Human-animal-landscape relations on the move: playing chess and defending reindeer herds from predators in Zabaikal’e

There exists a growing dissatisfaction with materialist explanations for Northern gatherer-hunter and animal relationships. The earlier versions have tended to focus on a few choice mega-faunal resources as drivers for adaptation. Coupled with an unease of stripping away local sensibilities in some more recent science studies, this panel raises the question of how people make multiple relationships with a variety of animals in the formation of their domus or home, place, land, etc. This redrawing of attention brings those animals - which have been relatively invisible in academic discourse - back into focus. Moreover, we can examine and elucidate how the strict boundaries between the domesticated and the gatherer/hunter require an artificial shifting of experience which blurs real human and animal familiarity. We are seeking contributions that explicitly address the ways that people form partnerships and other entanglements with animals that sit between the formal understandings of the domesticate and the wild, the hunter and the cultivator.