With a reflexive, anthropological approach and drawing on rich empirical and ethnographic studies from around the world, this volume engages with the theoretical and methodological issues raised by reported sightings of unrecognised animals.

Samantha Hurn is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Director of the Exeter Anthrozoology and Symbiotic Ethics (EASE) working group, and the MA and Ph.D programmes in Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter, UK.

Introduction

1.The Place of Cryptids in Taxonomic Debates

2. Cryptids, Classification and Categories of Cats: an Ethnozoological Study of Unidentified Felids from Eastern Indonesia

3. Cryptids and Credulity: the Zanzibar Leopard and Other Imaginary Beings

4. 'By dreaming I'll go to the tiger-world': the Naga tiger-man and the modern assemblage of a myth

5. Human Predation and Animal Sociality: The Transformational Agency of 'Wolf People' in Mongolia

6. Enigmatic Bush Dwarfs of West Africa: The Case of the Siyawesi of Northwestern Benin

7. Suspending disbelief and experiencing the extraordinary: how radical participation may facilitate an understanding of aquatic snake and fish-tailed beings in southern Africa

8. Mermaids in Brazil: The (ongoing) creolisation of the water goddesses Oxum and Iemanjá

9. Ganka: Trickster or Endangered Species? An anthropologist's role in preventing the extinction of the New Jersey sea monster.

10. Far from the Madding Crowd: Big Cats on Dartmoor and in Dorset, UK

11. Land of Beasts and Dragons. Contemporary Myth-Making in Rural Wales.

12. Digesting 'cryptid' snakes: A phenomenological approach to the mythic and cosmoge-netic properties of serpent hallucinations