Mongolia’s northernmost province, Khövsgöl Aimag, famous for its massive Lake Khövsgöl set among the mountainous steppe, taiga, and tundra forests, increasingly attracts both domestic and international tourists. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Mongolia received over 500,000 tourists annually. The aimag is also home to Indigenous, nomadic Dukha reindeer herders and semi-nomadic Darkhad cattle herders. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this study uses an analytical hierarchy process to map areas in Khövsgöl Aimag, where the infrastructure, including buildings, dwellings, formal and informal roads, and pastureland, is subject to geohazards. The hazards of interest to this mapping analysis include mass wasting, flooding, and permafrost thawing, which threaten roads, pastures, houses, and other community infrastructure in Khövsgöl Aimag. Based on the integrated infrastructure risk map, an estimated 23% of the aimag is at high to very high risk for localized geohazards. After a discussion of the results informed by the interviews, mobile ethnographies, and local and national land use policies, we postulate that communities exercising more traditional nomadic lifestyles with higher mobility are more resilient to these primarily localized geohazards.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2024
Multiresource Pastoralism, Dynamic Foodways, and Ancient Statecraft in Mongolia
Pastoral nomadic regional confederations, states, and empires have assumed a prominent place in the histories of the Eurasian steppe zone; however, anthropological theory devoted to understanding these political systems is still debated and relatively inchoate. A major question concerns the techniques of political integration that might have brought together dispersed mobile herders under the aegis of these complex, large-scale steppe polities. The first such polity in East Asia, the Xiongnu state (c. 250 BC–150 AD) of Mongolia, has been characterized as a polity built by mobile herders, but in fact the steppe populations of this period followed quite diverse lifeways. Most notably, the establishment of more permanent settlements for craft and agricultural production has complicated the typical narrative of the pastoral nomadic eastern steppe. This study considers ways to conceptualize these interesting variations in lifeway during the Xiongnu period and raises the question of how they might have promoted a novel Xiongnu political order. We analyze transformations within the Egiin Gol valley of northern Mongolia to better understand the organizational, productive, and settlement dynamics and present the first regional landscape perspective on the local transformations incurred by the creation of a Xiongnu agricultural hub. To understand these radical changes with respect to the long-term pastoral nomadic and hunting-gathering traditions of the valley’s inhabitants, Salzman’s flexibility-based model of multiresource pastoralism is of great use. Egiin Gol valley transformations indeed attest to a scale of political economy far beyond the bounds of this local area and suggest an innovative role for indigenous farming in Eurasian steppe polity building.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737687
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10466330
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Land
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2073-445X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1715
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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