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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the potential of consecrated animals -unique individuals kept by Tibetan herders as protectors of the household- to question not only local, competing understandings of livestock animals but also anthropological theories of pastoralism and methods of inquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Pastoralists of the Tibetan plateau select individual animals from among their horses, their yak herds and their flocks of sheep and consecrate them in a ritual after which the animals are excluded from a number of productive and labour functions. They remain in the herds as protectors of the household, understood both in its animal and in its human dimensions. Selected on the basis of their salient physiognomic or psychological features, consecrated animals bear witness to pastoralists' sensitivity to the diversity of individuals that make up their herds and to their elaborate treatment of said animal individuality. Furthermore, the role such singular animals play in the protection of the household's human and animal members indicates that for pastoralists, human agency is not the only, or even the central, factor of the prosperity of their herds. Instead, non-human beings such as said consecrated animals or landscape deities are regarded as key agents influencing the fortune of the hybrid communities in which herders live. This challenges classical anthropological theories of the human-animal link upon which pastoralism is grounded and, most importantly, questions both Buddhist cosmological divides between sentient beings and modernist, market-oriented views of livestock espoused by Chinese state-planners. Based on a thirteen-month long field research among pastoralists of North Eastern Tibet, the proposed paper discusses the methodological challenges of an ethnography attuned to animal individuality and explores the potential of consecrated animals to shake different understandings of livestock animals currently shaping the ontological landscape of the Tibetan plateau.