Mobile pastoralism a century apart: continuity and change in south-eastern Kazakhstan, 1910 and 2012

Ferret, Carole

doi:10.1080/02634937.2018.1484698

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Sheep from this site were managed using different strategies that changed over time, with Bronze Age sheep being guided from high-altitude summer pastures to the semi-arid steppe, or lowaltitude foothills, in the winter months. This is supported by studies of modern pastoralists who engage in similar activities to increase predictability of resource availability (Ferret, 2013(Ferret, , 2018. In the Early Iron Age, sheep exhibit a very different management strategy (Ventresca Miller et al, 2020).…”

Section: Mountain Pastoralism and Agro-pastoral Foothills During The Bronze And Iron Agesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In mountainous areas of southern and eastern Kazakhstan, alpine pastoralism and vertical transhumance are important strategies for local populations. Herders engage in seasonal vertical mobility with their livestock, moving from permanent winter camps in the piedmont, to high-altitude pastures during the summer (Kerven et al, 2011;Ferret, 2013Ferret, , 2018. Highaltitude pastures are preferred due to their high-quality grass and lack of disease-causing insects (Kerven et al, 2011;Ferret, 2013).…”

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most herders in southeastern Kazakhstan spend at least 4 months grazing livestock in mountain pastures, staying until late September or early October (Ferret, 2013). However, transhumance is not a homogeneous lifestyle, as groups engage in different forms and scales of movement (Ferret, 2018(Ferret, , 2013. For example, some villages are permanently occupied while small groups of shepherds, and their families, move with livestock to seasonal pastures (Ferret, 2018).…”

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, transhumance is not a homogeneous lifestyle, as groups engage in different forms and scales of movement (Ferret, 2018(Ferret, , 2013. For example, some villages are permanently occupied while small groups of shepherds, and their families, move with livestock to seasonal pastures (Ferret, 2018). In contrast to the semiarid plains, rich summer pastures with good water supply are relatively close in these mountain systems, while higher rainfall in the piedmont means that small-scale agriculture can also be practiced.…”

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ecosystem Engineering Among Ancient Pastoralists in Northern Central Asia

et al. 2020

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Ecosystem engineering is an innovative concept that recognizes that organisms impact their environment, and that these changes can be detected over time. Thus, additional datasets from the ecological longue durée are necessary, specifically in response to the onset of the Anthropocene and the impacts of humans and their commensal organisms upon ecologies of all scales. For example, the management and herding of domesticated animals are recognized as having dramatic implications for soil stability, vegetation coverage, and even atmospheric composition the world over. Yet, the point at which pastoralism became a recognizable factor in altering earth systems, with large-scale environmental ramifications, is poorly understood. Here, we respond to this by reviewing and presenting data from the archeological and paleoenvironmental record across northern Central Asia in order to assess broader ecosystem impacts of pastoralism, from time periods when this economic pattern was a relatively novel component of local ecologies and involved limited population densities, through to periods in which it became intensive, coincident with agriculture, and linked to increased sedentism. Probing diverse, published analytical datasets and case studies, we examine pastoral adaptations and environmental impacts, highlighting a region where tensions surrounding resilience and sustainability of pastoralism have peaked in modern times. We draw upon these findings to examine the challenges faced by pastoralists today, and the ways in which archeological data might inform on management decisions into the future.

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Section: Mountain Pastoralism and Agro-pastoral Foothills During The Bronze And Iron Agesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contemporary Pastoralists Engage In Ecosystem Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ecosystem Engineering Among Ancient Pastoralists in Northern Central Asia

et al. 2020

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“…The circum-village overgrazing is due to small-scale livestock owners being usually unable to seasonally migrate to distant pastureseither hundreds of km across the desert and steppe plains, or vertically up steep mountain tracks-due to the cost of transport, unavailability of labor, badly maintained roads, and bridges etc. (Kerven et al, 2004(Kerven et al, , 2006(Kerven et al, , 2008(Kerven et al, , 2016bHauck et al, 2016;Ferret, 2018;Robinson, 2020). Nevertheless, in better-favored locations nearer to cities with high demand for livestock products of meat and dairy, it has been economically viable for a minority of smallscale livestock owners to continue vertical transhumance from valleys and plains in winter to high summer mountain pastures in summer, using spring and autumn pastures in the foothills, with several hybrid forms of social organization (McGuire, 2013;Hauck et al, 2016;Ferret, 2018).…”

Section: Pastoral Scale and Livestock Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

Kerven¹,

Robinson²,

Behnke³

2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provides an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unraveled the relationships between Kazakh nomads' socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the composition of rangeland vegetation, wildlife biodiversity, and rates of carbon sequestration. By concentrating capital and landed resources, a minority of large-scale pastoralists have been able to re-extensify by combining mobility with selective intensification, including an increased reliance on cultivated feed. Current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to either intensify or extensify at sufficient scale, increasing environmental damage, and social inequality.

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Internal Migration in Kazakhstan

Islyami

2020

Internal Migration in the Countries of Asia

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Mobile pastoralism a century apart: continuity and change in south-eastern Kazakhstan, 1910 and 2012

Cited by 19 publications

References 24 publications

Ecosystem Engineering Among Ancient Pastoralists in Northern Central Asia

Ecosystem Engineering Among Ancient Pastoralists in Northern Central Asia

Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

Internal Migration in Kazakhstan

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