Kin Listening and Voicing in the Altai-Sayan Mountain Homelands, Inner Asia, with Robbie Beahrs, ITU

The talk presented at the panel F3. Reading others: intent and sensory attunement between species, chair - Alex Oehler, University of Regina. The conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA): Engagements and Entanglements, May 12 - 15, 2021, University of Guelph, Ontario, a virtual event.
The talk by Victoria Soyan Peemot, University of Helsinki, and
Dr. Robert O. Beahrs, Technical University of Istanbul.
"Kin Listening and Voicing in the Altai-Sayan Mountain Homelands, Inner Asia"
This study investigates situated listening and voicing in human-nonhuman communication practices among mobile hunter-pastoralists in the Tyva Republic, Inner Asia. Drawing on the concepts of “audile techniques” (Sterne 2003) and “sentient ecologies” (Anderson 2000), we argue that interspecies communicative practices require situated sensory competences of non-verbal listening and voicing that has often been overlooked in anthropological studies of hunter-pastoralism in Inner Asia. Firstly, we show how sensory sociality within an aal-the socioecological unit of a herding family and domesticated animals-is cultivated through years of non-verbal communication, intimacy, and intersubjectivity. A tethered horse, for example, communicates its needs related to food, water, or rest by nickering-a specific vocalization which is defined by horsemen as ‘an inner, nasal voice with a closed mouth’ and distinguished in sound and purpose from neighing and snorting. Secondly, we examine how sonic knowing is shaped by the material transductions in herders’ encampments and resounding echoes of the surrounding environment. Herders, for example, can interpret the sonic characteristics of animals’ individual and group movements through the felt walls of the yurt as well as material quality of seasonal environments and weather patterns. Finally, we claim that the aal community’s mutual belonging and engagement with shared homelands requires a relational sensibility towards sounding, one which we explore through Indigenous concepts related to gift exchange, guesting/hosting relations, and land-based kinship (Peemot 2021, Beahrs 2021). herders communicate intersubjectively with their animals using whistles, shouts, and other vocalizations; some horsemen have the gift of tuning their voices together with the voices of wild animals, listening to weather patterns, or pleasing the superordinate nonhuman beings who live in the Saian-Altai Mountains.