Motherhood, mothering and care among Mongolian herder women

Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia: Nation, Identity, and Culture, 2020

This chapter explores embodied accounts of herding through ethnographic accounts of milking routines in Bayankhongor province. It aims to shed light on the often disregarded topic of milk and milking, which has appeared only marginally or in scattered forms in anthropological discussions about contemporary Mongolia. In the spirit of feminist approaches calling for attention to everyday relations and situated knowledges, this discussion is focused on milking as a form of work and labor as well as a structuring material in social relations. In this way, the central argument presents milk and the work of processing milk into dairy products as a key element of social reproduction among pastoralist households. Giving attention to milk and milk-related labor also brings to the fore women's work and their particular routines and spaces within the pastoralist household. The social reproduction work that is intertwined with milking work is an area of research that should be further investigated in the Inner Asian context where more traditional forms of mobile pastoralist livestock husbandry are still practiced. This chapter thus aims to serves as a jumping off point for future research on the anthropology of milk in Mongolia and Inner Asia.

Mongolian pastoral women have essential roles as caregivers to their families, keeping their household members well fed, adequately dressed, and clean. However, when they are forced to lead their households alone, female-led families are more vulnerable because of limited assets and restricted access to information and knowledge exchange. • When women are entrusted with leadership of their communities, they demonstrate equal leadership qualities, reputation, and governance processes over rangeland management with their male counterparts. • Women leaders display superior trust building among their community members when compared with the men. • We recommend empowering women by increasing their leadership roles in formal community organizations

Gender, Place and Culture, 2018

In this article, I use absence as a lens to explore social change and masculinity in rural Mongolia, with a focus on household splitting during winter months. Since the breakdown in state-sponsored dormitory systems, many mobile pastoralists split their households to accommodate children during the school year. This results in women moving to settled centres while men remain in pastures to care for livestock. In critical reflections on rural work, both male and female herders have underscored concerns around the absence of women in rural homes. In Mongolia, absence has different implications for men and women, gendered division of labour and social roles, which are tied to household economies and pastoralist work practices. Drawing from ethnographic field research, the cases contribute to understandings of the co-constitutive nature of space and society, and attempts to dislodge ideas about the fixed nature of households in rural Mongolia.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2004

Beginning in 1990, Mongolia, a former client state of what was then the Soviet Union, undertook liberal economic reforms. These came as a great shock to Mongolia and Mongolians, and resulted in food shortages, reports of famine, widespread unemployment, and a collapse of public health and health care. Although economic conditions have stabilized in recent years, unemployment and poverty are still at disturbingly high levels. One important consequence of the transition has been the transformation of the rural, primarily pastoral, economy. With de-collectivization, herding households have been thrown into a highly insecure subsistence mode of production, and, as a consequence, have become vulnerable to local fluctuations in rainfall and availability and quality of forage, and many now lack access to traded staples and essential commodities. Household food insecurity, malnutrition, and migration of impoverished households to provincial centers and the capital of Ulaanbaatar are one result. Reductions to investments in the health sector have also eroded the quality of services in rural areas, and restricted access to those services still functioning. Evidence suggests that women are particularly vulnerable to these political-ecological changes, and that this vulnerability is manifested in increasing rates of poor reproductive health and maternal mortality. Drawing on case-study ethnographic and epidemiological data, this article explores the links between neoliberal economic reform and maternal mortality in Mongolia. [Mongolia, maternal mortality, neoliberal reform, post-socialist societies, political ecology of pastoralism]

Mongolian pastoralist households with children face an annual decision at the start of the school year—how to take care of both herds and children separated by long distances and resource needs. This article draws on twelve months of ethnographic research on rural work practices among mobile pastoralists in Mongolia to illustrate how children’s access to primary education spatially transforms the organization of herder livelihoods. By prioritizing herder reflections and theoretical insight into their own lives and experiences, we show that educating children within the conditions of Mongolia’s emerging market macroeconomic system is entangled in struggles over housing, finance, and labor and we highlight the spatial nature of these contradictions in everyday rural social production. This evidence supports our argument that the terms of inclusion in Mongolia’s current schooling system pose challenges for pastoralist livelihoods and encourages reflection on the need for imagining innovations in education provision.

Nomadic Peoples, 2008

Pastoralism in Mongolia has increasingly been portrayed by two powerful and mutually reinforcing discourses. First, the neo-liberal discourse enthusiastically embraced and reproduced by most of the Mongolian political elite constructs pastoralism as backward and unproductive, in need of modernization, and sedentarization. Second, an increasingly powerful essentialist discourse argues for the preservation of 'traditional' Mongolian pastoralism. By presenting a stereotypical image of 'the nomadic culture' on the brink of extinction, outsiders (e.g. NGOs, the tourist industry) become stakeholders in the debate on Mongolian identity and the country's development path. They also help (unwillingly perhaps) reinforce the image of the pastoralist as obsolete and 'timeless'. The article shows that the realities of Mongolian pastoralists lie beyond these two constructs. The pastoralists have taken steps toward adapting to the new socio-economic realities: they use veterinary services, try to use the market system and social services. Yet their adaptive capacity is severely limited by unfavourable social and economic circumstance endorsed by the State.

Pakistan Journal of Agricultural Sciences

All over the world the rural women participate in livestock management and are also involved in agricultural tasks. Women manage and care their animals in good way as compared with men. Women work more hardly in rural activities i.e. domestic, livestock and farming activities. Women have more importance as compared to men in livestock care and management. In the world, two-third of rural people and minority of suburban poor people depends on livestock for their livelihood. Approximately 35 million people are involved in livestock related activities (Holmaan et al., 2005). In Punjab, women spend most of the time in different activities such as processing of milk, making and collecting dung cake, cleaning of animals sheds, watering, bathing, making dung-pads and cleaning sheds and grazing animals (Nazli and Hamid, 2007). They also perform difficult tasks like fodder chopping, fodder cutting, rearing, marketing, milking and treatment of animals. Therefore, rural women are involved in almost all livestock-related activities. But, their involvement in livestock-sector is considered as part of their housework and their role in livestock-sector is always undervalued. In the Punjab province of Pakistan, a large number of women participate in livestock care and crop production (

Society and Natural Resources, 2019

Women in the US have farmed for centuries, but have infrequently had the farmer title. Rural sociologists have explored women’s on-farm roles, as well as rural conceptualizations of gender that influence who can be a farmer. As the proportion of women claiming the farmer title increases, it is important to explore women farmers’ experiences. This article focuses on sixteen farmers in Colorado across the conventional-alternative spectrum. Through engagement with feminist and rural sociological theory, and based on analysis of semi-structured interviews, we contend that women in this study expand what it means to be a farmer by performing femininity through carework within their farming practice. This study demonstrates how some women farmers adapt a variety of predominantly feminine-coded work—such as education, customer support, and feeding work—to make agriculture a space of carework, and farming a role expanded beyond a masculine ideal.

1993