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Navigating the Human-Animal Boundary
Article in Reviews in Anthropology · February 2010

DOI: 10.1080/00938150903548592
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NERISSA RUSSELL
Alger, Janet M. and Steven F. Alger 2003. Cat Culture: The Social World of a
Cat Shelter. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Corbey, Raymond 2005. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human

Boundary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Downloaded By: [Russell, Nerissa] At: 22:32 9 March 2010
Forth, Gregory L. 2004. Nage Birds: Classification and Symbolism among an Eastern
Indonesian People. London: Routledge.
Snyder, Lynn M. and Elizabeth A. Moore, eds. 2006. Dogs and People in Social,
Working, Economic or Symbolic Interaction. Oxford: Oxbow.
Willerslev, Rane 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the
Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Animals have long figured in anthropology, but human-animal

relations have come into focus in recent decades. The topic links
anthropology’s sub-disciplines by exploring the biological and
cultural nature of both humans and animals in the past and
present, as well as articulating with similar concerns in other
disciplines. While anthropology is defined in terms of the sepa-
ration of humans from animals, this exploration exposes the
permeability of the human-animal boundary, transcended by
thinking animals, bestial ancestors, and trans-species empathy.
This forces a rethinking of the nature of personhood: is it only
for people?
KEYWORDS animal consciousness, classification, embodiment,

human-animal relations, personhood
Address correspondence to Nerissa Russell, Department of Anthropology, Cornell

University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. E-mail: nr29@cornell.edu
3
4 N. Russell
Animals, and especially animals in relation to humans, have become a hot

topic in the last couple of decades across a range of disciplines beyond
zoology and animal science, driven by shifting conceptions of the nature
of animal minds. There has long been a strain in veterinary studies con-
cerned with the human-animal bond, represented, for example, in the
journal Society and Animals. Much of this research is focused on the ben-
efits of companion animals to humans and the prevention of animal abuse,
but scholars from this background have produced some pioneering studies
of human-animal relations that try to assess the scope of these relations
across cultures and through time (e.g., Lawrence 1985; Schwabe 1994;
Serpell 1986). Human-animal relations can be understood narrowly as the
interactions between humans and other animals, or more broadly to
include the uses people make of animals as both beings and concepts.
Inspired in part by the animal rights movement, in part by a critical reas-
sessment of the construction of nature, human-animal relations have been
explored in disciplines including literary studies (Ham and Senior 1997),

religious studies (Kowalski 1991), feminist studies (Adams and Donovan
1995), history (Ritvo 1987; Salisbury 1994; Sax 2000; Turner 1980), soci-
ology (Franklin 1999), and geography (Philo and Wivert 2000; Tuan
1984; Wolch and Emel 1998). Underlying much of this work is an interrog-
ation of the human-animal boundary: what, if anything, separates humans
from other animals?
Anthropology, with its sub-disciplines encompassing the study of both
humans and animals (primates), past and present, and across cultures, and
its long-standing concern with the intersection of nature and culture, is parti-
cularly well positioned to examine human-animal relations. Indeed, there is a
long tradition of anthropological attention to human-animal issues. Within
biological anthropology, primatology is devoted to implicit human-animal
comparisons: what can non-human primates tell us about humans and our
ancestral hominids? Some primatologists have also addressed relations
between living humans and primates (e.g., Cormier 2003; Fuentes 2007).
Leach’s (1964) ‘‘Anthropological aspects of language’’ is a classic of linguistic
and symbolic anthropology, and Lévi-Strauss’s (1963:89) dictum that animals
are ‘‘good to think’’ has inspired many within and beyond anthropology.
Archaeology has long concerned itself with whether and how ancient people
hunted animals and with what domestication is and how it came about (e.g.,
Meadow 1993; Vigne et al. 2005).
The five books considered here span anthropology’s four fields (if we
include folk taxonomy as linguistic anthropology), although two are not
actually written by anthropologists. They address several of the vexing and
fascinating issues in the anthropological study of human-animal relations.
Some common themes emerge across the books and sub-disciplines, parti-
cularly in relation to the human-animal boundary.
Navigating the Human-Animal Boundary 5
BECOMING HUMAN
Corbey’s (2005) The Metaphysics of Apes is written by a philosopher who has

long collaborated with archaeologists and biological anthropologists, focus-
ing on paleoanthropology and primatology. While the title might suggest a
discussion of ape cognition (where there has been much recent work, e.g.,
Rumbaugh 1999; Tomasello and Call 1997; Whiten and van Schaik 2007;
Wood et al. 2007), this is not Corbey’s main focus. Rather, he explores
how apes have defined humanity in the history of Western thought. The
human-animal boundary is rendered problematic by our fellow primates in
two ways: by the often-uncomfortable similarities between humans and liv-
ing primates, especially the great apes; and by our relationship to our homi-
nid ancestors. At what point in human evolution did these animals become
human? Corbey explores the relationship between these two problematic
questions, which have often informed each other. He notes that the human-
animal boundary has historically shifted its position and been defined by
different criteria, and that European thought has swung back and forth
between humanizing and bestializing tendencies for both humans and apes.
In general, though, Western thinkers have sought to maintain human purity
by patrolling the human-animal boundary. While Corbey characterizes
historical periods of thought on these topics, a strength of the book is his
recognition of the contention within each of these periods.
European thought on the ape-human boundary is no doubt shaped by
the lack of native great apes in Europe, so that their discovery posed a new
challenge. In the absence of apes, it is easier to construct a clear human-
animal boundary. Europeans became aware of the living great apes from
the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries. Initially their knowledge of these
animals was sketchy, and they were understood in part through medieval
conceptions of the wild man or homo sylvestris: hairy, half-human creatures
living deep in the forest. The homo sylvestris was seen as dangerous and
licentious, and these traits were mapped onto great apes, such that both
homo sylvestris and the imperfectly distinguished gorillas, chimpanzees,
and orangutans were believed to capture and rape women. Interestingly,
apes and wild men seem to have been conceived as exclusively male. The
homo sylvestris also provided a model for representations of hominids when
their fossils were first discovered, and probably still shapes popular concep-
tions of our ancestors (Moser 1998).
Linnaeus (von Linné 1758), while a creationist, did much to blur the
human-animal boundary by classifying humans with other animals, based on
anatomical similarities. This was a controversial move at the time, when most
scholars strove to define a human-animal boundary with apes safely on the ani-
mal side. After all, this was the time of the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism
(body=soul, nature=culture, animal=human, etc.; Descartes 1664), some of
6 N. Russell
which persists today. But some, such as Rousseau (1755) and Monboddo
(1779–1799), saw great apes as humans in a state of nature, hence human.
In the 19th century evolutionary thought became dominant, logically
implying no greater boundary between humans and other animals than
between any two animal species. This threat to human uniqueness underlay
the opposition to evolution; even Darwin (1860) himself resisted the implica-
tions. By the later 19th century hominid fossils began to support the evol-
utionary model, and to threaten the human-animal boundary further. Some
human dignity was preserved by casting evolution as a march of progress,
in which humans stood at the pinnacle of a process of steady improvement.
On the other hand, some, including Sigmund Freud, interpreted our animal
ancestry as meaning that an ape-man lingered within us, the bestial part of
our human nature.
In the 20th century, evolution came to be understood as a process of
selection acting on blind variation: adaptation to particular conditions rather
than moral progress. However, much of the teleology of 19th century evol-
utionary thought lingers in current thinking, even in scientific work. Corbey
traces the increasingly desperate attempts to find key traits to differentiate
humans from apes and all other animals: language, tools, brain size, symbolic
thought, consciousness, culture. When other animals are found to possess a
trait, it is defined more and more narrowly to maintain human uniqueness:
not just tools, but tool-making tools, or tools used in a symbolic context.
These mental contortions are necessary only because of the dualistic model
of humans as a category opposed to other animals en masse, rather than as
one species among many. As Cartmill (2001) has noted, the human-animal
boundary is a moral, not a taxonomic distinction. Blurring it has ethical
implications, which have been seized upon by the animal rights movement.
Corbey notes, though, that the argument is made for the extension of (some)
human rights to other species based on their personhood, judged by their
similarity to humans. We are still the standard, and the effect is to move
rather than remove the human-animal boundary. As a philosopher, Corbey
also notes that much of ethics is about respecting difference rather than simi-
larity. Fuentes (2006) has argued that while shared humanity or personhood
with animals has usually been argued on the basis of empathy (e.g., King
2007), it can equally be argued on the basis of shared biological structures
such as the physiological bases for emotional experience.
An important aspect of Corbey’s book is his delineation of how dualistic
thinking about humans and other animals has shaped Western anthropology.
Western primatology until recently treated other species as essentially differ-
ent from humans, criticizing Jane Goodall (1990) for naming her chimpanzee
subjects, for example, which recognized their individuality. Japanese prima-
tologists and anthropologists, on the other hand, have long taken a more
empathetic approach, imputing thoughts and feelings to monkeys (Asquith
1986; Ohnuki-Tierney 1987; cf. Alger and Alger 2003, below). More crucially,
the human-animal boundary, assimilated to culture=nature, has defined

sociocultural anthropology in contrast to biological anthropology in parti-
cular and the natural sciences in general. Corbey suggests that we need to
move beyond Cartesian dualism, recognizing that the capacity for language
and culture are biological adaptations: human nature has been social and
cultural from the beginning. While he does not develop this, Corbey is
arguing for an embodied approach that does not divorce human mind from
bestial body. If we can achieve such an understanding of humans, perhaps
we can extend it to other species as well.
HUNTING SOULS
Willerslev’s Soul Hunters (2007) exemplifies one way such an embodied

approach might transcend the human-animal boundary. His title pays hom-
age to Hamayon’s (1990) La Chasse à l’Âme (Soul Hunt), her exploration of

shamanism among the Buryat and other Siberian hunting groups. Willerslev
is less concerned with shamanism per se, which has been largely extirpated
among the northeast Siberian Yukaghir hunters whom he studied, but
focuses on their experience of hunting animals, the basis of the shamanistic
worldview. That is, he presents a new analysis of animism.
The Yukaghir have been heavily impacted first by Soviet collectiviza-
tion, and then by post-Soviet privatization. Willerslev himself experienced
some of this impact, with the result that his participant observation was on
the one hand more intense than he might have intended, and on the other
hand more limited to the largely male sphere of the forest. After a first visit
to the area as a museum researcher, Willerslev returned to work for an
NGO prior to his doctoral research, helping to set up a fur collective to secure
fair prices for the Yukaghir hunters. A large Russian fur company took
umbrage at this disruption of their exploitation and sent police officers to
arrest him, forcing him to hide in the forest with the hunters. The danger
was real, for his Russian NGO colleague was found mysteriously drowned.
While in the past women would have joined the men in the forest and hunted
with them except during menstruation and just after birth, since the introduc-
tion of government wage labor in the 1960s younger women have stayed in
the village to work. The men spend eight months of the year hunting in the
forest, during the Soviet period mostly trapping sable for the fur trade. In the
post-Soviet era, wage labor has dried up and prices have risen, so many
Yukaghir have returned to subsistence hunting focused on elk (moose to
North Americans), with a lesser component of sable trapping. The younger
women still stay in the village, however.
In common with many hunting groups, especially in the circum-boreal
region, the Yukaghir believe that elk offer themselves to the hunter, or rather
that they are offered by a master of animals (e.g., Brightman 1993; Descola
8 N. Russell
1994; Nadasdy 2007; Tanner 1979). One must take what is offered in order
to receive more later; killing game does not deplete it, but rather contributes
to its increase. On the other hand, too much hunting success accumulates too
many animal souls, and the spirits may claim their share by taking the souls
(causing the death) of the hunter and his family. The Yukaghir balance these
countervailing incentives by killing all animals offered, but ceasing to hunt if
they become too successful.
Another way the Yukaghir conceive of the danger of too much hunting
success is that the animal master spirit has fallen in love with the hunter, and
will want his spirit with her in the otherworld, causing his death. This brings
us to the metaphysics of Yukaghir hunting. The Yukaghir consider animals
(or at least some animals, some of the time) to be persons with souls. Elk
of either sex are seen as essentially feminine, giving themselves to hunters
not because they sacrifice themselves freely (for the Yukaghir recognize they
have their own interest in living), but out of desire for the hunter. The hunt is
an act of seduction, described in language full of sexual imagery. This con-

flation of hunting and sex, with the prey cast as a woman to be conquered
and penetrated, is extremely widespread among hunters in a broad range
of societies, even modern Western ones (e.g., Brightman 1993:127; Cartmill
1993:240; Fiddes 1991:145; Ingold 1987:251; Kensinger 1989; Roe 1997:180;
Tanner 1979). The night before a hunt, hunters make small offerings to the
animal master spirit, so that the spirit will have sex with them in their dreams.
This desire is then transferred to the prey, who are also enticed by the
hunters’ decorated clothing. During the hunt, the Yukaghir practice what
Willerslev calls ‘‘mimesis’’: they imitate elk to the point that they become
almost-elk (or, as Willerslev puts it, not elk, but not not-elk). Killing the ani-
mal re-establishes the human-animal boundary, preventing seduction from
becoming love and the hunter from becoming wholly and permanently elk.
The power of the ‘‘hunting as sex’’ metaphor is apparent in that
Willerslev seems to have adopted it himself, unexamined. He suggests that
one could explain the sexual imagery of Yukaghir hunting, as an early
20th century ethnographer did, by analogy to the free sex and male rivalry
among unmarried Yukaghir at the time. This explains nothing, except that
Willerslev apparently also sees sex as like hunting; free love is not intrinsi-
cally like killing animals. However, Willerslev rejects this explanation
because gender relations changed dramatically in the Soviet and post-Soviet
eras, so that Yukaghir no longer experience free love. And, of course, the
equation of hunting and sex extends far beyond Yukaghir society. Much
more usefully, he inquires what it is about hunting that evokes sexual
feelings. He argues that seduction is not merely a metaphor, but arises from
the bodily experience of the hunt. The mimetic experience involves a blend-
ing of bodies and identities that resembles sex; boundaries are blurred and
crossed. This raises the question, alas ethnographically inaccessible to
Willerslev, of how Yukaghir women experienced hunting. The closest he
can come is to note that women are often enthusiastic dancers. Yukaghir
dancing involves imitation of animals, and especially their courting behavior.
So, he suggests, dancing is the primary mimetic experience of modern
Yukaghir women, analogous to hunting for men.
Shamanism is no longer practiced among the Yukaghir, but some forms
of it survived into the 1960s, so Willerslev was able to obtain some infor-
mation about it. At least these later shamans, practicing at the family level,
operated through a more intense version of what ordinary hunters experi-
ence: in trance, they would become wholly one with the animal, and compel
it to offer itself to the hunters. This was an act of desperation, when the
family was faced with starvation, as it was regarded as cheating. Even then,
the shamans (who could be male or female) would not eat the meat of ani-
mals killed by their magic, because the close identification would make it like
cannibalism or, in fact, eating oneself. Also like hunters, shamans gained
power through having sex with spirit helpers.
Willerslev sees animism=shamanism not as a religion, but a set of prac-

tices or mode of perception. He refuses to treat the Yukaghir understanding
of spirits and the personhood of animals and spirit beings as metaphorical,
since the Yukaghir do not and he rejects as ethnocentric a stance that would
judge the validity of Yukaghir beliefs by Western criteria. While this approach
is challenging for those whose understanding of the world differs from that of
the Yukaghir, Willerslev’s struggle to understand their concepts in their own
terms helps us to appreciate more fully the reality in which the Yukaghir live.
For the Yukaghir, personhood and identity, for humans as well as animals
and spirits, is not inherent but emerges from engagement. Yukaghir do not
see all animals as persons, and can treat them as commodities, for example,
in other contexts. Animals and spirits become persons when they act like
persons, and interact with humans.
SPIRITUAL BIRDS AND SOUL BIRDS
For the Nage of Flores Island, Indonesia, it is birds that have spirits, or, rather,
spirits manifest themselves as birds. Forth’s Nage Birds (2004) is partly an
exercise in classic ethnozoology, partly an exploration of the extensive
symbolic role of birds in Nage life. Forth elicited lists of bird names from
his Nage informants and inquired about identification criteria. He found that
the order in which birds were recalled and how bird names grouped in the
lists were important clues to higher-level groupings. He used this information
to construct the Nage bird taxonomy. Interestingly, given the theme of this
book, which was inspired by the symbolic importance of birds in Nage life,
the Nage have no word for ‘‘bird,’’ although Forth suggests there is a covert
category that corresponds to our ‘‘bird,’’ although it also includes bats. They
refer instead to ‘‘animals that fly.’’
10 N. Russell
Forth weighs in on one of the major debates in ethnobiology: whether

folk classifications are based on perceptual salience, and thus similar to
scientific taxonomies (the intellectualist position: Berlin 1992), or whether
they are based on culturally specific values, whether economic or symbolic
(the utilitarian position: Hunn 1982). Although Forth seems to have been
sympathetic to the utilitarian view at the outset, he became convinced that
the intellectualist model better fits the Nage taxonomy, at least at the level
of the folk generic (roughly equivalent to species or genus in scientific tax-
onomy; the smallest named category). Some groupings are based on cultural
criteria, however. For example, there is an important group of birds that
make a type of sound called po at night. Po means owl, but in this context
it also includes diurnal raptors and spirits; indeed, the po sounds are always
made by spirits, which may manifest themselves as birds. The various kinds
of po sounds are not equated to different bird taxa, but to different messages
from malevolent spirits.
Forth defines several categories of birds with supernatural associations.

Spiritual or witch birds are visible manifestations of (evil) spirits. They tend to
be black and nocturnal, and include but are not limited to po-making birds.
While spiritual birds are ominous, there are also non-spiritual omen birds;
that is, birds whose appearance or call augurs ill fortune, but that are not
considered to be embodied spirits. While spiritual birds signal general
misfortune, omen birds indicate specific bad outcomes; spiritual birds are
religious while omen birds are magical. Soul birds form a third category,
linked specifically to deceased people, and act more like omens than
spiritual birds. Similar beliefs that birds may embody the souls of dead
people are found elsewhere in the Pacific, for instance in New Guinea
(Lohmann 2005:190).
Forth suggests that we see culture shaping knowledge most clearly
where it is in conflict with science; that is, where beliefs are empirically incor-
rect. Examples are beliefs that falcons decapitate their prey with the edge of
their wings, or that bats derive from bamboo grubs through metamorphosis
(and then further transform into larger bats and then palm civets). Forth
argues that even these mistaken beliefs are based to some degree on obser-
vation, but partial knowledge leads to erroneous interpretations. He does not
consider that the symbolic role of birds plays much role in these false beliefs,
but rather that the Nage simply do not systematically subject their inferences
to experimental falsification in the manner of Western science. In contrast to
Willerslev, who chooses to take Yukaghir beliefs seriously and thereby
challenge his own notions of reality, Forth finds it more useful to evaluate
Nage knowledge from the vantage of science.
Birds play other roles in Nage life. People and places are named after
birds. Birds and their calls mark times of the day and year. Birds are used alle-
gorically to illustrate human life and feature prominently in myth, songs, and
proverbs. In these contexts, birds do not always have the same associations
they do in real life as spiritual or omen birds. Forth’s main conclusion is that
folk taxonomy and symbolic uses of birds and probably other taxa are inde-
pendent of each other.
DOGS IN HUMAN LIFE
So far we have been discussing relations with wild animals. While Forth
makes some reference to domestic chickens, which are economically impor-
tant to the Nage and used in sacrifice and divination, they are in a different
category from other birds. Indeed, it is not clear that Nage consider them to
be birds. Symbolically, they are identified with humans and human souls.
Nage dogs are also ambiguous, and the focus of more taboos than any other
animal. Dogs are the only domestic animal among the Yukaghir, and the only
animal that has no spirit master. Dogs frequently inhabit a liminal space: they
are animals but live with humans, domestic but not (or only rarely) livestock
(Gottlieb 1986; Sharp 1976). Anomalous creatures and liminal zones are both
troubling and productive, with the potential to mediate transformations from
one state to another. As such they are often the focus of ritual (e.g., Douglas
1966; van Gennep 1960; Turner 1967). Dogs eat feces and other unpleasant
substances, which renders them unclean for some people, such as the
Yukaghir, and sacred purifiers for others, such as the Zoroastrians (Boyce
1993; Schwabe 1994). Dogs, the first domesticate, have participated in vir-
tually every possible form of human-animal relationship: pets, food animals,
commensals, hunting and herding aids, sources of labor and medicine, sym-
bols, pariahs, fur and wool supplier, sacrificial victims, and so on (e.g., Barsh
et al. 2006; Laurans 1975; Ojoade 1990; Serpell 1995; Tooker 1965; White
1991; Wing 1984; Yates and Koler-Matznick 2006). Snyder and Moore’s edited
volume, Dogs and People in Social, Working, Economic or Symbolic Interac-
tion (2006), explores some of these roles in past societies, although some of
the chapters are primarily concerned with studies of present-day practices
that may help illuminate the past.
In global perspective, with the exception of Egyptian mummies, dogs
are the animal most commonly found in human graves or buried like humans
(Morey 2006), implying some blurring of the human-animal boundary. In this
volume, we find discussion of dog burials in Bronze Age Greece, Germany,
and The Netherlands (Prummel 2006); Bronze Age and classical Greece
(Trantalidou 2006); and classical Rome (De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti
2006). Prummel (2006) notes that dog remains are rare in human graves of
the central and western European Bronze Age; the dog bones at the only
two sites where they occur could be seen as offerings or grave goods. Like
the humans at this period, they are cremated, and buried in pits or urns either
alone or mixed with remains of other animals or, in one case, a human infant.
They are associated with elite graves and may have been prized hunting dogs
12 N. Russell
or other companions. Hamilakis (1996) has suggested that the somewhat

more abundant dog remains in Mycenaean graves (Late Bronze Age Greece),
also in elite contexts, are hunting dogs, hunting being an elite activity at that
point. However, few remains of game animals are found at Mycenaean sites,
so Hamilakis proposes that the hunting is largely imaginary, and the dogs are
symbolic status markers. Prummel is unconvinced that hunting dogs would
exist in the absence of hunting, and suggests that they may have been valued
for other reasons. ‘‘The dogs could have symbolized one or more values like
hunting, animal husbandry, housekeeping and the maintenance of the
family, love, combat, warfare and perhaps others’’ (Prummel 2006:75). De
Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti (2006) note numerous Roman dog burials in
cemeteries, both alone and with humans; they suggest these may be either
pets or guides for the afterworld.
The presence of pet dogs, including toy breeds kept as lap dogs, is well
attested to in both the literature and the archaeology of classical Greece and
Rome as well as medieval Europe; a Maltese-like toy breed seems to have

been present throughout the classical world (Baxter 2006; Daróczi-Szabó
2006; MacKinnon and Belanger 2006; Trantalidou 2006). In all cases, such
special breeds, as well as special hunting breeds, are limited to elite contexts
and served as status markers, while medium-size generic ‘‘mutts’’ are more
widely distributed.
While they are rarely the primary sacrificial animal, dogs are recorded as
sacrifices for particular deities or purposes in many societies (e.g., Méniel
1992; Oberholtzer 2002; Ojoade 1990; Olsen 2000; Tooker 1965). Trantalidou
(2006) and de Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti (2006) review the literary, artistic,
and archaeological evidence for dog sacrifice in the classical world, where
the sacrifice of ‘‘unclean’’ dogs was felt to have a cathartic, purifying effect.
Dogs are especially associated with the underworld and chthonic deities,
and de Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti suggest that Roman dog sacrifice is often
associated with liminality, no doubt because of their own liminal position.
The articles in this volume highlight a long-standing practice in Greece
and Italy, stretching from at least the Early Iron Age through the Hellenistic
periods, of making votive deposits in wells including sacrificed animals, dogs
among them (Chenal-Vélardé 2006; Chilardi 2006; Wilkens 2006). For sheep
and goats, this begins in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B on Cyprus at Kissonerga-
Mylouthkia, where at least 23 complete sheep and goats were dumped in a
well along with partial remains of at least five humans (Croft 2003).
Valadez et al. (2006) document a particularly interesting form of dog
sacrifice at Teotihuacán, Mexico. Under the ancient city are a series of tunnels
excavated by the prehistoric inhabitants, with sacrifices and ritual deposits.
Dogs are disproportionately frequent among these animal remains in
comparison to occupation deposits. The canid remains include a coyote,
numerous dogs, and 20 wolf-dog hybrids. Stable isotope analysis indicates
that the coyote had a typical carnivore diet, the dogs’ diets were variable
and generally omnivorous, and the hybrids had largely plant-based diets.
This suggests that they were specially fed by humans, probably mostly maize.
The tunnels were seen as entrances to the underworld, places of death,
rebirth, and hence fertility. In this especially liminal place the ancient
Teotihuacanos sacrificed especially liminal canids: half-wild, yet living more
in the human realm than ordinary fully domestic dogs.
Mason and Snyder (2006) present an ethnoarchaeological study result-
ing from forensic consulting, examining the sacrifice of dogs and use of
dog parts in Afro-Cuban religions, primarily Palo Monte. The motives for
sacrifice are variable: to feed blood to spirits in return for their help, to heal
illness or remedy misfortune, or to transfer their power to the priest. In this
last case, the dogs may be tormented prior to sacrifice so they will bring that
anger and ferocity to the ritual deposit (nganga), to be harnessed by the
priest against enemies.
ANIMAL ETHNOGRAPHY
I have often mused about what one could learn by applying the ethnographic
method to animals, in contrast to more standard ethological approaches.
Some primatologists may approach this (e.g., Fossey 1983; Goodall 1971). It
requires crossing the human-animal boundary and seeking common ground
with other sentient beings. It also depends on applying the arguably uniquely
human capacity for empathy to other species (Fuentes 2006). Two sociolo-
gists, Janet and Steven Alger (2003), have attempted this in Cat Culture, their
ethnography of a cat shelter with the emphasis on the cats, complete with
vignettes of cat interactions. Most anthropologists will probably be unsatisfied
with their definition of culture as social organization, produced by generating
its components: norms, roles, and sanctions. Culture is one of the criteria com-
monly used to separate humans from animals. Biological anthropologists and
others who have argued that some animals possess culture have defined it as
traditions of learned behavior (e.g., Bonnie et al. 2007; Whiten and van Schaik
2007). Most sociocultural anthropologists prefer a definition involving an
integrated symbolic system of shared beliefs, harder to demonstrate in other
species (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963). Be that as it may, the Algers have ven-
tured where few anthropologists have dared to tread. Originally working on
other issues, the Algers brought their professional skills together with their
private lives in this study. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
an animal rights organization) activists who became involved in an unusual
cat shelter in Albany, New York as adopters, volunteers, and board members
prior to their research, the Algers decided to study cat society. The shelter is in
an apartment where the cats are allowed to run loose. Only sick cats, new
residents, or those who fight are caged until they can be restored to health
and harmony. This is therefore a rare study of domestic animal behavior in
14 N. Russell
a ‘‘natural’’ setting, where the cats are free to interact with minimal human
interference.
The theorizing here is not terribly sophisticated, drawing mainly on the
symbolic interaction theory of George Herbert Mead (Mead and Morris 1934)
to explore how people, and in this case cats, construct their social world
by imagining how others will react and acting accordingly. (For a more
ambitious attempt at animal ethnography, here with dogs, see Kohn 2007.)
The Algers devote some attention to the humans who run the shelter,
and their interactions with the cats, but they are primarily interested in the
cats themselves. They demonstrate that not only do the cats have individual
personalities, but they recognize each other as individuals and behave differ-
ently to each other. The Algers take this as evidence of symbolic interaction,
and hence symbolic thought. This book, then, contributes to the literature on
animal consciousness and intelligence. It seems, however, to fall into the
group critiqued by Corbey, where intelligence or personhood is judged by
similarity to humans. We hear much about human-like behavior by these

cats, little about what makes them uniquely catty.
Some of the authors’ attitudes seem decidedly anthropocentric, as well
as culture-bound. For example, while they and the other shelter volunteers
are for the most part committed to giving the cats as much freedom and
self-determination as possible, accommodating to their personalities, they
seem completely untroubled by the policy of spaying and neutering all the
cats. Were the cats truly free agents, I suspect they might not make this
choice. They stress that spaying and neutering the cats removes sexual
competition and permits a harmonious community; it is probably equally
important that it nearly eliminates mothers with infants, who may also be
more competitive and protective. They appear to project their desire for
harmony onto the cats, intervening when necessary to maintain it, and
observing that aggression comes mainly from cats new to the shelter. They
read the subsequent diminution of aggressive behavior as the cats learning
that aggression and dominance behavior are unnecessary, although it could
equally be interpreted as the cats having settled their position in the domi-
nance system. Traditional ethology has been criticized for overemphasizing
dominance (e.g., Haraway 1991), and the Algers are reacting against this in
emphasizing other kinds of behavior, such as friendship. Sometimes, though,
they seem blind to what is very clearly dominance behavior, even when it is
used by shelter volunteers to tame feral cats (by caging them and making
them dependent on the volunteer, and handling them even against their will,
a clear establishment of a dominance relationship). Policy recommendations
in chapter seven advocating stronger legislation to protect animals do not
derive at all from the ethnographic study, except to use it as ammunition
to argue for the deservingness of cats.
Despite these weaknesses, some very interesting observations
emerge from this study. There are two basic kinds of cats who come to
the shelter: those raised in human households, and feral cats who grew up
in colonies in the interstices of human society. It turns out that while
‘‘friendlies’’ (tame cats from human households) are better at interacting with
humans, ferals are better at interacting with other cats and form the core of
the cat community at the shelter. The most problematic cats, who may con-
tinue to display aggression long after their arrival, are those from single-cat
households, who have not learned how to relate to other cats. This obser-
vation exposes the anthropocentrism of the concepts of domestication and
the wild; the wild=domestic or wild=tame distinction is all about animal
behavior in relation to us. Studies of tame and feral domestic animals such
as this might be a useful counterpart to taming studies such as the famous
fox farm experiment, where foxes were selected for breeding solely on the
basis of how willing they were to interact with humans. This selective breed-
ing led to dramatic changes in morphology, endocrinology, and a range of
behaviors with no further intervention (Belyaev 1979; Belyaev 1984; Hemmer
1990; Trut 1999; Trut et al. 2004). If domestication has shaped animal beha-
vior as well as animal bodies, what happens when they are removed from
those constraints? Groves’s (1989) study of feral mammals on Mediterranean
islands suggests that brain size, at least, does not return to the wild state in
the absence of predators.
The Algers argue that cats display a sense of self by initiating inter-
actions, forming friendships, and displaying empathy (for caged cats, for
instance). They note that this sense of self is strongest in cats that get the
most attention from humans or other cats. If this is not a matter of these
cats getting more attention because they are more empathetic or outgoing,
it suggests that, like ape language (it is possible to teach chimpanzees,
bonobos, and gorillas to use forms of language in captivity, but they do
not do so spontaneously in the wild; e.g., Arcadi 2005; Patterson and
Linden 1981; Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 2000), this may be a capacity that cats
possess but do not normally develop in the wild (cats’ wild ancestors are
largely solitary, although feral cats tend to form colonies). The Algers close
with the observation that our common evolutionary heritage permits us to
read the emotions of other species, and to form human-animal com-
munities. Taking us back to Willerslev’s Soul Hunters, they note that even
or perhaps especially predators and prey need to understand each other’s
emotions.
HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologists of all sub-disciplines and many theoretical bents are studying

human-animal relations. Aside from providing a space for productive interac-
tion across the sub-disciplines, and forging alliances beyond anthropology,
what do human-animal studies have to offer to anthropology? Some of its
16 N. Russell
major themes both draw on larger debates and inform them from a different
perspective.
Boundaries
Attention to human-animal relations immediately focuses awareness on the
human-animal boundary, explored explicitly in three of the books discussed
here and more implicitly in Nage Birds and Dogs and People. Not only are
strategies to define and maintain the human-animal boundary similar to those
used to construct boundaries among human groups (Mullin 1999), but
Corbey (2005:170–172) observes that the human-animal boundary has been
underscored in order to establish the unity of humanity, argue for universal
human rights, and counter racism. Can we maintain universal human rights
while relinquishing some of our human uniqueness? As we see most force-
fully in Soul Hunters, but also in The Metaphysics of Apes and some of the
chapters in Dogs and People, not all societies share the rigid Western views
of the human-animal boundary (of course, not all societies share Western
views of human or animal rights, either). As Corbey points out, the human-
animal boundary is closely related to other dualisms, between nature and
culture, science and humanities, and so on. Moving beyond these dualisms,
to accept biology and culture as important, will tend to erase or at least blur
this boundary; an embodied approach presently seems the most promising
way to proceed (Butler 1993; Hamilakis et al. 2002; Moore 1994; Strathern
1996). Overcoming the mind=body dualism to understand thought as shaped
by bodily experience and bodies as shaped by ideas about the world may
help us to overcome human=animal dualisms as well.
Personhood
The nature of the human-animal boundary is implicated in defining person-
hood. While ‘‘person’’ is typically considered as equivalent to ‘‘human being,’’
this is not universally the case (for instance, the United States Supreme Court
has ruled that corporations are persons). Status as a person carries certain
rights and perhaps responsibilities, both legal and moral. It also implies indi-
viduality and agency. Some of the impetus for extending personhood to at
least some animals comes from the animal rights movement; we see this here
in Cat Culture and probably also in some of the primatological literature on
the subject. But equally it comes from the recognition through the work of
anthropology (e.g., Soul Hunters and Nage Birds) that some cultures define
persons much more inclusively, encompassing animals and often what we
would consider inanimate and supernatural beings; moreover, the boundaries
among these kinds of persons may be quite fluid. As explored by Willerslev,
understanding how such (to us) disparate beings can all be persons illumi-
nates alternate ways of constructing personhood (see also Nadasdy 2007).
Domestication
Perhaps the most important theme in human-animal studies in anthropology
that is not explored in these books, except to some extent by implication, is
domestication and the construction of the wild. I will not dwell on this here
(but see Cassidy and Mullin 2007), but it is worth noting that it is hunters who
find it easiest to transcend human-animal boundaries. As with the Yukaghir,
those who regard wild animals as persons often consider domestic animals as
just animals, lacking souls. The property relations of domestication disrupt
the sense of kinship with other animals. Of course, this is an oversimplifica-
tion. East African pastoralists feel considerable kinship with their cattle, and
personhood again becomes an issue with modern Western pets (as in Cat
Culture). As I have argued elsewhere (Russell 2007), domestication is another
place where nature and culture meet and intertwine.
Domestication aside, this set of books provides a good entrée to the
current literature on human-animal relations. The times, places, and species
examined vary, but common themes of challenges to the human-animal

boundary and the construction of personhood emerge. Darwinian evolution-
ary theory makes it clear that humans are just one species of animal among
many, similar to the views of many foragers (e.g., Ingold 1994). But, as
Corbey points out, anthropology, as the study of human beings, is intrinsi-
cally anthropocentric and has tended to draw the human-animal boundary
rather starkly. Anthropologists are struggling to escape Cartesian dualism in
many spheres, and for this purpose, animals are ‘‘good to think.’’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Roger Lohmann for inviting me to write this essay, and to

him, as well as Joseph Alter and Patricia K. Anderson, for their helpful
comments that improved it.
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NERISSA RUSSELL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.

She is a zooarchaeologist who works at Neolithic sites in Anatolia and Eastern
Europe; her main project is currently at Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Her interests
include human-animal relations, domestication, social uses of animals and
meat, gender, and bone technology. Her publications include ‘‘The Wild Side
of Animal Domestication’’ (Society and Animals 2002) and ‘‘Dance of the
Cranes: Crane Symbolism at Çatalhöyük and Beyond’’ (with Kevin J.
McGowan, Antiquity 2003). She is finishing a book entitled Putting Flesh
on the Bones: Archaeological Perspectives on Human-Animal Relationships.
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Navigating the Human-Animal Boundary

Article in Reviews in Anthropology · February 2010

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Navigating the Human-Animal Boundary

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Navigating the Human-Animal Boundary

Corbey, Raymond 2005. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human

Animals have long figured in anthropology, but human-animal

KEYWORDS animal consciousness, classification, embodiment,

Address correspondence to Nerissa Russell, Department of Anthropology, Cornell

Animals, and especially animals in relation to humans, have become a hot

explored in disciplines including literary studies (Ham and Senior 1997),

Corbey’s (2005) The Metaphysics of Apes is written by a philosopher who has

the human-animal boundary, assimilated to culture=nature, has defined

Willerslev’s Soul Hunters (2007) exemplifies one way such an embodied

age to Hamayon’s (1990) La Chasse à l’Âme (Soul Hunt), her exploration of

an act of seduction, described in language full of sexual imagery. This con-

Willerslev sees animism=shamanism not as a religion, but a set of prac-

SPIRITUAL BIRDS AND SOUL BIRDS

Forth weighs in on one of the major debates in ethnobiology: whether

Forth defines several categories of birds with supernatural associations.

DOGS IN HUMAN LIFE

or other companions. Hamilakis (1996) has suggested that the somewhat

Rome as well as medieval Europe; a Maltese-like toy breed seems to have

similarity to humans. We hear much about human-like behavior by these

HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropologists of all sub-disciplines and many theoretical bents are studying

examined vary, but common themes of challenges to the human-animal

I am grateful to Roger Lohmann for inviting me to write this essay, and to

Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, eds.

De Grossi Mazzorin, Iacopo, and Claudia Minniti

1990 Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe.

Chamber Tomb at Galatas, NE Peloponnese. Annual of the British School at

Lohmann, Roger Ivar

Savage-Rumbaugh, E. Sue, William M. Fields, and Jared Taglialatela

1976 Man:Wolf:Woman:Dog. Arctic Anthropology 13:25–34.

Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences

NERISSA RUSSELL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.

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