Livelihood Strategies For Herdsmen In Inner Mongolia

This field is located in Inner Mongolia and is a pastoral area.In this paper,the author gives a detailed description of the local animal husbandry activities and herdsmen's life scene based on the long-term participatory observation and tries to show the strategies adopted by herdsmen when solving realistic problems.After the establishment of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1947,the gradual changes in production and life in the local pastoral areas became more rapid.By 1950,the traditional nomadic production methods of herdsmen as a unit of households were gradually merged into herdsmen's cooperatives.Soon they formed a community-oriented production organization model that obeyed the National planned economy and formed a nomadic economic form in which the communes worked together as units.At the beginning of 1980,with the pace of China's reform and opening up,the form of communes' production organization in Inner Mongolia was also disintegrated.After the implementation of the dual contract responsibility system(double inheritance system),livestock groups and grasslands were contracted to households from collective operations to individuals.After the the dual contract responsibility system,the pastoral area of inner Mongolia changes rapidly.There is a contradiction between the herdsmen's willingness to increase the number of livestock and the limited area of the contracted grasslands and the range of net fences.At the same time,grassland in households makes it impossible for herdsmen to use rotational grazing to solve pasture pressure.Therefore,it has become an urgent problem to restore grassland and solve its carrying capacity,which has also become the main factor to change herdsmen's lifestyle.On the government side,based on the above situation,in order to solve the contradictions highlighted in the pastoral areas,a number of relevant policies have been formulated and resolutions have been made to resolve the existing conflicts between grassland and livestock.According to the survey,herdsmen have a clear need to improve their living conditions,their children's schooling and employment and their savings.Therefore,in daily life,the transformation of herdsmen is mainly manifested in the pursuit of life from the basic needs to the market economy,and presents new expectations for the form of family planning.In the author's survey area,due to the imbalance of grass and livestock and natural abnormal factors,the state of the herdsmen's income and expenditure has become more urgent in the past ten years and the leasing of pastures has made herdsmen's lives more dependent on government subsidies.From an anthropological research perspective,the activities taken by different ethnic groups to overcome the difficulties they face in adapting to the regional natural environment are called strategies.It is applied to this article,that is,in a specific market economy environment the systematic use of the Internet and the market by herdsmen in their own way in order to improve the quality of life and the scope of social action,such as the joint households?the Hot and the Gacha,is regarded as the Herdsmen's strategy.As a researcher from Mongolia,the author believes that the mode of livestock management in inner Mongolia is settled and grazed with the changes of its overall environment,and the purpose of animal husbandry is no longer to supply households but to meet the multiple needs of household expenditure to obtain more income.Under the condition of market economy,the economic demand changes the social custom and alienates it,and people's pursuit of material interests gradually stimulates and expands people's pursuit of material desires.To sum up,based on the three basic factors of herdsmen ? households and villages,this article comprehensively studies herdsmen's life,and then shows the influence of herdsmen's pursuit of specific economic relations on pastoral culture and the social changes caused by it.This study has made some contributions in enriching the nomadic economy,regional studies,and bringing the study of the normal life of herdsmen in inner Mongolia into the international perspective,introducing it to Mongolia and other countries and regions in the world.This has theoretical and practical significance for anthropology and Ethnology research.