One of the characteristic aspects ofViveiros de Castro’s perspectivismis the relative rather than absolute character of subject/object positions. In the Altaian context, animals are not attributed with subjectivity in the way found in Amazonian cosmologies. Still, the subject position is not particular to humans: the landscape is populated by masters of a both human and nonhuman kind. The terminological division of animals into wild (a?dar-kushtar) and domesticated (mal) in Altaian language is analogical to the human/animal division in Amazonia. Wildness and domesticity thus become relative categories defined with reference to the idiom of the master. What is wild for a human master is domesticated for a nonhumanmaster. Here, the common denominator is a sort of ‘livestock-morphism’:what for the human hunters looks like a deer is a cowfrom the point of view of the forest masters. If conducted improperly, hunting is thus analogous to livestock theft – morality transcends perspectivism in Altai. Exploring this ‘pastoralist perspectivism’ leads to questions about subjectivity and agency, ethics and ownership. The discussion is finally placed ‘into perspective’ by showing thatAltaians do not operate with a single idea of the animal and human–animal relationship.

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"everyone dies … Very few people kill themselves" emile durkheim 1952: 267 Suicide is a challenging object of study. as ian Hacking has recently claimed, "[t]he meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide" (2008: 1). For anthropology, the particular challenge lies in thinking beyond some of the assumptions implicit in the powerful and widespread clinical conceptualization of suicide, which presents it as a pathological and individual act, committed with willful intent, full consciousness and unambiguous authorship, whose default subject is arguably a "Western," male, white, middle-class human. These implicit assumptions serve as a "gold standard" of real suicide, to which all acts of self-harm are compared or ultimately attributed. in this volume, however, we aim at abandoning such assumptions in favor of noneuropean experiences of self-harm in order to reexamine critically the Western tradition of thinking about suicide. The ethnographies assembled in this volume engage with cultural practices of making sense of suicide, and in particular with the multitude of questions and answers about agency, personhood, and death that circulate within specific vernacular and expert regimes of knowledge around the issue of suicide. When families, neighbors, religious specialists, doctors, public health experts, activists, and newsmakers speculate about possible motives and reasons behind suicides, they operate with assumptions about free will, suffering, authorship, power and personhood and about "the very quality of life experienced by someone who chooses to die" (Marks 2003: 308). By recording and analyzing ethnographic instances of such sense-making, this volume seeks to highlight the ambivalent

Two indigenous Siberian groups-the Yukaghirs and the Telengits-share rather similar ideas about success in hunting as an elusive and highly precarious tension between too little and too much luck. In the catalogue of semiotics, it corresponds to the homonym whereby one sound/spelling is the manifestation of two words with different meanings. The result, as we shall show, is that any lucky hunter always inhabits the alternative possibility of his own failure. In this sense, good luck in hunting might at any point be exposed as bad fortune.

By considering the emergence and threat of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Europe, this paper demonstrates the growing role of veterinary rationales in reframing contemporary human-wild boar coexistence. Through comparative ethnographies of human-wild boar relations in the Czech Republic, Spain and England, it shows that coexistence is not a predictable and steady process but is also demarked by points of radical change in form, course and atmosphere. Such moments, or wild boar events, can lead to the (re-)formation or magnified influence of certain discourses, practices and power relations in determining strategies of bio-governance. Specifically, this paper highlights how the spread of ASF in Europe has accelerated an already ongoing process of veterinarization, understood as the growing prominence of veterinary sciences in the mediation and reorganization of contemporary socioecologies. This example highlights how veterinary logics increasingly influence localized human-wildlife relations and, through analogous practices of biosecurity and control, also connect different places and geographic contexts.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of knowledge on how research evaluation in different national and organisational contexts affects, often in unintended ways, research and publication practices. In particular, it looks at the development of book publication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the Czech Republic since 2004, when a performance-based system of evaluation was introduced, up to the present. Design/methodology/approach The paper builds upon ethnographic research complemented by the analysis of Czech science policy documents, data available in the governmental database “Information Register of R&D results” and formal and informal interviews with expert evaluators and other stakeholders in the research system. It further draws on the authors’ own experience as scholars, who have also over the years participated in a number of evaluation procedures as peers and experts. Findings The number of books published by researchers in SSH based at Czech institutions has risen considerably in reaction to the pressure for productivity that is inscribed into the evaluation methodology and has resulted in the rise of in-house publishing by researchers’ own research institution, “fake internationalisation” using foreign low-quality presses as the publication venue, and the development of a culture of orphaned books that have no readers. Practical implications In the Czech Republic robust and internationally harmonised bibliometric data regarding books would definitely help to create a form of research evaluation that would stimulate meaningful scholarly book production. At the same time, better-resourced and better-designed peer review evaluation is needed. Originality/value This is the first attempt to analyse in detail the conditions and consequences the Czech performance-based research evaluation system has for SSH book publication. The paper demonstrates that often discussed harming of SSH and book-writing in particular by performance-based IF-centred research evaluation does not necessarily manifest in declining numbers of publications. On the contrary, the number of books published may increase at the cost of producing more texts of questionable scholarly quality.

We contribute to the growing field of veterinary humanities by promoting collaboration between veterinarians and anthropologists. Veterinary anthropology as we propose it analyzes the role of animal diseases in social life while questioning notions of animal health and human health. We distinguish three ways for veterinarians to collaborate with anthropologists, which more or less follow a chronological order. One form of collaboration requires anthropologists to bring risk perception or local knowledge on zoonoses identified by veterinarians. A more recent form of collaboration integrates veterinarians and anthropologists around the view of animals as actors in infrastructures of security. Finally, we suggest that, as veterinary expertise and its roles in contemporary societies is becoming an object of anthropological enquiry, a new space for collaboration is unfolding that enables veterinarians to see themselves through that reflexive lens of anthropological attention. Veterinary anthropology can therefore be defined as an anthropology of veterinarians and with veterinarians.