Accepted Panels

This paper explores human-livestock relations through the lens of sensory mobilities by focusing on the everyday routines of pastoralist households in Northern Bayanhongor province. Here attention is given to forms of routinised mobility involved in grazing livestock, milking traditions, and training horses and yaks. Labor shortages amongst households causes strain to care for large herds of yak, horses, sheep and goats which are prevalent in this region. The research focuses on the experiences of an elderly couple and their young adult children who find ways to manage these constraints; motorcycles and new forms of transport enable faster correspondence between the settlement and remote camps, while horses are still the preferred method of grazing goats and sheep. Milking a large herd of yaks by hand and related processing of dairy products at times is extremely painful for the body's joints which become sensitised to difficult climatic conditions and individual yak sensibilities. Finding lost livestock and locating horse herds requires a different attunement to landscape and observational tools. By focusing on one household, the paper aims to explore: how are mobilities mutually constructed and sensed between humans and their livestock and how are they changing? The research will use audio, visual and auto-ethnographic methods to present these sensory mobilities as a way to experiment with sensory methodologies.