Extending Flexibility

Changes in the Size and Composition of Residential Units in Mongolian Pastoral Society

Abstract

The word or concept of flexibility has been often used to explain pastoralists’ behavior and organization. In fact, spatial mobility for moving camps, and the fact that flocks and herds are partible(separable), can provide various options to make decisions with respect to certain conditions. However, there are limits to flexibility. It is often considered that camps consist of several households that empirically correspond to family, and are the lowest level of social community in some areas. At least, a minimum size of residential units has been needed, to some extent, to maintain human life and reproduction, as well as herding and husbandry in pastoral societies.

In Mongolia(especially modern Mongolia), the basic residential unit is the hot ail, a cluster of two or more tents, each of which is occupied by a single nuclear family. The main role of hot ails is to facilitate cooperation in managing livestock. Hot ails are transitory and flexible arrangements, generally based on kinship connections and relationships between close friends. This paper focuses on the transformation of one residential unit and the households composing it over a period of some 11 years, during which its composition changed and divided into several smaller units. It presents a case study of how residential units in Mongolian pastoral society have changed after the collapse of the socialist system, and examines the process from the point of flexibility, also found in the breakaway from the traditional developmental cycle in Mongolian pastoral society.

Some of those changes can be explained by ecological factors, one of which is carrying capacity, referring to when flocks become too large to herd in the grazing land adjacent to a camp. Another factor is the problem of husbandry, with rams and bucks becoming isolated from ewes and does. Because of those factors, the residential unit split into two, with a one-tent residential unit appearing temporarily. Finally, three residential units emerged in this study.

Other changes can be explained more directly by social factors, the main one of which was migration to towns and other sedentary areas, or sedentarization. In the area that I studied, that trend started to become pronounced in 2006, after which residential units became progressively smaller over time. Pastoralists migrated to towns, and many became absentee herd owners, leaving the management of their livestock to herdsmen. As a result, some of the residential units came to consist not only of nuclear families but also of households with only herdsmen, including one-person households. Singular residential units also appeared, composed of just one tent with one family, several herdsmen, or only one herdsman. Such small residential units could not complete such work as slaughter for the market, the birth of livestock, hay-cutting, and movement, all of which used to be carried out by the hot ails cooperatively.

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)