With each pass, another stone. Ovoo at the heart of heritage, environment, and conflict

Two cranes play in the pool surrounding Sum Khokh Burd Monastery Ruins in Dundgovi, Mongolia. Photo by KG Hutchins 2018.

As environmentally-sourced artifacts that grow in size with each interaction with humans, ritually significant piles of stone known as ovoo in Mongolia delineate both space and time in ecologically and politically charged ways. Their presence and power as spiritual beings and historical markers is derived from and enacted upon the ecological and social landscapes which they oversee. This paper explores how ovoo instigate, mediate, and commemorate conflict in ways that entangle environmental and cultural heritage. Drawing on the experiences of three heritage bearers who interact with ovoo as part of their livelihood, I argue that ovoo allow for people to access more-than-human networks as part of their heritage preservation.

The Melodious Hoofbeat: Ungulate Rhythms in the Post-socialist Conservatory

This article examines cases in which traditional musicians in Mongolia bring the perspectives of rural non-human animals into urban music institutions, troubling the colonial nature–culture and urban–rural divisions around which they were designed. In Mongolia, music has played a central role in the socialist modernization projects of the twentieth century, as well as the protests that led to the country’s transition to parliamentary democracy in 1990. These projects involved the formation of urban-based national conservatories and orchestras designed around a western model that attempts to separate nature from culture. How then, do multispecies relationships play out in a post-socialist context, where capitalist and socialist modernities have each left their mark? I argue that Mongolian musicians incorporate non-human animals into musical heritage institutions in ways that both depend on and resist the interplay between socialist and capitalist colonial projects.

Mother camels and calves kept close to the encampment, Dundgovi, Mongolia. Photo by KG Hutchins, 2017.

Like a Lullaby: Music as Herding Tool in Rural Mongolia

Sheep enclosure. 2017. Rural Dundgovi Province, Mongolia. KG Hutchins.

Journal of Ethnobiology September 2019: Ethnobiology Through Song.

This paper examines the application of song as a herding tool. Based on participant-observation and twenty semi-structured interviews in pastoral encampments in the Gobi Desert over four months, I explore what the practice of singing to sheep can elucidate about interdependent human-animal relationships. The livestock birthing season in rural Mongolia in early spring is a crucial time for humans and animals alike. While pastoralists throughout the country have many different approaches for managing the challenges they face during this time, herders in rural Dundgovi province have a special set of tools for adopting orphaned livestock to new mothers: species-specific, semi-improvisational songs. The herders I work with in this province report that these songs are their primary method for instigating nursing and developing parental bonds between orphaned newborns and foster mothers. This musical practice is interwoven with other forms of traditional musical performance intended for human audiences. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature in ethnobiology that examines the musical capacities of non-humans. I take instances of livestock-singing in the Gobi as opportunities for the creation of mutual empathy between herder and animal. These performances implicate humans in the emotional worlds of sheep and give sheep the role of consumers of music—a position usually reserved for humans.

Hutchins, KG. 2019. Like a Lullaby: Song as Herding Tool in Rural Mongolia. Journal of Ethnobiology. 39(3): 445-459.

With Each Pass, Another Stone: Ovoo at the Heart of Heritage, Environment, and Conflict

Orkhon Waterfall. 2010. Övörkhangai Province Mongolia. KG Hutchins.

Points of Transition: Ovoo and the Ritual Remaking of Religious, Ecological, and Historical Politics in Inner Asia. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. February 20-22, 2019.

As environmentally-sourced border markers that grow in size with each interaction with humans, Mongolian ritual stone cairns known as “ovoo” delineate both space and time in ecologically and politically charged ways. Their presence and power as both spiritual beings and historical markers is derived from and enacted upon the ecological and social landscapes which they oversee. This paper explores how ovoo instigate, mediate, and commemorate conflict in ways that entangle environmental and cultural heritage. As growing structures spiritually associated with moral landscapes and healthy ecosystems, ovoo are central to discourses on both environmental and cultural heritage. Bearing the marks of history, they also stand as heritage of conflicts unresolved.

This paper presents three ethnographic vignettes in which ovoo play central roles in both conflict and heritage. First, I explore a case in which contestation on how best to maintain an ovoo in an environmentally and spiritually sustainable way opens up a space for negotiations of post-socialist Mongolian environmentalisms and ecological spiritualities. Then I detail how an ovoo mediates urban disasters for musicians involved in the heritage industry in Ulaanbaatar, and how that protection is at odds with Western structures, and consumers, of cultural heritage. Finally, this paper examines how ovoo spring up simultaneously as memorials of violence and caretakers of nonhumans in the form of ghosts and birds in a former monastery brought to ruin. Each case presents its own context of ovoo at the heart of a conflict which involves a commingling of cultural and natural heritage. Taken as a whole, these stories do not form a unified, linear narrative based on a Western teleology of progressive environmentalism or forward-marching history. Rather, they come together as something of a rhetorical ovoo, an assemblage of overlapping acts of eco-spiritual resilience.