and now some cows.

As I mentioned in my last posts, much ado is made about the Sakha horse, its sacred qualities, and the relationship between people and their ponies. Amongst all the horse imagery and horse talk here, it is easy to forget about the other village dwellers, the Sakha cows. In fact, a well-known ecological anthropologist, Susan Crate, has written extensively on the human-cow relationship and cow-keeping practices in the western part of the Sakha Republic, and she also touches on the differences in the ways cows and horses are viewed in the Sakha belief system. I highly recommend this article here if you are interested in an introduction to her longer work on Sakha cultural ecology sustainable agriculture and post-Soviet village life: Cows, Kin, and Globalization).

What I really like about Susan Crate's work is how the practices surrounding the care of cows hold families and community members together. The paper I linked to above details the importance of respect for the animals and honouring them for their contributions. I find it interesting that she observed in many cases that harmonious cow-human connections, in which family members followed Sakha protocols and rituals on also correlated to peace within the family. Those who treated their cows poorly, or abused them without attention to respectful practices also tended to have a lot of tension within the household's human relationships. Of course it's hard to attribute causality to either one of those situations, but it did remind me of the quote (from Gandhi) that we can understand a lot about a society (or an individual) by its treatment of its animals (or he may have said weakest members, it has been disputed). Regardless, I do think looking at how a person approaches their own consumption and usage, and their moral and ethical conception of animal-human (and even plant-human) relations does say a tremendous amount about their character.

Some Sakha people have noted that cows and horses and people are pretty much all alike; in Crate's research, she's noted that the only thing that humans have that the other two don't is the power of speech. (Cows and horses, though, do have a passive understanding of human language, so one must be careful of how one speaks around them). However, horses are still a little more highly revered, it seems, because they were the first creator of the sky-god, who put them on earth even before creating humans; thus products from horses have a particular sacred quality for their connection to the Upper World. Cows, on the other hand, are intrinsically part of the Middle World. They were brought forth out of the earthly lake-water, and their sort of sacredness seems to stem from being intrinsically part of the Middle World, the world of humans.

Cows, at least in the villages I've visited, seem to be much more numerous than horses. Almost everyone keeps a cow or two in their yard, and cows also roam freely about the villages, grazing opportunistically in the nearby fields and parading about the streets before returning to their cow-yards at sunset. Sakha cows are also of a hardy, stout, woolly variety, and have also been just as essential in helping Sakha people to survive cold northern winters. Their meat is eaten, but of utmost importance is their milk, used in a variety of delectable dairy products. As a vegetarian (as much as possible while I here) I am particularly indebted to the local cows for enriching my diet & keeping me protein and calcium-fortified this long winter. Sakha sour cream, or süögei, is the finest I have ever eaten, even better than Ukrainian farm sour cream (the test for that sort is how well you can get a spoon to stand up in the middle of the sour-cream bowl; it seems likely that you could plant trees in süögei). I also very much enjoy küörcheekh, which is a mixture of sweet and sour cream, whipped with fresh berries or jam (perhaps wild strawberries, djedjen, or red currants, khaptaghas) Kümüs, the sacred drink for the Sakha, is traditionally made from fermented horsemilk, but a similar drink, bitak, can also be made from cow milk. However, from what I can gather, bitak seems to be less ritually appropriate, and is often consumed in less formal settings.

This ubiquitous village building in the picture above is a khoton, or Sakha cow-barn. They are squat, low buildings, constructed to minimize the loss of heat. Previously, they were attached to the balaghan, or winter house, by a small corridor; this helped to raise the temperature inside the balaghan, and also meant that cow-milkers didn't actually have to venture outside in the wee hours of cold winter mornings when they arose to do the milking...