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- Convenors:
-
Patryk Reid
(University of Pittsburgh)
Jonathan Schlesinger (Indiana University--Bloomington)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Posvar 3800
- Start time:
- 28 October, 2018 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
Scholars of Central Eurasia have long acknowledged the importance of environment and animals, particularly within the contexts of livestock, pastures, and hunting. The growing fields of environmental and animal histories offer new methodologies to reexamine the important relationship between environment, animals, and humans. Our panel uses environmental and animal history to challenge some commonly held ideas within Central Eurasian scholarship.
Our scholars use a mix of literary, archival, folkloric, and oral sources to examine animal and environmental history over multiple regions and periods. Christopher Atwood shows that rather than existing with a stable environment, the Mongols radically reshaped environments in their empire like early modern empires. Marissa Smit uses the legend of the Seven Sleepers to examine the role of dogs in medieval Anatolia and complicates the predominant narratives of dogs in historical and contemporary societies. Kenneth Linden examines the history of the wolf in Mongolia and shows that the spiritual connection that is often emphasized is less common than violent conflict. Together these presentations will show the importance of animal and environmental history in Central Eurasian studies and how these important fields can shed new light on our understanding of Central Eurasian history.
Our panel demonstrates that by using Central Eurasian history we can challenge and refine many common ideas in environmental history, particularly problems of Western-centrism. Topics like imperial ecology, companion animals, and predator extermination are usually studied in Western, Christian contexts. Our research shows that environmental and animal histories of Central Eurasia provides a rich opportunity to engage with and complicate narratives in our region and the rest of the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
The legend of the Seven Sleepers, often known in Muslim contexts as the Companions of the Cave (Ar. Asḥāb al-Kahf), has enjoyed enduring popularity across a variety of literary genres, from scriptural interpretation to the more popular and vernacular tales of the Prophets. Falling in with the legend's cast of human characters, youths who flee religious persecution by entering a miraculous 309-year sleep, is a charismatic dog, Qitmir, who through divine intervention is able to profess his own faith in God and earn himself a place in paradise.
In this paper, I situate two medieval Anatolian retellings of this legend briefly within its folkloristic context, beginning with the Quran, in order to highlight the special level of emphasis with which these texts place upon human-canine companionship. They expound a sense of moral obligation on the part of humans which is at odds with contemporary Muslim writings on dogs which view this animal as the ultimate embodiment of the abject, the unclean, and the marginal. I connect these attitudes to the question of dog ownership in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolia, particularly with the elite use of dogs as hunting partners.
The legend's emphasis on companionship and mutual obligation among equals (both human and canine) is at odds with the contemporary use of animals such as dogs to produce and police hierarchies of status. Thus, I will also seek to complicate previous attempts at employing literary evidence read "against the grain" to write the place of dogs in medieval Anatolian society.
Paper long abstract:
Since John Richard's Unending Frontier (2003) and Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (2004), the ecological impacts and imperatives of empires have been preoccupied historians of the early modern period. Less widely understood have been the similar ecological impacts and imperatives of the thirteenth century Mongol empire. Environment has been an important area of focus in the study of Central Eurasian nomads, but within a framework that takes the relative stability of the ecological infrastructure as a given. The Mongol empire, however, resulted in a both a vast expansion of pastoralism together with the kind of directed agricultural expansion that we usually associate with the early modern world. The result was an environment in Mongol China that looked vastly different from anything in China before or after - and yet which left permanent marks on the Chinese economy and agriculture. This paper will present research on the environmental geography of Mongol China, showing how distinctive the environment was, and how that distinctiveness was the result of ongoing Mongol imperial policy.
Paper long abstract:
Scholarship on the relationship between humans and wolves in Mongolia often emphasize the special and sacred role wolves play. This is often then contrasted to the rest of the world's antagonistic relation with the wolf, especially the American extermination campaigns. However, a closer examination shows that throughout history Mongolians most often portrayed wolves as objects of hatred, scorn, and as threats to lives and livelihood. Wolves are portrayed in an array of roles, from a monstrous predator, to greedy exploiter, to hunted fugitives.
In this talk, I will use a combination of sources, including a close reading of literary sources, data from socialist government documents, hunters' handbooks, and visual sources to examine how socialist era attitudes and policies to wolves compare with earlier periods of Mongolian history. During the socialist period of Mongolia, wolf hunting became Marxist labor necessary to modernize the herding economy and build socialism. Although ultimately unsuccessful, socialist Mongolian wolf extermination campaigns showed similar tactics, professionalism, and businesslike violence reminiscent of wolf extermination projects in North America. This project is part of my larger dissertation research on the environmental and animal history of collectivization in socialist Mongolia.
Many scholars point to modernization, Christianity, and capitalism to explain violent and exploitative relationship with animals, particularly predators. Socialist Mongolia, as a formerly Buddhist but explicitly atheist country, offers an important case study of human-animal relations in a non-Western context. Mongolia's socialist era centralized command economy also provides a contrast to current religiously open individual herding households who are the source of contemporary studies of Mongolia. The history of the wolf in Mongolia provides an opportunity to disentangle the many competing factors used to explain human-animal relations in Central Eurasia and globally.