Animals, Kinship, and the State: Kyrgyz Chabans Rebuilding Herds and Reorienting Belonging after the Soviet Collapse

Abstract

Abstract: Until the end of the 1980s, the vision of the now for the Kyrgyz pastoralists was elaborated in the framework of an omnipresent state.  The running of herds over mountain pastures was organized by state entities (kolkhozes and sovkhozes) and the great majority of animals were effectively state-owned.  The state system maintained roads and vehicles for livestock transport, the provision of veterinary services, and the marketing of wool and meat, as well as the provision for the other needs of Kyrgyz pastoralists’ livelihoods.  Today, the pastoral landscape is scattered with the ruins of large livestock shelters, the doors and roofs of which have been pilfered for the needs of a much more small-scale, privately organized economy.  As ownership of livestock and machinery passed to private hands in the mid-1990s, there was initially a catastrophic collapse of livestock herding as a basis of livelihood for most herders.  As communities sought to reconstruct their future in the absence of the reliable state, their sense of belonging shifted from state entities to traditional concepts of relatedness remembered from their primordial past.  Yet while the initial privatization was organized on the premise that collectivities based on extended kinship would replace the state organization, this proved unworkable in many ways.  Such collectivities then fragmented and livelihoods became organized around families in the narrower sense.  Thus, in a twenty year period, Kyrgyz herders have shifted from relying on the state organization of their lives, to an unstable primordial kinship, and now to a new set of orienting principles which hinge on complex assessments of what can assure the future.  In this paper, based on fieldwork in Narïn Province, we will examine how these transformations have taken place in pastoral livelihoods, as well as the challenges that have emerged in this environment of rapidly changing belonging in relation to livelihoods, kinship and the state.