigatory Attunements and Partnerships between Dogs and Gwich’in in Northern Canada  Jan Peter Laurens Loovers and Robert P. Wishart Afterword: Concepts that Travel  David G. Anderson Index

About the Author :
Maggie Bolton (UK) is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She studied for her doctorate at the University of St. Andrews, and subsequently held a Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the ESRC, at the University of Manchester. She has conducted ethnographic research in Sud Lípez province in the Department of Potosí, Bolivia since the mid-1990s. Her interests are human-animal relations, particularly among llama herders, and mining. She edited, jointly with Cathrine Degnen, Animals and Science: From Colonial Encounters to the Biotech Era (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and has authored various journal articles and book chapters. Jan Peter Laurens Loovers (UK) is a Dutch anthropologist and Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen in the Inuksiutit: Inuit Food Sovereignty in Nunavut project, working in the Arctic for over 15 years with research on various themes including dogs, mining, filmmaking, and Indigenous ways of educating. Most recently, he was the Project Curator for the British Museum’s Arctic exhibition and a Research Fellow on a project in Scotland about environmental and social justice in the energy transition at St Andrews University. He is the author of Reading Life with Gwich’in (Routledge, 2020) and co-edited (with R. Losey and R.P. Wishart) Dogs in the North (Routledge, 2018) and with A. Lincoln and J. Cooper the acclaimed book, Arctic: Culture and Climate (Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum, 2020).