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).