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2 - To hold on and belong to one’s land
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2021
Summary
Abstract
The territory in which Mongolian and Buryat pastoralists nomadize is referred to as the nutag. But far from defining just a place, this term also encompasses relations with other humans and the master spirits of the land. This chapter highlights how human-herd animal relations should also form part of this definition, by investigating the ways herders’ and animals’ routine movement patterns mark the landscape; like their herders, livestock develop a form of attachment to their nutag. The Mongols envisage the landscape as being shared with invisible entities and this chapter examines how they seek the best possible coexistence with them, particularly through daily and extraordinary rituals, in which horses often play the role of mediator animals.
Keywords: homeland, landscape, movement patterns, invisible entities, ovoo, rituals
The territory in which Mongolian and Buryat herders nomadize is referred to as nutag (Mongolian) or nyutag (Buryat), roughly translated as ‘homeland’. The size of the homeland in question and the scale at which the herder is talking about depends on the origin of the speaker: the nutag of a Mongolian herder may be their country (state), province (aimag) or district (sum) of origin. In its narrowest sense, the nutag refers to the place where a person lives within the district, either the location of the various encampments, and thus the nomadic territory, or even the winter or spring camp, the only place of residence officially declared by the herders to the authorities. For the Buryats, the nyutag is, on the widest scale, the Republic of Buryatia, or one of the two Buryat districts (Ust’-Orda and Aga), but more commonly it refers to the territory of a village. Mongolian and Buryat people feel deeply rooted to their nutag and glorify it in songs (Legrain 2014: 48). The ‘homeland’ often implicitly refers to the ‘native homeland’ (törsön nutag, in Mongolian), the place where they were born, and it is in this nutag that their placenta was buried (Lacaze 2012: 74-77). People are advised not to move too far away from their nutag, as they will no longer be protected by the spirits that inhabit it, and it is preferable to be buried there when they die (see Delaplace 2008: 143-148; Charlier 2015: 150-152).
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- Nomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol HerdersMultispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia, pp. 63 - 92Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021