Special Section: Multispecies Co-existence in Inner Asia

In this special section our focus is on human relations with animals in the domestic sphere (or domus) in Inner Asia. In the existing academic literature, there has been greater attention paid to human–nonhuman relations in North Asia (or Siberia), often between hunter and prey animal. The intention of this special section is to ask what we can learn about relations between humans and domestic animals when we shift the focus to Inner Asia, a region that has long been characterised by multispecies pastoralism. The various contributors to this issue have conducted research across a broad swathe of Inner Asia, from Buryatia in the southeast of Siberia (Oehler), Mongolia (Bumochir et al., Fijn, Hutchins, Swancutt), Inner Mongolia (White), Qinghai (Bumochir) to the southwest of China (Swancutt). Within anthropology, a multitude of terms have emerged for a focus beyond the human, now superseding older literature within ecological or environmental anthropology to become ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), ‘anthropology beyond humanity’ (Ingold 2013), or an ‘anthropology of life’ (Kohn 2013). This terminological proliferation has occurred in the context of the broader ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences and the ‘ontological turn’ within anthropology. These diverse bodies of literature share a concern with thinking beyond the anthropocentrism which has historically dominated the humanities and social sciences, previously confining attributes such as subjectivity and agency to humans alone. This concern has gained a