Editor’s Introduction

The once-bright lines drawn between “animals” and “humans” have become fuzzier in the “Age of the Anthropocene.” Many social scientists are probing the implications of an increased realization that humans can be destructive animals, and that we influence our interconnected environment more than was commonly considered as recently as twenty years ago. Rather than tackle religiously infused debates about evolution and climate change, this issue explores the question of “animal-human interrelationships” from the viewpoints of various peoples of Eurasia. Living in close proximity with animals has given many individuals and groups different perspectives on animal husbandry, domestication, hunting, and the interconnectedness of all beings seen to have souls within a larger cosmos. This double issue, which I have been working on for over two years, is divided into two loosely related conceptual sections. The first features pragmatic, economic-based animal-human practices, and the second includes more spiritual, cosmological understandings of animals as actors in seen and unseen environments. We begin with well-grounded, ethnographic descriptions and analyses of reindeer herding among the Evenki of Siberia, dog breeding among the Oroks of Sakhalin, livestock husbandry among mountain Kyrgyz nomads, and horse breeding in Turkmenistan. These Siberian and Central Asian cases have something in common: they reveal historical contexts for the degradation of animal husbandry without its Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, vol. 56, nos. 1–2, 2017, pp. 1–5. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1959 (print)/ISSN 1558-092X (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2017.1391538