Paper short abstract:

This paper pairs an ethnographic study of horses in a Kazakh village with oral literary material in order to elucidate the representational dilemmas implicit in the horse’s simultaneous status as companion species and as food.

Paper long abstract:

The paradox of the horse in Kazakh culture is that horses appear, at first glance, to simultaneously hold the place of ideal food and ideal companion. It is the meat of horses above all other animals that holds the highest value in the village: its acquisition drives households to band together to collect the money necessary for its purchase; its presence at funerals, weddings, and seasonal celebrations mark these events as qualitatively different from everyday life. Yet in both legend and everyday life, the horse as companion can possess an individuality that blurs the boundary between the equine and the human. Horses can possess individual names, personal burial sites, exalted lineages, and even legendary biographies, as in the tales of horse herds whose descent is traced to a stallion that emerges from under the sea. The seeming intimacy of the horse and the human would appear to make the act of consuming horse-meat uncomfortably akin to cannibalism, creating challenges both for how horses are interacted with and how they are talked about. This paper pairs an ethnographic study of horse-meat consumption in a contemporary Kazakh village with oral literary texts—proverbs, folk speech, and legends—in order to elucidate the divergent ways in which the category 'horse' is conceptualized as horses transgress the boundaries between the edible and the inedible.