This paper examines hippophagy among Tyvan pastoralists. Horse-meat eating practice is defined by herder-horse relationships, the horse’s not-quite-livestock position and its instrumental and symbolic values. Complexity of influencing factors engenders a ritual which regulates slaughtering and eating meat of the most appreciated horses. As a result of this, ritual transformation of animals into meat does not turn them into the absent referent; rather, as I show in this article, the reference is alwayspresent.

This article studies the use of livestock dung in the social and ecological context of pastoralism in the Tyva Republic, Inner Asia. In steppe ecologies, livestock dung, depending on its (mis)management, can be a valuable resource or a threat to animals’ health and herders’ well-being. Its use is embedded in the relationships between herder-livestock communities and landscapes, which are sentient and superordinate. Utilizing dung for household needs is simultaneously a form of care for livestock and a method of balancing the relationship with sentient homelands.

This study presents a brief inquiry into the human-canine relationship among the Tyvan pastoralists in the Altai-Sayan Mountainous region of Inner Asia. Their co-evolution is intimately bound together, and the inter-species relationship includes several aspects and roles. The authors investigate especially the dogs’ responsibilities in taiga and steppe habitats and how the language reveals these responsibilities by focusing on distinctions between hunting dogs (aŋčï ït) and camp guarding dogs (kodančï ït). Both names point at the main tasks—hunting and guarding the seasonal campsite territory. The third category is named xava dogs; the name traces its origin to Chinese languages. Similarly, the story of a small-sized xava dog sheds a light on the Altai-Sayan Mountain region’s historical and religious connections with China.

This paper is a brief description of two drums brought back by the Finnish geologist Jacob Johannes Sederholm from his expedition to Siberia in 1917. These two drums have not previously been described in any scholarly work. Therefore, research on the drums, based on ethnographical sources and museum collections, was done to identify their provenance.