2
Personhood and Agency in Eskimo Interactions with the Other-than-Human


Erica Hill

Following the lead of ethnographers working in the Arctic, Subarctic, and Amazonia, archaeologists have recently directed their attention to identifying and describing relational ontologies in the past. These ontologies are generally animist in orientation, assigning agency—and sometimes personhood—to a host of other-than-human actors, including animals, ostensibly “inanimate” objects, spirits, ancestors, and the dead (Betts et al. 2015; Watts 2013). Agency has been defined broadly as the “causal consequences” objects have on human activity, including the performance characteristics of material things (Brown and Walker 2008:298). Dobres and Robb (2000) argued that agency is critical to the understanding of material culture, social reproduction, and the construction of both group and individual selves. They identified variables relevant to the study of agency in the past, such as intentionality, operative scale, and role in social change. Their work addressed personhood tangentially, suggesting that the social constitution of the subject in terms of gender, age, race, and class was relevant to the exercise of agency (Dobres and Robb 2000:8–9, 11). More recently, Robb (2010:494) has revisited agency, defining it as “the socially reproductive quality of action within social relationships” mediated and contextualized by material things.

Robb (2010) focused on agency as a social phenomenon enacted through intersubjective practice. This perspective is linked to recent archaeological approaches that privilege personhood. Robb’s “agents” overlap with how “persons” are generally defined in relational ontologies; that is, persons are agential beings constituted through socially (i.e., relationally) situated actions. Personhood is conditioned by corporeal experience and by variables such as age, sex, gender, and social status. Social interactions and processes contribute, in tandem with embodiment, to the construction of the person. Temporal and spatial factors—history and geography—frame experience and structure engagements with the world, including social relations with other persons and encounters with agents. Persons share common experiences of space, things, and actions (Bird-David 1999:S72) within the social realm. As a relational process, therefore, personhood is “culturally contingent, historically specific, and internally unstable” (Finlay 2014:1192).

Agency, in the sense I employ it here, is a necessary but insufficient capacity that defines persons. In the simplest terms, all persons are agents, but not all agents are persons. Relational ontologies may attribute agency to, for example, figurines (Hendon et al. 2014), Native American bundles (Zedeño 2008), architecture and landscape features (Brown and Emery 2008; Harrison-Buck 2012; Herva 2009; Sillar 2009), and animals such as fish (Losey 2010), dogs (Laugrand and Oosten 2007; Losey et al. 2011), bears (Betts et al. 2015; Losey et al. 2013), and sea mammals (Hill 2011, 2013; McNiven 2010, 2013). All of these agents are animate and capable of action, but not all of them are persons.

The person may be constituted and dissolved in multiple forms throughout the life course as identity markers develop, shift, recede, or disappear. Human burial practices and cemetery organization have been especially productive avenues of research (e.g., Janik 2011). Cemeteries provide multiple, often contemporaneous examples of how personhood was—or was not—materialized. Categories of person may be inferred though body placement, quantity and quality of offerings and grave goods, evidence of grave reopening, and proximity to others. When and to what extent infants and children possess agency and become persons, for example, varies, indicating that personhood is a process (Finlay 2014:1196–98; Janik 2000) rather than a prediscursive phenomenon, as I discuss below in reference to Inupiaq Eskimo “wild babies.”

Paying close attention to the specifics of bodily experience, skeletal features, grave goods, and interment—whether human or nonhuman—can inform us about how persons were categorized and personhood was constructed in the past. Such an approach can be employed at multiple scales—that of the community, for example, in the study of cemeteries (e.g., Janik 2000), and at the level of the individual. An osteobiographical approach (Boutin 2012) has been employed effectively in archaeological studies of personhood and may be useful in the interpretation of both humans and animals (e.g., Losey et al. 2011). Evidence of care for humans or nonhumans with injuries or disabilities, for example, may inform us about the experience of such conditions, as well as about the ontological status of the deceased (Rivollat et al. 2014; Tilley 2015; Tilley and Oxenham 2011). Two recent studies of physically compromised individuals—a probable male suffering from chondrodystrophic dwarfism (Tilley 2015) and a child with Down syndrome (Rivollat et al. 2014)—found that the deceased were given normative funerary treatment, with no apparent evidence of stigmatization or spatial isolation from others. Such treatment contrasts with burial evidence for the segregation or differential treatment of children, possibly as incomplete or non-persons, in many cemeteries (Finlay 2000; Scott 2001).

Losey and colleagues (2011) have argued for the status of dogs and wolves as persons based on their burial treatment by hunter-gatherers in the Lake Baikal region. Not all wolves were buried in cemeteries, indicating that a specific wolf was somehow significant, perhaps identified as a particularly capable protector based on its position encircling a human head. In a similar vein, Argent (2010) has interpreted the Pazyryk horse burials as evidence that some—but not all—horses were recognized and honored for who they were or what they had done.

Bendrey (2014) has recently reported on the remains of a goat with evidence of a healed fracture. The severity of the injury would have prevented the animal from grazing and foraging with herd members, indicating that humans chose to care for the animal rather than cull it. While Bendrey does not argue that the goat was considered a person, this case study demonstrates the potential of approaches that combine fine-grained osteological analysis with an appreciation for how cultural and archaeological contexts can inform us about relations among humans and nonhumans.

In this chapter I explore the linked concepts of personhood and agency in the North American Arctic. I suggest that Eskimo of Alaska and Chukotka (figure 2.1) recognized a number of beings and “objects” as agential—capable of action and generating causal consequences. In addition, some of those agents were capable of interacting with each other and with humans as persons. Distinguishing between the two was a skill essential to daily life, whether the activity was risky, such as hunting or traveling, or relatively safe, such as dancing or scraping seal skins. Through analysis of oral narratives, imagery, and archaeological deposits, I describe how proto- and early historic Eskimo living along the Bering Sea coast differentiated between persons and agential non-persons. This exploration contributes to broader discussions of hunter-gatherer ontologies and, more specifically, to what Jordan (2008) has advocated as the study of “northern mind.”

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Figure 2.1. Map of the Bering Sea region.

Relational Ontologies and the Hunter-Gatherer Past

Influenced by Ingold (e.g., 2000a) and by broader academic trends in anthrozoology, or human-animal studies, researchers have recently drawn attention to differences between hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoralist modes of human-animal interaction (Oma 2010; Orton 2010; Russell 2002). Ingold (1987, 2000b, 2002, 2006) has persuasively argued that cosmology or worldview, human-animal interactions, and subsistence mode are entangled phenomena—that humans, animals, and the landscape itself are dynamic “constituents of the dwelt-in world” (Ingold 2000c:42). Ingold explicitly refutes the idea that “some distinctive hunter-gatherer world-view” exists (Ingold 2000b:42) while recognizing significant differences in the ways members of hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, agrarian, and industrial societies perceived the environment and engaged the world (Ingold 2000a, 2006:13).

Certainly, the acts of hunting and gathering present humans—and other animals—with very different challenges and opportunities than domestication and pastoralism. But hunter-gatherer and pastoralist ontologies are also variable, reflecting the particulars of history and geography and producing culturally distinct “meshworks” of social phenomena (Ingold 2006:13). Fijn (2011:45; see also Oma 2007, 2010) explicitly rejects Ingold’s broad characterization of pastoralism as a productive mode in which humans dominate their subjugated flocks. She has suggested that Mongolian herders take an animist perspective of the world, considering their horses, sheep, and goats to be persons and subjects with whom herders engage in relations of mutual respect. While acknowledging that such subject-object relations obtain in some herding societies, Fijn (2011:45–47) sees animist hunters and gatherers of the Arctic as better analogs to the Mongolian herders she studies than many other pastoralist peoples.

While animism appears to be a perspective that many hunter-gatherer and some herding societies share, the relational particulars differ. The remainder of this chapter explores those particulars—specifically, distinctions between agents and persons—among proto- and early historic Eskimo of the Bering Sea coast. Such distinctions were critical in animist societies populated by multiple types of persons and non-persons. Personhood, in contrast to agency, is an embodied social phenomenon enacted and reproduced through praxis and engagement in intersubjective relations. For a person, whether human or other-than-human, social relations with other persons are rule governed and dependent upon a shared understanding of interpersonal etiquette.

The proto- and early historic Eskimo landscape was a crowded one, inhabited not just by human and other-than-human persons but also by non-persons—agents whose actions had real, often serious consequences for others. Since these agential non-persons obeyed no rules and belonged to no society, they were unpredictable and therefore potentially dangerous. The successful navigation of daily life amid such a multitude of beings required the differentiation of agents from persons and of one type of person from another. Accurate identification of an agent or person was a prerequisite for appropriate action. In the case of agential non-persons, action could involve avoidance or violence; engagement with other persons could also involve avoidance or violence, but, in addition, it could involve communication, negotiation, and reciprocal action.

Eskimo Persons

For historic period Eskimo, as for many other small-scale societies, negotiation and reciprocity were behaviors essential to the constitution of the social person, the personne morale of Mauss (1985), who existed within a network of roles and obligations. Such persons were linked by kinship and marriage to both the living and the dead (Praet 2013). Among nineteenth-century Eskimo, most humans, many animals, and some things were persons. They all possessed agency, a necessary but insufficient condition of personhood. Some agential beings were not persons. Wild babies, for example, were known for horrific acts of cannibalism, but their behavior—uncontrolled, insatiable consumption—identified them as lacking personhood. Such agential non-persons violated taboos, acted in unpredictable ways, and were incapable of respect for others. In contrast, persons possessed awareness (Fienup-Riordan 2009) and behaved according to the strictures of their species.

Relations between “real” Eskimo persons and other-than-human persons such as prey animals were built upon the shared values of reciprocity, respect, empathy, and restraint (Fienup-Riordan 2007). These values were enacted and experienced intersubjectively, in social arenas governed by rules and involving pre- and proscribed behaviors (i.e., “taboos”). The Eskimo experience of the personhood and agency of themselves and others proceeded from specific social personae as constituted by the intersections of sex/gender, age, kin group, disability, capacity, skill, and status as a spouse or parent. The nature of personhood shifted throughout the life course (Finlay 2014; Fowler 2004) and was conditioned by activity, location, and the presence or absence of other persons. Embodied experience of personhood was therefore highly contextualized both spatially and temporally.

Adult Inupiaq and Yup’ik men and women, specifically husbands and wives engaged in hunting and sewing, related to prey animal persons in distinct, though complementary ways. While men generally hunted seals, walrus, and whales, women’s behavior determined whether they were successful. Women’s thoughts and actions during the hunt, their treatment of animal bodies, and the skill and attention they devoted to sewing garments made from animal skins and hides directly influenced an animal’s willingness to “give itself” to a hunter. Whales came to women who shared with others, refrained from quarreling and troublesome thoughts (Bodenhorn 1990), and constructed beautifully sewn clothing (Chaussonnet 1988). Shamans, whaling captains (umialiit), and their wives carried additional burdens of leadership, taking roles as community representatives to members of animal societies. Relations among men, women, and prey animals therefore differed depending upon the specific intersections of the gendered body with age and skill set, as well as upon season, activity, and status in the community.

Physical form—the bodies of human, seal, walrus, and whale persons—structured experience. Nineteenth-century Eskimo analogized an animal’s skin to a coat and a beak or muzzle to a mask (Fienup-Riordan 1994:59), which could be taken on and off to facilitate transformation. The outer form determined the perspective of the person, similar to the “mimetic empathy” of the Yukaghir described by Willerslev (2007). Animal persons, like human persons, had preferences, tendencies, and capacities that humans might learn to know and recognize. In contrast to humans, however, an individual animal usually represented a type of person rather than a unique combination of attributes like a human person (Ingold 1987:247; see also Willerslev 2007:2074). Yup’ik Eskimo considered beluga whales to be peaceful and hard-working. Spotted seals were ill-tempered, while ringed seals were gentle and sensitive (Fienup-Riordan 1994:60–61). Knowing the preferences and personalities of prey animals—and the rules of etiquette their hunting required—was critical to the survival of all persons, whether human or animal.

In a Siberian Yupik story (Dolitsky 2000:21–22), a hunter who could not take any animals is given advice by a polar bear in exchange for assistance. The polar bear was naked and freezing, having lost a fight with another bear. The hunter covers him with clothing made of bear skin and helps him by killing the quarrelsome bear. In gratitude, the bear explains why the hunter is unsuccessful: his dirty clothes are driving away prey animals, plus his wife is combing her hair at the same time she sews clothing, thus violating a hunting taboo. According to the bear, “It’s because of that grime that you can’t hunt well. The animals are afraid of the stench of your clothing.” This reference to scent likely concerns seals, who had a particular dislike of filth and slovenliness (Søby 1969–70).

While prey animals were generally known for their preferences and behaviors as a species rather than as individuals, a hunter might encounter an animal one-on-one. Under such circumstances, he might deal with the animal as an individual, just as the hunter dealt with the polar bear. In oral narratives recounting this sort of interaction, an element of reciprocity or exchange is usually present, as when an old man protects a reindeer from a wolf in exchange for a back scratcher (Dolitsky 2000:48). Negotiation and exchange are also central to encounters with orcas (i.e., killer whales) on both sides of Bering Strait. Orcas near the village of Naukan, Chukotka, encountered a party of hunters with a whale and began dragging them into a cave, despite attempts by the hunters to negotiate with them “in their own language.” The hunters escaped only after one of them tossed his earrings into the sea as a gift (Dolitsky 2000:136). This way of dealing with orcas is also known in Southwest Alaska, where orcas will share blubber and meat with humans in exchange for beads (Fienup-Riordan 2011:73–79).

These examples illustrate how human and animal persons interact and negotiate to survive. While the rules of animal persons may not be the same as those of human persons, they are nevertheless internally consistent and predictable. They can be learned by humans, as recounted in the story of a boy who lives with seals (or salmon) for a year. The story is known in multiple versions in the North Pacific and describes how a boy learns to see the world from a seal perspective. What the boy sees as a skylight is, from a human perspective on the other side of the ice, a seal breathing hole. When the boy encounters human hunters, he sees them as a seal does, wearing the evidence of their disrespectful behavior—a man who drinks too much water wears a bucket on his head (Fienup-Riordan 1990, 2007).

This exchange of perspectives, termed Amerindian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 1998; see also Willerslev 2004, 2007), is associated with human-animal transformation, a phenomenon still observed in Alaska villages (Cassady 2008). Such an exchange is made possible by the persistence of personhood—known as inua among Inupiat or yua among Central Yupiit (Fitzhugh and Kaplan 1982; Hill 2011, 2012)—despite physical form. The shared “soul substance” facilitates communication between types of persons and enables them to coexist. The human person must know the pre- and proscriptions for engaging with other-than-human persons—know what to do and how to do it, as when the hunter threw earrings to the orca. Such actions—on both sides of the interpersonal equation—materialized social rules founded on reciprocity.

Gift exchange and reciprocity are only possible among persons because only persons have the capacity to engage in social behaviors and observe rules. In other words, only those agents who are also persons are part of the Eskimo social world. In Eskimo ontologies, the largest category of person is composed of humans and some—but not all—nonhuman animals, which are perhaps best described as “other-than-human persons,” following Hallowell (Hallowell 1960; Hill 2011, 2012). Almost all prey animals, including seals, whales, walrus, and caribou, were seen as persons, which is consistent with the idea that hunting is a social act, an engagement between members of two societies for mutual benefit. This perspective is derived from Brightman’s definition of personhood as a form of “human-like subjectivity” (Brightman et al. 2012:2) defined in part through social action. Jordan has described it as “unfolding dialogue” (Jordan 2001:101) constituted through behavior and interaction.

Significantly for archaeology, this “dialogue” is enacted through patterned behavior involving the treatment of specific animal bones or body parts, such as the heads of bears (Jordan 2003, 2008) or the bladders of seals (Fienup-Riordan 1990, 1994). “Structured deposits” such as caches of seal bones on Nunivak Island (figure 2.2) materialize exchange relationships between human and animal societies. Nineteenth-century ethnohistoric documents indicate that seals, like beluga and other species of sea mammals, required their bodies and remains to be treated in specific ways by human hunters. Taboos governed all actions related to hunting, butchering, and consuming seals. Additional proscriptions structured speech, song, and even thoughts about prey animals. These taboos were a code of etiquette for social interaction between humans and prey, outlining what was—and was not—proper behavior or discourse.

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Figure 2.2. Seal “burials” on the coast of Nunivak Island, 1927. Structured deposits of seal bones, especially skulls, resulted from the intentional acts of hunters returning the remains of seals to the sea. In exchange for proper treatment of their bones, seals would continue to “give” themselves to hunters. Courtesy, Henry B. Collins Collections, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. NAA inv no. 1420803.

Hunters took prey in ways that showed respect to the animal person, for example, by providing seals and whales with drinks of water once they had been hauled onto the ice. The animal’s inua remained in the body and was aware of its treatment throughout the process of butchery. Through the 1800s in Southwest Alaska and Nunivak Island, the heads and bladders of seals were retrieved and cared for until the annual Bladder Festival, when the bones and bladders would be returned to the shoreline or pushed through the ice so the seals might return the following year (Himmelheber 2000:134–36).

The remains of seals and other animals, such as beluga and caribou, are archaeologically recoverable evidence of how Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimo interacted with other-than-human persons (Hill 2011, 2012, 2013). Caches of bones, sometimes with hunting gear or evidence of fire, are distinctive features that occur on both sides of Bering Strait. Though such caches are often described as “ritual” or “structured” deposits, the evidence from Alaska and Chukotka suggests that they might be more productively interpreted as reciprocal acts of gift giving that materialize the rules of etiquette between human and sea mammal persons. Caching of seal bones is thus the human observance of mutually agreed-upon rules for handling seal remains. Although this practice is documented from the nineteenth century, the structured deposition of animal bones has been going on for several hundred years in the Bering Sea region (Hill 2011).

A massive feature at a site on Cape Krusenstern (figure 2.3) was composed of an estimated 1,000 seal skulls and measured 5 m in diameter and approximately 50 cm thick, dating to around AD 500 (Giddings and Anderson 1986)—significantly larger and older than the smaller caches described here from the nineteenth century. Differences in the size, composition, and configuration of caches indicate that relations with other-than-human persons may have occurred at a number of different scales—that of the individual hunter and his wife as well as of the household, kin group, and community. The time depth also suggests that interpersonal relations—and relational ontologies themselves—have deep histories among the Eskimo. Such histories counteract the tendency to create timeless hunter-gatherer pasts differentiated only by economy and environment (Janik 2011; Sassaman 2000).

Agential Nonpersons

Both archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence indicate that sea mammals possessed agency and personhood. They, like several other types of entities (Burch 1971; Fienup-Riordan 1994, 2011), possessed “awareness” and could affect the lives of human persons. Encounters with them could be dangerous unless respect was shown and etiquette observed. However, some entities inhabiting the Eskimo landscape possessed agency but were not persons. These beings existed alone, beyond the bounds of human and animal communities (see Grønnow 2009 for examples from Greenland). They lacked the capacities for sociality and reciprocity, which defined personhood in the proto- and early historic Eskimo context. “Wild” or “cannibal” babies were one kind of agential non-person encountered by Yupiit and Inupiat beyond the bounds of the village.

Oral narratives on both sides of Bering Strait are replete with stories of wild babies—also called “big-mouth” or “monster” babies (e.g., Anderson 2005:112–13; Bergsland 1987:168–73; Fienup-Riordan and Kaplan 2007:64–83; Lantis 1990). Such babies were usually the product of some violation of a taboo—someone forgot to do something and, as a result, a big-mouth baby was born, usually by the expedient of eating its way out of its mother’s body. As cannibals, these babies existed beyond the bounds of the social. Persons could not speak to or reason with them. The only way to deal with wild babies was to avoid, escape, or kill them. As late as the 1960s, specific lakes and places on the tundra were known to be inhabited by such babies, and people avoided hunting or traveling through those areas (Burch 1971).

Cannibal babies possessed agency—they had the capacity to act in meaningful and intentional ways—but they were not considered persons in the Eskimo ontological system. This excerpt from one version of the story, told by Inupiaq Simon Paneak (Bergsland 1987:169), describes the unpredictable and bizarre behavior of a wild baby, which has just eaten its mother: “The little baby no longer stayed by its mother, but jumped out through the skylight. And whatever belongings those people had, their dogs or themselves, it tried to get at, in order to eat them. Whenever it touched something, it’s said, the little baby tore it to pieces—it had sharp teeth, it’s said. As soon as it touched something with its mouth, it would bite a piece off. And it was bouncing . . . That little baby’s only way of moving was to bounce.”

Wild babies could be overcome by quick thinking, often informed by the wisdom of elders. In Paneak’s version of the story, an orphaned boy remembered the advice of his grandmother and prevented the baby from following the villagers as they escaped. This and other versions end by noting the subsequent achievements of the boy, who became a leader and expert hunter.

Wild baby stories convey information not only about personhood and agency but also about proper behavior, including attention to elders and observance of taboos. The boy’s success as a hunter indicates that his courage and respect for the rules earned him the approval of both human and animal persons. In contrast, wild babies obey no rules for living, as Inupiat (literally, “real” people) do; they respect no taboos or standards of behavior and refuse to negotiate or communicate. Reciprocity is not part of their behavioral repertoire; they are alone and asocial. As cannibals and insatiable consumers, they violate fundamental rules of Eskimo life—they consume the flesh of family members and eat voraciously without sharing.

Inupiat and Yupiit also recognized other beings as agents without personhood. Like wild babies, these beings were dangerous to persons. Their behavior generally included some element of uncontrolled consumption or an insatiable appetite. Disembodied hands, mouths, and heads (Anderson 2005:186–91) are frequent agents, such as the itqiirpak, a huge hand with mouths on each finger that devours noisy children. Another Yup’ik creature is the meriiq, which sucks the blood from one’s big toe when that person has forgotten to procure water (Fienup-Riordan 1994:85). Some stories describe the behavior of humans, often adult men, who become cannibals or mistake something inedible for food. Two examples from Selawik, Northwest Alaska, describe men who refuse to eat what their wives have cooked—rejecting the society of their families—and instead consume their own children (Anderson 2005:241–44) or confuse rocks with (edible) blubber (Anderson 2005:245).

Wild babies, agential body parts, and some humans, while agents, either never had or lost their capacity to be persons. Their behavior is unpredictable and dangerous and usually features some act related to cannibalism or excessive appetite. These entities violate fundamental rules governing food consumption and sharing and fail to respond as a person would to reasonable speech or action. While these creatures have agency, they have somehow—often through the violation of a taboo by a human person—either given up their personhood or never had it to begin with.

Conclusion

The reciprocal social relations between human and other-than-human persons described in this chapter comprise what Mauss called a total social phenomenon (Mauss 1966 [1925]:1); that is, the principle of reciprocity between humans and other persons was woven into the very fabric of daily action and formed part of human social structure. In this view, interactions with other-than-human persons are as essential to the constitution of society as humans themselves. Such a view requires an expansion of our understanding of the social—it requires us to extend “sociality” to include relations with and among nonhuman persons. An accurate reconstruction of the past also requires understanding how age, sex, status, and a host of other variables constituted the person. Relational ontologies, such as the one described above, involved interactions not just between the human and other-than-human but among different kinds of human and other-than-human persons. Those humans who failed to behave properly and fulfill the obligations of kinship and marriage could lose their status as persons, as evidenced by their behavioral excesses. Differences between human persons—hunters and seamstresses, for example—structured interactions with prey animals and were dependent upon variables that included sex, activity, season, expertise, and marriage status.

This broader understanding of what constitutes the person implicates the practice of archaeology more broadly, extending the purview of the discipline to encompass those categories of “things” archaeologists have traditionally considered to be objects rather than agential subjects. By including other kinds of agents in our understanding of the complex social worlds of the past, our reconstructions of indigenous ontologies become more nuanced and multidimensional. As this chapter has shown, the conceptual domain of “agent” may include human persons; entities without personhood, such as cannibals or wild babies; and other-than-human persons, such as figurines (Hendon et al. 2014), animals (Hill 2011, 2013), and geographic features (Hill 2012).

Simply characterizing an indigenous ontology as “relational” actually tells us very little about the experience—the dwelling-in-the-world—of specific persons. Required is a culturally specific exploration of who was (and was not) considered a person; how personhood was constructed, acquired, or lost; and what rules or values governed relations among persons. Hunters in the Bering Sea region enacted their relationships with whales and walrus in ways quite distinct from the ways hunters of dugong did so in the South Pacific. Animal bladders and skulls were the loci of anima in the Bering Sea (Hill 2011), while Torres Strait Islanders privileged the ribs and ear bones of their prey (David and Badulgal 2006; McNiven and Feldman 2003).

Distinguishing between personhood and agency is a valuable endeavor because it defines not only what was considered appropriate social behavior but also what was not. Uncontrolled consumption and failure to share defined personhood by being antithetical to the ways “real people” acted in the early historic Eskimo past. Wild babies and hunters-turned-cannibals were agents, fully capable of action. But their actions violated the rules of sociality and reciprocity. Mere action denoted agency; action tempered by social rules defined persons. The distinction made here between agency and personhood departs from Robb’s (2010) definition of agency as socially situated action. Early historic period Eskimo recognized non-social agents. Such agents were capable of intentional actions, such as cannibalism, and could effect change but lacked the capacity for reciprocity and sociality. In other words, while both agents and persons could act, only persons could interact.

This chapter is intended not to identify a distinct “hunter-gatherer perspective” that characterized forager societies—even Arctic forager societies but rather to describe a specific relational perspective and locate it in place and time. How Eskimo of Alaska and Chukotka defined personhood has changed as a result of factors that include geography and degree of interaction with other ethnic groups. Contact with Chukchi herders, Russian traders, and Athabascan speakers required redefinition of ontological domains. Similarly, daily and seasonal rounds, migration, displacement, and large-scale changes in settlement patterns brought human persons into contact with new and unfamiliar agents, such as the entities associated with specific places (Burch 1971) or embodied in geographic features (Hill 2012).

For Yupiit and Inupiat, personhood appears to have been a matter of degree rather than an absolute state. Human persons could retreat from society by refusing to share or, like the qivittut among Greenlandic Inuit (Grønnow 2009), by leaving their camps and villages to live by themselves. Grief, trauma, and loss could cause human persons to abandon friends and family, placing themselves beyond the bounds of the social in both ontological and geographic terms. Loss of personhood could also occur during life-cycle transitions, illness, and death. These liminal periods reconfigure social status, leaving human persons potentially vulnerable. If personhood is a fundamentally social phenomenon, as argued here, processes and events that radically affect a society’s social structure are simultaneously threats to its members’ ontological status.

The study of personhood and agency in the past offers archaeologists opportunities to explore perspectives on the world that may differ radically from their own. Commonplace finds such as animal remains, figurines, and burial offerings take on new meaning once notions of personhood and agency expand to include the other-than-human. The landscape itself, like the arctic tundra, transforms from an apparently natural environment to one crowded with animals and entities pursuing their own social lives. Such a perspective on the world has tremendous potential to—paraphrasing Ingold (2006)—astonish and so reanimate thought.

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