Wild Yak Hunting in Northern Tibet: Local Hunting Culture in the Context of Conservation Initiatives and State Policies

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Antoni Huber
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2007 to 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 42800037

The proposed 8 weeks of fieldwork represent the final phase of a longer-term project to document and analyze hunting culture on the Tibetan plateau. The fieldwork will study the hunting of wild yak or drong (Bos grunniens) by nomadic pastoralists in northern Tibet. This particular focus has several reasons. Firstly, the wild yak represents the last major Tibetan game species requiring research within my larger project, which is theoretically based upon a species-byspecies analysis of hunting in terms of local knowledge, practices and socio-economic conditions. Secondly, hunting of wild yak today represents a unique confluence of different and conflicting interests: Tibetans regard it as the hunt of highest status in their cultural history, associating it with leadership, divinity, power, heroism, and masculinity, and recognizing it economically as the largest yield of meat per animal of any kill; International conservationists rank wild yak as a highly endangered species requiring maximum legal protection from hunting; while the Chinese state seeks to demonstrate its control over local communities such as nomadic pastoralists in Tibet by applying contradictory policies which both encourage wild yak hunting and also prohibit it. New contributions to knowledge which this research will provide include: i. The first ever documentation of actual hunting techniques used for wild yak, and a record of the body of associated local cultural knowledge and practice; ii. Investigation of the impact recent conservation laws are having upon hunting the wild yak, and how hunting behaviour is modified or even stopped as a result; iii. An appraisal of hunting of wild yak in relation to the Chinese state’s policy of resettling nomads far further northwards than their pre-modern grazing areas and significant new overlaps between wild animal ranges and spheres of human activity this has created.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants