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Paper short abstract

This paper investigates how milk fermentation accounts for an embodied practice of continuity as carried out by Mongolian herder women. With a focus on lactic ferments and multi-sensory milk processing, questions of biosocial growth emerge as counter-narratives to post-socialist progress and crisis.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I investigate how milk fermentation accounts for an embodied practice of continuity as carried out by Mongolian herder women. By drawing on ethnographic and scientific fieldwork, I discuss how dairy starter cultures generate biosocial wealth while facing severe challenges stemming from international developmental dynamics, neocolonial food systems, and environmental destruction. By centering lactic ferments and multi-sensory milk processing, questions of biosocial growth emerge as counter-narratives to post-socialist progress and crisis.

Studies in anthropology and STS address how localized heritage biowealth such as plant seeds becomes absorbed into the dynamics of global capitalism, often resulting in the alienation of these valuable biosocial entities (Livingston 2019; Yates-Doerr 2017; Tsing 2015). In Mongolia these dynamics appear inverted. Pastoral households rely on homemade ferments that are neatly incorporated in home ecologies as biosocial commons that are incommensurable. Such pastoral human-microbe interactions are slowly undermined by the introduction of allegedly superior ferments from large European biotech companies. The acclaimed superiority of European ferments roots in standardization as a central element for more stable and profitable dairy production. Homemade ferments, to the contrary, are devalued by being considered too sour, unstable, and unclean, echoing orientalist tropes figuring pastoralism as “backward”.

Against these tropes, I investigate standardized and pastoral dairy ferments within capitalist modes of production vis-à-vis multispecies timescapes and gendered biosocial knowledge systems. I argue that pastoral ferments embody stability and continuity by being neatly incorporated into domestic micro-ecologies, maintained by the often-unacknowledged meticulous work and knowledge of herder women.