Domesticating Women, Animals, the Environment, and Spiritual Entities - Navigating Boundaries in the Pastoral Community of Limi, Nepal

Aug 24, 2026

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Through a case study of pastoralists in the Limi valley of north-western Nepal, this article revisits domestication through the Limey pastoral practice. Rather than drawing fixed lines between inside and outside, domestication in Limi is relational and shifting, extended to politics and moralities across gender, age, spiritual entities, and nature. Pastoral practice forms humans within multispecies co-domestication, shaped by religious precepts and gender norms, and produces hybrid, fluid boundaries across social and ontological categories. Domestication is presented as an art of multispecies coinhabitation rather than human domination.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryReligion & Spirituality

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Domestication narratives and boundary-making

Research context in Limi, Nepal

Rethinking domestication through Limey pastoralism

religions Article Domesticating Women, Animals, the Environment, and Spiritual Entities: Navigating Boundaries in the Pastoral Community of Limi, Nepal Tara Bate Citation: Bate, Tara. 2022. Domesticating Women, Animals, the Environment, and Spiritual Entities: Navigating Boundaries in the Pastoral Community of Limi, Nepal. Religions 13: 495. [https://doi.org/](https://doi.org/)[ ](https://doi.org/)[10.3390/rel13060495](10.3390/rel13060495) Academic Editors: Catrien Notermans and Anke Tonnaer Received: 18 April 2022 Accepted: 24 May 2022 Published: 30 May 2022 Publisher's Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional afﬁliations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ([https://](https://)[ ](https://)[creativecommons.org/licenses/by/](creativecommons.org/licenses/by/)[ ](creativecommons.org/licenses/by/)[4.0/](4.0/)) . Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISEK), University of Zürich, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland; [tara.bate@uzh.ch](tara.bate@uzh.ch) Abstract: Through a case study of pastoralists in the Limi valley of north-western Nepal, this article revisits the notion of domestication with regards to Limey pastoral practice. Taken in its etymological sense, of “making part of one's home”(domus), domestication could be seen to draw a line between the inside and the outside. Yet, in Limi, these lines are blurred and shifting in nature: those that are a part of the home are not deﬁned ontologically but relationally. Beyond strictly human–animal relations, domestication is here extended to involve politics and moralities of human differences such as gender and age, politics of relations to spiritual entities, and politics of nature. In Limi, pastoral practice inserts humans in a constellation of relations of co-domestication governed by religious precepts and gender norms, conceived as foundational to multispecies coinhabitation. Domestication is not a solely anthropogenic process but a composition of multiple—including nonhuman—agencies. And yet, pastoralism, as it is practiced today, also contributes to creating a space of hybridity and ﬂuidity of social and ontological boundaries—between women and men, humans and livestock, domestic and wild animals, land and spiritual entities. This article, through a case study of Limey pastoralists' gendered relation with herds and an animated landscape, adds to the understanding of domestication as not merely the domination of the human over the non-human but as an art of multispecies coinhabitation. Keywords: pastoralism; gender; ecology; religion; multispecies; Nepal; Himalayas; Buddhism; syncretism; domestication; ontology 1. Introduction Human civilization, progress and culture began with the domestication of animals1 and plants (Lien et al. 2018, p. 1; Haudricourt 1962) some 10,000 to 12,000 years before our era (Cyrulnik et al. 2000), as the story goes. This is when, during the so-called Neolithic Revolution (see Childe [1936] 1951) in the Middle East,2 human mastery over and domination of animals and nature through their incorporation into the domus, the home, paved the way to human hegemony in the world—leading to the era now termed the Anthropocene. This narrative naturalizes the process that led to the establishment of boundaries and hierarchies that appeared during this period: those between male and female, between culture and nature, and between human and animal, to mention a few. According to this narrative, domestication was the shift away from humans being subjected to the vicissitudes and anxieties of existence as animals and as prey, whose whole existence was spent making sure their basic needs were met and survival, achieved. According to this theory, the subjugation of others—women, animals, plants, landscapes—was a nece

FAQs

How does the article redefine domestication in the Limi pastoral context?

It treats domestication as relational and shifting rather than as a fixed inside/outside boundary. Domestication connects humans with animals, nature, and spiritual entities through co-domestication.

What role do gender and age play in the article’s account of co-domestication?

The article extends domestication to politics and moralities of human differences, explicitly including gender and age. Gender norms are described as foundational to multispecies coinhabitation in Limi.

How does the article contrast its findings with common anthropocentric domestication narratives?

It argues that the mainstream narrative’s highly anthropocentric assumptions do not match Limey pastoralists’ lived reality. In Limi, life is made possible by composing with different entities’ needs and preferences rather than by reordering the world in strictly human terms.

Aug 24, 2026

Upload by Hazel