Throughout the northern circumpolar tundras and forests, and over many
millennia, human populations have based their livelihood wholly or in
part upon the exploitation of a single animal species-the reindeer. Yet
some are hunters, others pastoralists, while today traditional pastoral
economies are being replaced by a commercially oriented ranch industry.
In this book, drawing on ethnographic material from North America and
Eurasia, Tim Ingold explains the causes and mechanisms of
transformations between hunting, pastoralism and ranching, each based on
the same animal in the same environment, and each viewed in terms of a
particular conjunction of social and ecological relations of production.
In developing a workable synthesis between ecological and economic
approaches in anthropology, Ingold introduces theoretically rigorous
concepts for the analysis of specialized animal-based economies, which
cast the problem of 'domestication' in an entirely new light.