Medicinal Socialities: Kinship and Knowledge Transmission Between Mongolian Veterinarians and Herders

Abstract

There has been a lack of awareness that veterinary practices carried out by local district veterinarians and the herding community in the countryside of Mongolia play a crucial and significant role in relation to the health and wellbeing of humans and other animals. The intention within this chapter is to extend knowledge regarding the socio-cultural underpinnings of veterinarians as primary responders to zoonotic diseases and as medical professionals, including the importance of an extended kinship network in the transmission of oral and applied forms of knowledge relating to diseases and illness in the countryside. Chapter 11 details two related forms of knowledge transmission: the first from a veterinary practitioner to his daughter as apprentice with further kinship connections through the veterinarian's wife and son. A second ethnographic narrative, between respected herding elder and a nephew as veterinarian, addresses the dynamics between two different knowledge systems: between a nomadic herding philosophy towards healing and the pluralistic incorporation of science and biomedicine with socialist underpinnings.