In their introduction to this collection, Thomas White and Emilia Sułek argue that while animal life and death have been transformed by the expansion of infrastructures, animal life itself can sometimes be understood as a vital part of infrastructural configurations.

DOI 10.26034/roadsides-202200801

Normative understandings of Mongolian kinship have long revolved around metaphors of flesh, blood and bone, while substantive approaches have focused on materials such as umbilical cords and photographic montages. In this article, I argue that the flesh of livestock has been largely overlooked in considerations of Mongolian kinship, and I address the role of meat in making and maintaining relations, both among people and between people and their homelands (nutag). In pastoral Mongolia, herd animals enact and enable a wide range of social relations. However, in the ethnographic context discussed here – the Ulaanbaatar ger districts – urban-rural migrants live at a distance from animals. No longer herders, their access to nutag meat is reliant on their connections to countryside relatives, rendering meat a kinship-making substance in new ways. This paper begins the work of analysing the shift from animal to meat-based enactments of relatedness in the age of the market.

DOI 10.1163/22105018-12340175

Pastoralism is one of the key markers of Mongol identity in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. As the Inner Mongolian scholar Uradyn Bulag has argued, pastoralism has served as “a barometer to measure the degree of autonomy Mongols could exercise in their autonomous region.” If recent reforms suggest that autonomy is being curtailed in the sphere of education, in the context of an increasingly assimilationist state, what readings are now being given by this other barometer? Answering this question involves attending to the ways in which China’s governing of its ethnic minorities is today entangled with state environmentalism, since pastoralists themselves have come to be blamed for the degradation of the grasslands.

DOI 10.1525/curh.2021.120.827.227

In the name of ‘ecological civilization’, the Chinese state has sought to adjust the ecologies of its degraded northern grasslands, using market instruments, such as payments for ecosystem services, to induce ethnic minority pastoralists to pursue non‐herding livelihoods. In the far west of Inner Mongolia, the resultant decline in the availability of rural labour has meant that most domestic camels that remain on the rangelands are now left largely unmanaged throughout the year. Local Mongol officials and intellectuals have long regarded extensive animal husbandry as a bulwark against Mongol dispossession through Chinese agricultural expansion. This article shows how they now make use of dominant ecological and market rationalities to articulate their defence of this form of land use, by figuring these ‘semi‐wild’ camels as providers of ecosystem services. In doing so, however, their proposals bypass the figure of the culture‐possessing rural minority subject, which in this region is associated with training and working with camels, and which has been fostered by the cultural heritage policies of the reform era. Divergent understandings of the ‘wildness’ of nonhumans thus reveal tensions between ecological and cultural politics at China's margins, and anxieties surrounding the rural minority subject in the context of new modes of environmental governance.

DOI 10.1111/1467-9655.13424

In this short essay I show how recent approaches to infrastructure and to human-nonhuman relations across the social sciences can help us to sketch out a political road ecology.

https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/road-ecology

In this special section our focus is on human relations with animals in the do- mestic sphere (or domus) in Inner Asia. In the existing academic literature, there has been greater attention paid to human–nonhuman relations in North Asia (or Siberia), often between hunter and prey animal. The intention of this special section is to ask what we can learn about relations between humans and domestic animals when we shift the focus to Inner Asia, a region that has long been characterised by multispecies pastoralism.

DOI 10.1163/22105018-12340145

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has led to an efflorescence of interest in the heritage of the “Silk Road,” both in China and abroad. In this article, I approach the BRI and its associated “Silk Road fever” ethnographically, discussing its effects on a particular region of China. What was once characterized in official discourse as a “remote border region” is now recovering its history of camel-based connectivity, and using this to imagine its future development. I situate this Silk Road discourse within the context of the politics of land, ethnicity, and the environment in a Chinese border region. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in this region, and analysis of local publications, the article shows how this discourse provides ethnic Mongol elites in the west of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with resources to defend pastoralist livelihoods threatened by the state’s recent grassland conservation policies. I thus show how the BRI’s spatial imaginary is “domesticated” in a particular part of China, and shine a light on the spatial politics which this imaginary – and the nonhumans involved in it – affords.

DOI 10.1080/15387216.2020.1720761

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.

DOI 10.29164/18animals