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Contribution short abstract:

This contribution explores how milk fermentation and more-than-human knowledge systems relate through the study of lactic ferments and their use and proliferation in Mongolian and Kyrgyz pastoral society.

Contribution long abstract:

In Central Asian pastoralism, milk fermentation happens through the work of animals, humans, material culture, and, most importantly, microbial starter cultures as communities of lactic acid bacteria that enable the transformation of perishable fresh milk into storable, consumable dairy products. In turn, by making fermented dairy products humans support unique microbial ecosystems. However, pastoralists rarely refer to microbes in the context of dairy production. In fact, given that milk is considered pure, the herders I worked with in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan even considered microbial activity in milk sometimes as pollution, echoing the pathogenic paradigms of both socialist and capitalist biopolitics. Nevertheless, local dairying knowledge offers insight into unique interactions between humans and microbial communities. In the Mongolian language, the word for starter culture is khöröngö, a polysemic term that translates as ferment, wealth, capital, and heirloom. As a ferment, it is shared across maternal generations, or between households, to initiate new dairying cycles. In Kyrgyzstan, the word used for describing ferments is göröñgö, a notion significantly resembling its Mongolian counterpart in that it also refers to sociocultural wealth. For instance, göröñgö is used to describe the upbringing of a child with diligence and in a healthy environment. Sharing portions of khöröngö/göröñgö is a future-oriented practice of growth that builds on past knowledge. Khöröngö/göröñgö, I suggest, bundles environmental knowledge as well as time and multispecies relationships of value and heritage. It is a living archive in-the-making.