In his study of the human, non-human relationships in Mongolia, Bernard Charlier explores the role of the wolf in the ways nomadic herders relate to their natural environment and to themselves. The wolf, as the enemy of the herds and a prestigious prey, is at the core of two technical relationships, herding and hunting, endowed with particular cosmological ideas. The study of these relationships casts a new light on the ways herders perceive and relate to domestic and wild animals. It convincingly undermines any attempt to consider humans and non-humans as entities belonging a priori to autonomous spheres of existence, which would reify the nature-society boundary into a phenomenal order of things and so justify the identity of western epistemology.
Bernard Charlier, Ph.D (2011, University of Cambridge), Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, is researcher and Editor of
Social Compass. In 2011, he studied at the Collège de France the relationships between the perception of nature and figurative practices in Mongolia.
All interested in man-animal relationships, man-environment relationships and processes of creation of meaning. It will attract those who have a particular interest in Inner Asia and wolves.