Pastvina group (anto_nie, Edith Jeřábková, Denisa Langrová, Ruta Putramentainte, Alex Sihelsk*, and Kateřina Žák Konvalinová)
The second volume of the anthology Liminal Animal, entitled Pastoral Twilight, has been prepared by the Pastvina group. It was created as part of the project Pastoral Twilight: Initiatives for rural cultures. The Pastvina group explores forms of contemporary pastoralism in Czechia and Eastern Europe. It seeks to mediate the legacy of pastoral cultures for contemporary culture and art, and to show an example of the long resilience of pastoral cultures against the homogenizing powers of modern regimes and states that gradually eliminated Europe’s nomadic cultures. The anthology offers two different perspectives on the nomadic cultures of the Balkans and their relevance today, a personal experience of a shepherdess processed into poetry, and a report on the complicated and politicized relationship between humans and bears – the supposed enemies of herds and pastoral life. The stories unfold in the liminal landscapes of the mountains and their foothills.
Pastures and poetry have belonged together since time immemorial. Some verses arise there and are carried away by the wind, caught in heather or hyssop shrubs, while others are recorded in diaries and offered to people in poetry collections. Lenka Chýle became a shepherdess almost overnight during a summer job in the Louny region. The hills of the Bohemian Central Highlands, Raná and Oblík, where she grazed a large herd of sheep and goats from April to August, became for her one of the many living, non-living, and mythological beings that accompanied her through days of solitude and work. With honesty, gusto, and rawness, the author records everything that doesn’t escape her attention and relates to adapting to her new profession; to the animals entrusted to her care; to the environment of the pastures, mountains, and village; and to various shifting states and sensations – breath, step, pulse, sounds, echoes, commands, silence, despair, relief, sex, death, pleasure, emptiness, connection, disconnection, belonging, and farewell. This cocktail of transition toward a cyclical experience of the world is structured chronologically and offers insight into the personal experiences of a shepherdess that are at the same time familiar to other shepherds of different times. Mount Raná gradually becomes a close being to Lenka Chýle, just as Mount Pirin becomes such a being for the writer Kapka Kassabova in her book Anima: A Wild Pastoral.
Anima is an incantation against the modern age and a re-experiencing of kinship between human and more-than-human beings, semi-domesticated and wild animals, and the entire mountain ecosystem that, until a century ago, was still inhabited by remnants of nomadic cultures – Karakachans, Pomaks, Vlachs, Yuruks, and others. Kapka Kassabova’s documentary novel, with its multispecies relational entanglement, throws us back into the sites of old pastoral cultures and original breeds of sheep, goats, dogs, and horses that survived the devastating blows of socialist collectivization and post-revolution capitalist privatization only as scattered individuals, together with the last unrestrained shepherds in the mountains. A few enthusiasts enchanted by these animals are returning them to their habitat and to a semi-wild coexistence with humans in the mountains. Anima is not only an animal, but a making-present of all those whose paths crossed the Rhodope Mountains at different times. Up there in the mountains survives a premodern spirit and a human-animal dependency that cannot be reconciled with the post-industrial black hole of the lowlands and big cities. Those who truly live above cannot live below, and vice versa. As Kassabova writes: “This is what industrialisation, hybridisation, sedentarisation, homogenisation and finally, globalisation have achieved. Those who fight on the frontline of extinction to keep our oldest animals alive are an underclass, nameless savages glimpsed in the distance surrounded by dogs and sheep or is that goats?” (p. 274).
The culture of the Karakachans has also been the subject of research by anthropologist Gabriela Fatková, who focused not only on their pastoral way of life, but also on their poetry and efforts to record their language in written form, as pursued by Karakachan poet Velička Chătová. The excerpt from Karakachans in Bulgaria – A Pastoral History, which describes the life of the Karakachans from nomadism to forced sedentarization within broader contexts, is devoted to their bond with animals, which was violently interrupted in the 1950s. Their animals were slaughtered or crossbred with productive breeds. Karakachan sheep, goats, dogs, and horses are extremely resilient animals adapted to life in the mountains, where food is limited, the terrain difficult, and the weather fluctuates. In such conditions, other modern breeds have no chance of survival. The text describes the history of the Karakachans and the geographical area of their activity spread across Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. Crossing borders within the practice of transhumance was a common feature of this human-animal culture that resisted being captured by state power, which first pushed them deep into the mountains and later drew them down and settled them in the foothills. The text provides insight into their way of life with animals.
Kristína Jamrichová’s How Bears Domesticate Humans can be read as showing how political power domesticates and manipulates people through bears. The author presents a dangerous and strengthening counterpoint to environmentally sensitive policies that regard predators – wolves and bears – as an integral part of mountain ecosystems. Shepherding has always had to coexist with them, protecting herds with the help of dogs. Jamrichová, by contrast, shows how these natural predators are being appropriated by nationalist populism as a weapon and a tool – bears by the Slovak National Party, wolves by Alternative for Germany. The author asks where does this lack of space for imagining different kinds of bear politics come from? Why is bear management discussed almost exclusively in terms of the ‘necro’ rather than the ‘bio’?
The anthology Pastoral Twilight leads the readers into mountain landscapes and their foothills, where two persistently different modes of living meet – the natural and the cultural, the cyclical and the linear, the analogue and the digital, and so on. The liminal beings of these spaces are not only more-than-human animals, but also shepherds, conservationists, hunters, miners, tourists, developers, and other groups with conflicting interests. It is a frontline constantly subjected to the pressures of the ongoing colonization of nature. The history of pastoralism illustrates both resilience and the moment of its breaking under today’s voracious regime. The shepherds who move through these in-between spaces become the liminal figures who inherit the ability to perceive this conflict in its intertwining of pain and rapture.