For the Siberian Yukaghirs the world is animated with living souls in the sense of Tylorian “animism”. As Yukaghirs say: “The world is full of vision, full of eyes”; seeing is universal and everything, from animals, rivers, lakes and trees to spirits and even shadows, has a perspective of its own that returns our gaze. If we are to take this seriously, not as a vague intuition but as a fact of vision, then everything is tangled in a web of seeing and being seen and no one is simply an “observer” and nothing just an “object”; there is only a sentient world crowded with eyes.

Living in such a sentient world implies that all beings – humans, animals and spirits – participate in a field of social interaction defined in terms of predation. From the viewpoint of any class of beings, all others are either predators or prey. The human hunter, for example, sees the elk as prey in much the same way as he himself is seen as prey by the spirit of the animal, who is said to hunt him as an elk. Hunting, therefore, is not a one-sided event but fundamentally reciprocal: people are both hunters and hunted just as they are both seeing and seen. Indeed, much of what goes on among Yukaghirs is concerned with this fearsome symmetry of being both subject and object of vision, both predator and prey.