| Résumé | | This essay aims to acquaint the reader with a series of ways of thinking with horses
and dogs in Eastern Mongolia. I draw on Moore’s (2011) concept of ‘ethical
imagination’ to investigate how relations with these animals are ‘imagined’
materially, affectively and semiotically, and to describe human-animal relations in a
context where I found it impossible to draw out a singular cosmological framework
that governs these relations. I paint a messy picture of multiple and partial
‘imaginaries’ meeting, clashing and combining in a post-socialist context of emergent
possibilities and concerns, where animals play vital roles in human life. I focus in
particular on the roles of horses and dogs and how they are thought together through
qualities, such as khiimor’ (fortune, but also perhaps a form of ‘anthropomorphic
energy’) that they sometimes share with humans in the contexts of prestige-laden
activities like horse-racing and fox/wolf hunting. In doing this I seek to take on board
the critiques of the material and relational ‘turns’ in anthropology, but crucially, by
holding onto the term ‘imagination’ I wish to retain a space for the creative potential
of the locally constituted and reflective human subject.
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