Response Defending the thesis on the ‘hunter’s double bind’ Rane Willerslev Aarhus University Piers Vitebsky University of Cambridge Anatoly Alekseyev M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk Tim Ingold’s () commentary on – or perhaps it would be more apt to call it a reinterpretation of – our analysis (Willerslev, Vitebsky & Aleskseyev ) is as insight- ful and intriguing as was his original article ‘Hunting, sacrifice and the domestication of animals’ (Ingold ). We thank him for the initial stimulus that his earlier article gave to our thinking and for his generous and thoughtful engagement with the present article. At the core of Ingold’s comment is his proposition that the transition from hunting to herding, and with it the origins of domestication and sacrifice, is perhaps better understood by applying Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectival ontology: Who sees what and from where (Holbraad & Willerslev ). Taking this relative or, more precisely, deictic perspectival approach, Ingold argues that our suggestion about the hunter’s ‘double bind’ as the driving impetus behind the transition from hunting to herding is exposed as ‘generating a string of ingenious yet wholly illusory paradoxes’ (Ingold : ). This is so because the perspectival world of hunters, animals, and masters is one of perfectly inverted symmetry: [I]t is not the hunter but the master of the animals who is sacrificing one of ‘his’ herd ... [The hunter] is a ‘bit-part’ player in the process, whose task is absolutely not to sacrifice the animals but to perform the immolation on the master’s behalf, receiving the meat in return for services rendered (Ingold : , original emphasis). Ingold’s argument is essentially a reinforcement of his original  model, according to which hunters, animals, and the spirits play complementary roles in a perfect balanced system of continuous killings and rebirths. The trouble is that, in proposing this picture-perfect model of cosmology, Ingold slides into some speculations which Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , - © Royal Anthropological Institute 