ABSTRACT
Livestock husbandry has long been a main source of livelihood for Central Asian peoples. The Inner Asian system of pastoralism, characterised by multispecies herding and seasonal mobility on open pastures, underwent a double death in the twentieth century, both linked with livestock ownership: collectivisation in the 1930s and privatisation in the 1990s. Despite these repeated crises, pastoral life is often characterised as unchanging, immutably made of everyday care and management of herds and flocks. The supposed invariability and banality of pastoral practices have not attracted many social anthropologists in Central Asia recently, who have foregrounded mobility in the context of labour or ethnic migration, rather than of pastoral nomadism. Drawing on field research conducted between 1994 and 2017 mainly in Kazakhstan, this chapter aims to describe recent qualitative transformation of pastoral techniques and pastoral livelihoods, such as the growth of social inequalities in auls or the loosening of the control over animal reproduction and movements compared to the ‘rationalised’ and standardised Soviet breeding.
