Environmental Humanities in Central Asia
Year: 2023
Type: book
Abstract: The author considers one aspect of the Central Asian relation to the environment by examining how humans act with other living beings rather than what they think of them. Conditioning their horses for long-distance races and for goat-grabbing, trainers hold a rare form of know-how, in which conjectural knowledge and procedural knowledge are distinguished. They get the best from each horse by dosing food, water, work and rest opportunely and by using special techniques such as tethering, strict diet and sweating. Central Asian horse training is an example of discontinuous action: its progress doesn’t show a constant temperance or a linear progression with a parallel increase of effort and feed, but an alternation of extremely contrasted phases (fattening and starving successively). This idiosyncratic method of training through discontinuous actions is related to concepts of a humoral physiology. These Central Asian notions are based on the double opposition of hot vs cold and wet vs dry, but also related to the contrasting seasons of a sharply continental climate, which pastoralists take advantage of, rather than trying to mitigate them.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Authors: Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Beatrice Penati
Institution: Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4386033142