Natasha Fijn: Living with Herds Collection

Videos and images about human-animal coexistence in Mongolia by visual anthropologist Natasha Fijn (https://vimeo.com/fijnproductions/about). The items in this collection were mainly published as supplementary materials for Fijn’s book “Living with herds: Human-animal coexistence in Mongolia”, which discusses the nature of human-animal interactions among Mongolian pastoralists, suggesting that Mongolians have co-evolved with domesticated livestock species. Natasha Fijn’s research crosses often preconceived boundaries between human-nonhuman, nature-culture, domestic-wild, ethnography-ethology, and written ethnography-visual anthropology. She has a background in both wildlife and ethnographic filmmaking, including a postgraduate diploma in Natural History Film and Communication and she has worked on natural history documentaries that have been distributed worldwide. Natasha is passionate about communicating cross-species, cross-cultural ideas, not only in written form but also through other media, using film and photography as an integral part of demonstrating the results of her research. She completed her PhD thesis in 2008 within the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. The field research for the thesis, and footage for a film that formed an integral part of this research, was obtained over twelve months in 2005, while she lived with two herding families in the Khangai mountains of Mongolia. The book “Living with herds” is a result of her year of living with Mongolian herders and their herd animals.