Accepted Panels

Unique oral history and folktales are transmitted among the Kyrgyz animal herder community along Tienshan Mountains. The presentation will introduce unique narratives among herder communities in Issyk-kul area, which tell centuries-lasting local environmental mutualism. This study especially focuses on collecting human-animal interactions between herders and local wildlife such as golden eagles, wolves, snow leopards, etc. Ethnographic documentation works are carried out mainly by participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with visiting local herders, elders, religious leaders, and hunters (more than n=50 in total informants) during September 2018~ May 2023. All documented oral history and folktales is telling deep contacts and even cognitive linkages between humans and animals. Those interview topics can be classified into three groups; 1. Orality: especially eagle hunter ethnography, 2. Folktales: old folktales including human-animal interactions, 3. Eco-narrative: actual ecological experiences by hunter and herders. This research particularly collected local perceptions of human-animal interactions in order to extract a cognitive sense of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) among Kyrgyz herdsmen. The presentation also demonstrates practical ethnographic visualizations and media outputs co-working with a photographer, a manga-artist, and an illustrator for a future inheritance of its unique ideas. Particularly, the authors define some visualized ethnography as educational media for local school education. Documentary films and an ethnographic manga-comic are now ready to publish in multiple languages and will be distributed to local schools. This study will demonstrate a new scheme of “a working ethnographer” who commits ethnographic documentation of indigenous knowledge together with a sustainable inheritance of local environmental mutualism by multiple visualizations.