ABSTRACT
People who are highly mobile should be attached to particular locations. And yet, contemporary Mongolian herders routinely expressed their attachment to particular places, as being their ‘homelands’, or their ‘birth homelands’. Despite temporarily gaining the acceptance of the deities of other localities, migrating herders are always happy to return to their own ovoo and land masters, which know them and welcome them back as their native children. These processes illustrate what geography literature discusses in terms of either place attachment or sacred geography to denote similar connections among many Indigenous people. Mongolian herders surely draw on both types of solidarity and access to their own homelands’ resources is granted more readily to neighboring outsiders or to outsiders that have granted similar favors in the past as a form of direct reciprocity reminiscent of calculative solidarity.
