Living off the land: Nature and nomadism in Mongolia (original) (raw)
Related papers
The End of Nomadism?: Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (review)
Anthropological Quarterly, 2002
T his volume is a bold synthesis of original field material and theoretical reflections as applied to six political districts in a region known as Inner Asia. The central argument of the book is that the mobile use of pastoral resources should not be considered an outdated or threatened economic form. Instead the authors demonstrate the robustness of "mobile pastoralism" historically and in specific state socialist jurisdictions within Russia, China, and Mongolia. The authors use their data on the sustainable nature of mobile pastoralism to critique of a wide variety of anthropological and government literature that, they contend, affirms stereotypes of nomadic production as an unfocussed or undisciplined form of existence. Instead, they argue that if there is an "end to nomadism" in the region it will come from the irrational pressure of privatisation which forces rural producers to migrate to cities in search of other forms of work. The material for this volume was generated by an ambitious five year project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which was based at the University of Cambridge from 1991 to 1995. The Project on Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia recruited a team of local researchers from Siberian Russia, Northern China, and Mongolia, trained them in participatory research techniques, and then had them conduct extensive survey work in ten case
Pastoralist Livelihoods in Asian Drylands: Environment, Governance and Risk, 2017
Ichinkhorloo, B. (2017). Environment as Commodity and Shield: Reshaping Herders’ Collective Identity in Mongolia. In A. Ahearn, T. Sternberg, & A. Hahn (Eds.), Pastoralist Livelihoods in Asian Drylands: Environment, Governance and Risk (pp. 41–70). Winwick: The White Horse Press.
Ecology of Rule: Governance, Territorial Authority, and the Environment in Rural Mongolia
This article constitutes an attempt to understand political transformations in a pastoral region of eastern Mongolia where senior men, their kin groups, and the ecologies-human and non-human-that bind them have become central nodes in the territorial operation of governance. This political assemblage has emerged in what I call the balance of "mastery," a tense, uneven entanglement of landscape and authority. The argument combines scholarly interests in political ontologies with analyses of neoliberal governmentality and rural social change. As such, the article traces the circulation of power, in its various human and non-human guises, through this landscape in ways that demonstrate the productive consequences of unequal agency, including the shifting relations of risk and vulnerability in a dynamic ecology of rule. [
A pastoral frontier: From chaos to capitalism and the re-colonisation of the Kazakh rangelands
There is little research on pastoralists’ responses to new expansion opportunities. We explore how pastoralists in Kazakhstan have responded to rapid, fundamental institutional and macroeconomic changes. We compare use patterns of grazing and water sites in two periods; 1999-2003, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the rural economy was in crisis and 2012-14, following a recovery in livestock numbers and a boost in the national economy. The study uses historical studies, formal surveys and anthropological interviews to document changes in livestock ownership, management and selection of pasture and water sites. In 2012-14, owners of the largest flocks had extended their grazing sites further away from the settled villages, moving away from more densely used sites more easily accessed in the 1990s. These new pastoral elites are colonising abandoned state-owned pastures and wells developed by Soviet state farms. Smaller-scale livestock owners based in villages are now less able to entrust their animals to larger-scale owners at remote desert sites, a change since the early post-Soviet period. The economic recovery of Kazakhstan has encouraged pioneering moves by entrepreneurial individuals, moves permitted by post-Soviet laws for privatised pasture land tenure. This expansionist movement parallels ecological patterns of site sequencing in wildlife. Key words: Pastoralism; former Soviet Union; livestock; Kazakhstan; site selection
Ephemeral 'communities': spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia
In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia's two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the 'communities' they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.
Chapter 14 Pastoral Mobility and Pastureland Possession in Mongolia
2012
Pastoralists in Mongolia have adopted a number of models of Europeanor Western-style modernization or development since the middle of the last century: in the Socialist period, collectivization to establish herding collectives, which may be recognized as a Socialist version of development; in the early 1990s, during the transition to a market economy, a market-oriented model based on private property, with the dissolution of the herding collectives and privatization of livestock, although pastureland remains for common use; and currently, since the late 1990s, "Community-based natural resource management" (CBNRM), a development model for common-pool resources management. The situation in the past two decades alleged to require new management institutions in the pastoral sector in Mongolia could be summarized as follows. Mongolia has been undergoing two processes impacting the pastoral economy and society: integration to the global economy or the transition to a market econ...
Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provid...
Milk is Gold: An Environmental and Animal History of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia
Dissertation, 2022
In this dissertation, I show how leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic used the collectivization campaign from 1956-1960 to change the way in which Mongolians interacted with animals and the environment. Collectivization, which followed the Soviet model, was the confiscation of private livestock to create collectively owned and worked livestock herds, and was seen as one of the building blocks of a modern socialist state. Mongolia had, and still has, a nomadic pastoralist economy, but this was subject to change over time, rather than being a romanticized and timeless way of life, and one of the largest changes occurred during the socialist era. My sources for this dissertation are Mongolian and Russian language archival sources, oral histories, socialist era handbooks, periodicals, and histories, as well as Mongolian short stories, poetry, songs, and films.
Multiresource Pastoralism, Dynamic Foodways, and Ancient Statecraft in Mongolia
Land, 2023
Pastoral nomadic regional confederations, states, and empires have assumed a prominent place in the histories of the Eurasian steppe zone; however, anthropological theory devoted to understanding these political systems is still debated and relatively inchoate. A major question concerns the techniques of political integration that might have brought together dispersed mobile herders under the aegis of these complex, large-scale steppe polities. The first such polity in East Asia, the Xiongnu state (c. 250 BC–150 AD) of Mongolia, has been characterized as a polity built by mobile herders, but in fact the steppe populations of this period followed quite diverse lifeways. Most notably, the establishment of more permanent settlements for craft and agricultural production has complicated the typical narrative of the pastoral nomadic eastern steppe. This study considers ways to conceptualize these interesting variations in lifeway during the Xiongnu period and raises the question of how they might have promoted a novel Xiongnu political order. We analyze transformations within the Egiin Gol valley of northern Mongolia to better understand the organizational, productive, and settlement dynamics and present the first regional landscape perspective on the local transformations incurred by the creation of a Xiongnu agricultural hub. To understand these radical changes with respect to the long-term pastoral nomadic and hunting-gathering traditions of the valley’s inhabitants, Salzman’s flexibility-based model of multiresource pastoralism is of great use. Egiin Gol valley transformations indeed attest to a scale of political economy far beyond the bounds of this local area and suggest an innovative role for indigenous farming in Eurasian steppe polity building.