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MongoliaConstraints on Herding
The harsh winter provides the greatest challenge to
pastoralists. The herds traditionally have spent the winter
eating dried grasses on the range, with at most a stone corral
for shelter from the worst winter blizzards. Since the 1950s,
Mongolian authorities have worked to provide shelters and fodder
for the herds. Catastrophic storms, coming in midwinter or at the
spring lambing season, can wipe out entire herds or severely
reduce their numbers. Herders move to special winter campsites,
and they reduce the size of the herd to be carried on the winter
pasture by slaughtering any animals thought unlikely to survive
the winter. Late fall is the only time Mongols routinely
slaughter animals; the meat, preserved by drying and freezing,
sustains the people during the season when neither sheep nor
horses are producing milk. (Mongols do not eat horseflesh;
Kazakhs do.) Mongols traditionally have consumed more milk
products than meat; animals are slaughtered in seasons other than
fall only for ceremonial occasions or for obligatory hospitality
to guests.
Winter conditions, which severely test the Mongols' ability
to sustain their herds and hence themselves, throw the society's
property system and the larger political structure into relief.
The key element in bringing a herd through the winter is a
suitable winter campsite, which must have a source of water near
terrain sheltered from the worst storms but open enough for the
wind to blow snow off the grasses. The number of winter campsites
is limited, and their ownership always has been well-defined. In
the past, they were owned privately by families under the
residual ownership of the lowest-level local administrative unit
known by a number of names,
banners
(see Glossary--or koshuus in Mongol) being
common. Now they are owned by the
herding cooperative or state farm, which allocates them to
herding camps.
Outsiders, who tended to observe Mongolian herders only in
the summer, mistakenly assumed that they wandered randomly across
an undifferentiated sea of grass. From a Mongolian perspective,
however, the landscape was far from undifferentiated, and each
move of a camp reflected a careful decision that matched the
needs of the herd with an estimate of the condition of the
grasses and the water supply at several known sites within a
large, but bounded, territory. Traditionally, Mongols thought of
ownership and territory not, as an agriculturalist would, in
terms of square kilometers or hectares of ground with a sharp
line around them, but as rights to use certain strategic areas in
the landscape, such as springs, streambanks adjacent to good
pasture, or named and permanent winter campsites. Such areas were
the objects of conflict between and among groups of herders; the
larger political structure, both past and present, regulated
access to these key resources and adjudicated claims to them.
Data as of June 1989
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