Event Description
Is caring for domestic animals compatible with eating them? Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Siberia’s Altai Republic, this talk examines the tangled relations of care and violence between Indigenous Altai pastoralists and the livestock on whom their way of life depends. Parsing the Altai expression mal-ash azyraar, or literally, “to feed livestock,” "feeding” animals in Altai society cannot be understood as a simple concrete act, nor as an abstract mode of relation. Instead, feeding—and implicitly eating—animals is a situation of temporal entanglement or co-futurity: to feed animals is to share a future with them, exposing the feeder to all of the potential benefits and ills that this future may bring.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage or email Eileen Huhn at [email protected].
Hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
