Beyond Wild and Tame: Soiot Encounters in a Sentient Landscape

Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. Following herder-hunters of the Eastern Saian Mountains in southern Siberia, the author examines how Soiot and Tofa households embrace unpredictability, recognize sentience, and encourage autonomy in all their relations with animals, spirits, and land features. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.

Alex C. Oehler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border (Lexington Books) and was a member of the research team of the Arctic Domus project (2012-2016) at the University of Aberdeen.