11. The Taiga Within. Topography and personhood in Northern Mongolia

Abstract

The binary between “the wild” and “the tame” has been out of fashion for some time now among anthropologists, historians of religion, and scholars from cognate disciplines. Like its conceptual parent nature/culture, alongside with a whole number of its more or less distant “cousins” such as the raw/cooked and public/private, wild/tame has been criticized for its inability to capture the diversity of human engagements with and perceptions of their surroundings in a cross-cultural perspective. Indeed, it seems hard to conclude otherwise when faced with the bewildering ethnographic variation documented by anthropologists from all corners of the world, ranging from the Hagen people’s “no nature, no culture” in Papua New Guinea’s (Strathern 1980) over the Amerindian “multi-naturalism” discussed by Viveiros de Castro (1998) to the landscapes of Northern Mongolia’s reindeer-herders, which, to cite a previous work of mine, “is not simply comprised by the physical contours of the environment surrounding the nomadic camp. For [the] camp does not define an enclosure of cultural space on the other side of which its inhabitants encounter a natural wilderness. ‘Wild’ spaces can be found inside each Duxa camp, just as ‘tame’ places can be found outside it” (Pedersen 2009, 137) But perhaps there is reason to pause a bit, and ask whether if is possible, germane even, to try reinstating the binary between nature and culture – and, more specifically between the wild and the tame – as an analytical framework in a manner that seeks to overcome its multiple (Eurocentric, Cartesian, modernist, etc.) biases, but retains its explanatory power. The present article attempts to do just that. More specifically, my aim in what follows is to explore the concept of wilderness as an ethnographically derived analytical concept and, in so doing, demonstrate the scope of a certain form of contemporary anthropology, which may

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